Historical Notes: Prince's marriage not made in heaven

THE ROYAL marriage in 1795 between the Prince of Wales (later George IV) and his first cousin Princess Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel was never going to last. Not least because the handsome but dissolute Prince had only agreed to the union on the understanding that the Government would help him to pay off his enormous debts (then running at pounds 630,000, or pounds 30m today). In the event, so much of his married income was put aside by Parliament to service these debts that the residue (pounds 60,000) was actually less than the sum he had been receiving as a bachelor (pounds 78,000).

It hardly helped that his scheming mistress, Lady Jersey, had deliberately chosen for him a bride with "indelicate manners, indifferent character, and not very inviting appearance, from the hope that disgust for the wife would secure constancy to the mistress". The plan worked admirably. When the betrothed cousins first met, three days before the wedding, the Prince did not bother to conceal his disappointment. Having spoken barely two words to the astonished Princess, he called for a glass of brandy and left the room.

This ungallant reception of his young fiancee - at 26, she was, in fact, six years his junior - was largely due to her exceptionally low standards of personal hygiene. Lord Malmesbury, the courtier sent to escort her from Brunswick, had noticed these deficiencies and had felt it necessary to advise her that the Prince expected "a long and very careful toilette de proprete" - which meant, at the very least, washing herself well "all over". But this sound advice had made only a "temporary impression" and she had since returned to her old ways.

The final straw came curing the farcical wedding night when the Prince discovered that his wife was not a virgin ("there was no appearance of blood," he later told Malmesbury, and "her manners were not those of a novice"). He made love to her just three times, twice that night and once the next, before his repulsion got the better of his sense of duty. A daughter, Charlotte, conceived in the process, died 21 years later in childbirth, leaving him without an heir.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a successful marriage between the Prince of Wales and Princess Caroline was the fact that he already had a wife. Ten years earlier, he had secretly married Mrs Fitzherbert, a beautiful Roman Catholic widow who had refused to become his mistress. Though valid in the eyes of the Church, the ceremony was in contravention of the 1772 Royal Marriages Act - which stipulated that none of the Royal Family could marry before the age of 25 without the King's consent. Moreover, it would have disqualified the Prince from becoming King, since the Act of Settlement of 1701 prohibited the heir to the throne from marrying a Catholic.

When the Prince married officially in 1795, he was still in love with his first "wife". Five years later, by which time he had long been separated from Princess Caroline, he returned to Mrs Fitzherbert (though he would later abandon her too). But, like our own Princess of Wales, Caroline would not go "quietly". She too became the darling of the people, a propaganda tool with which the press could attack an increasingly hidebound monarchy. She too would die prematurely amidst suspicions - however groundless - of foul play.

Saul David is the author of `Prince of Pleasure: the Prince of Wales and the making of the Regency' (Little, Brown, pounds 22.50)