In Eastnor Castle’s Gothic Drawing Room, there is an ornate, gold-framed portrait of a woman. She’s sitting at a green table, chin resting on her hand. Her black dress and white veil suggest a mixture of mourning and marriage; her gaze is wistful and directed out of frame. A crumpled newspaper lies at her feet.
This is Mrs Fitzherbert, an 18th-century painting by JR Smith we purchased in about 1994 from Christie’s. The woman in the painting, Maria “Mrs” Fitzherbert, is a distant relative of current castle owner James Hervey-Bathurst – his great-great-grandfather, Sir Frederick Hervey-Bathurst, married Mrs Fitzherbert’s niece, Louisa Smythe, in 1832.
But this is not just a family portrait. The painting captures a critical moment in British history: the day Maria Fitzherbert learned her secret marriage to King George IV was over. As the text on the frame reads, “Mrs Fitzherbert, after reading the newspaper containing the report of the debate in Parliament which annulled her marriage with King George IV, has discarded the bracelet containing the King’s miniature”.
Maria’s story is fascinating, yet tragic – and laced with enough romantic drama to fill several films. Born Maria Smythe in 1756, she married her first husband – Edward Weld, heir of the Lulworth Estate – at 18. But just three months later, he fell from his horse and died without amending his will. Maria, instead of inheriting his estate, was left with nothing.
Finding herself destitute, she knew she needed to remarry as quickly as possible, and so, three years later, she became the wife of Thomas Fitzherbert, with whom she had a son. But the child died young, and not long after, her husband was killed in the 1780 anti-Catholic Gordon Riots and Maria was widowed again. This time, however, she was left with a Mayfair townhouse and a substantial annual income – her ticket into Georgian high society.
It’s quite the thing to imagine her entering one of those elaborate parties for the first time. Here she was, a beautiful widow in her late 20s with a disposable income and, it has been noted, exceptional wit and intellect. She was a catch – as the Morning Herald wrote the day after her 28th birthday, “the widow of the late Mr Fitzherbert has in her train half our young nobility”.
It was only a matter of time before she caught the eye of the most powerful member of said nobility: George, Prince of Wales and future king of England. Six years her junior, he was, by all accounts, a mess of excess – he gambled, drank, had mistresses and a major spending problem. He was hardly compatible with Maria, a devout Catholic who had almost lost everything. But he quickly became obsessed with her, lavishing her with letters and gifts and even commissioning Gainsborough to paint her portrait.
Even so, she refused to become his mistress. So, George went one (dramatic) step further: he dispatched four members of his household to tell her he had stabbed himself in the heart and would deal himself a fatal blow unless she married him.
Left with no other choice, in 1785, she married him in secret. The ceremony took place in Maria’s living room – the curtains shut; the priest sworn to silence. Their union was illegal – under the Act of Settlement, no monarch could be a Catholic or have Catholic children, and the Royal Marriages Act required the King’s permission for any union, which the pair did not seek. Still, they lived together for many years in Brighton, where George commissioned the Brighton Pavilion as their glitzy love nest.
Eventually, George’s debts became impossible to ignore. So, when Parliament offered to cover his financial obligations in return for a Protestant marriage, he gave in. Maria was notified by letter that their relationship was over (the moment captured in our portrait), and George married his cousin, Caroline of Brunswick.
Still, George couldn’t let Maria go. Three days after Caroline gave birth to their daughter, he wrote his will, leaving “all my worldly property to my Maria Fitzherbert – my wife, the wife of my heart and soul”.
This outbreak of self-pity did not lead to reunion. He desperately sought out Maria over the next few years, but she repeatedly refused him, saying she would only reunite with him if the Pope declared their marriage legitimate – which would have voided his marriage to Caroline and plunged the royal line of succession into crisis.
The final blow, though, was when George became Regent, and he refused to seat Maria at his table. After years of being honoured as his consort and wife, she felt the insult deeply and formally separated herself from him.
Publicly, he mirrored this separation. When he finally became king in 1820, he violently railed against her, publicly dismissing their relationship as an “artificial marriage”. But privately, it was a different story. It was Maria’s well wishes he kept under his pillow when his health began to fail him. And when he died in 1830, it was Maria’s miniature he was wearing – and was even buried with. She outlived him by seven years, and died heartbroken, her final letter to him never answered – and their remaining correspondence burned to protect his lineage.
There are grander portraits of Maria – including one by Sir Joshua Reynolds in the National Portrait Gallery – but ours is the one that feels most like her. Not the society beauty. Not the monarch’s muse. Just a woman, alone in a room, having her heart broken for the third time. Among our collection, it stands as both a royal curiosity and a private relic – one that connects the Hervey-Bathurst family to a love story history tried to erase.