to be a radical vice in the law that it imposed no restraint on the marriage of the reigning Sovereign, or of any Regent who should have reached the age of twenty-one. It was declared monstrous that Royal princes should not be of age, in regard to marriage, till twenty-five; and that then they must depend on Parliament for permission to marry, and must wait a full year from the time of petitioning, for the chance of a prohibition by the legislature. Every effort was made to obstruct the passage of the law: the records of the Peers were ransacked: the Judges were invoked: all the forms of both Houses were made use of to obtain delay; but the King put forth his resources also; and by moral and political violence, the Bill was carried in six weeks. At the conclusion of the protest of the nine lords, they claim to be for ever regarded as free from responsibility for the disorders and sorrows which could not but arise from the operation of such a law. Some of them lived to witness what they had foretold; but the King and Queen themselves had to endure the worst of the retribution, in the spectacle of the corruption and blight which they had inflicted on their own children.
Half a year after the passage of the Act, it became necessary to acknowledge the marriage of the Duke of Gloucester, which had taken place five years before. It was done with the worst possible grace; and by this impolicy the public sympathy was directed full upon the pair who had done nothing wrong, but who would have been made to suffer less if their connection had been illicit. A son was born to them four years later; and he was not only made to feel that the shadow of Royal displeasure hung about his existence, but was doomed to have his domestic happiness delayed for twenty of the best years of his life by this cruel law.
It is not necessary to dwell upon the sins and sorrows of the many children of George III. It will never be forgotten that their family history presented a succession of scandals such as could never have happened if marriage had been within their reach as it is with all other young men and maidens. It has long been known that all the daughters, as well as the sons, were married in one way or another; and there is no more affecting story, in the whole family history, than that of the disclosure to the king, by his dying daughter Amelia, his favourite child, of her long-standing marriage,—by the shock of which his tottering reason was upset. One daughter—one of the most amiable and dutiful, and the most distinguished of all for the perfection of her manners,—the Princess Mary,—waited through long years of deferred hope, and saw the spring and summer of her life pass away before she married at last the object of her affection. Her lover did not fail her. He was steady in his attachment from his youth up; and if they had been but a little older, all would have been happy with them. But they were only one-and-twenty when the Princess Charlotte was born: and, as it was soon evident that the Prince Regent would have no male heir, unless his estranged wife died, the cruel law came in to forbid the marriage of the Duke of Gloucester. The King had first precluded his heir from pleasing himself in marriage, and had thereby driven him to an illegal union with the lady whom society, and finally William IV. acknowledged as his wife; he had then made a marriage for him with his cousin whom he never could endure; and then, when the unhappy pair were separated, he prevented his daughter Mary from marrying her lover, because the Duke of Gloucester must be kept single, in order to marry the Princess Charlotte, in case of the failure of any sufficiently desirable Continental connection. Old gentlemen and ladies of my standing can well remember the vividness of the interest when the time came at last for feeling some hope and comfort in the prospect of domestic life for an English princess. The sympathy of the whole nation was with the Princess Charlotte in her early troubles. Her admirers were noted and watched by every one of us, as if we had a personal interest in her; yet we had some sympathy left too for the Princess Mary, who had waited while her niece was growing up, and who now hung on the chances of her niece’s marriage for the happiness or the doom of the rest of her life.
In 1814, the Prince of Orange was here; and presently his father announced to the world that he was to marry the Princess Charlotte. For a little while the Princess Mary looked bright, and as if, at eight-and-thirty, she was renewing her youth. But the Prince of Orange went away—not to return; and she drooped. We wondered afterwards how much she knew of the young soldier—the obscure young German prince who had been here with the Allied Sovereigns, and who was not forgotten by the Princess Charlotte when he had departed. Within two years we had the pleasure of witnessing a royal love-match—a marriage which gratified the domestic heart of England: and not one only, but two. I was a young reader of newspapers then; but I remember the emotion caused by two lines of the narrative of the wedding. When the young bride was passing to her carriage on that May evening, after the ceremony, she was met and embraced at the foot of the grand staircase at Carlton House by the Princess Mary, bathed in tears. Everybody knew then what to expect; and in a few weeks—in July—the sober couple were married.
There was then a long abeyance of that sort of interest. It was nearly a quarter of a century before there was another royal marriage which could excite national sympathy. The state-marriages which took place after the death of the Princess Charlotte had little interest for the heartsick and mourning nation. They were all entered upon with a view to the succession; and they appealed to political judgment, and not to natural feeling. When the matter of the succession was clear, those who knew the story of the reigns of the two last Georges began to hope that the time was at hand when the fearful Royal Marriage Act would be repealed. When the Princess Victoria became Queen seemed to be the time for action.
There were none left of the old generation who could be in anyway affected by such a repeal; and the thing might be best done before a new generation grew up. The Sovereign was under no restriction from it; and the State had nothing