Maria’s faith therefore created a problem far greater than social disapproval.
The Royal Archives summarizes the situation bluntly: the ceremony violated both the Royal Marriages Act and the constitutional settlement, and had the marriage been legally valid, George’s marriage to a Catholic would have cost him his place in the succession.
George therefore faced a choice.
He could remain the legal heir to the throne.
Or he could attempt to become Maria Fitzherbert’s legally recognized husband.
Under the law then in force, he could not securely be both.
Yet on December 15, 1785, the ceremony went ahead.
Inside Maria’s House, They Married Anyway
The ceremony took place at Maria’s London residence.
It was deliberately private.
The Reverend Robert Burt performed it, and Henry Errington and John Smythe acted as witnesses. The Royal Archives dates the ceremony to December 15, 1785.
There was obvious danger for everyone involved.
This was not merely a wedding the royal family disliked.
It was a ceremony involving the heir to the throne that directly contravened legislation governing royal marriages.
Legally, therefore, the ceremony could not create the marriage George and Maria apparently intended.
But there was an important distinction between civil law and Maria’s religious understanding of what had happened.
The Royal Archives notes that although the marriage was invalid under British law, Pope Pius VIII later declared it valid.
That helps explain why the relationship cannot be understood simply by calling Maria a royal mistress.
From the British constitutional perspective, she was not George’s lawful wife.
From her own religious perspective, the matter was profoundly different.
And George had voluntarily stood beside her and gone through the ceremony.
That contradiction would haunt them.
Then Britain Began Asking Whether the Prince Had Married
A secret involving the Prince of Wales was unlikely to remain completely secret.
Rumors circulated.
And the issue was politically explosive because George was heavily in debt.
By the late 1780s, his finances had become a public and parliamentary problem. If Parliament was expected to help rescue the heir to the throne from his debts, questions about his conduct became politically relevant.
In 1787, the Fitzherbert rumors surfaced dramatically in Parliament.
George’s political ally Charles James Fox denied the marriage.
The denial protected the prince.
It also placed Maria in an extraordinarily humiliating position.
If the marriage were publicly acknowledged, George could face severe constitutional consequences.
If it were denied, Maria was left appearing to have participated in an illicit relationship with a man who publicly refused to acknowledge her as his wife.
The basic problem was impossible to escape.
George had entered a ceremony whose emotional and religious meaning depended upon taking it seriously—but whose political survival depended upon insisting that it had no legal force.
The monarchy needed one version.
Maria needed another.
George attempted to live between them.
George Eventually Chose the Crown’s Reality
For several years after 1785, Maria remained central to George’s private life.
But the relationship was unstable.
George’s enormous debts continued to shape his decisions, and he was hardly a model of romantic constancy. Other women entered his life.
By 1794, the relationship with Maria had broken down.
The Royal Archives states that the prince ended their relationship in June of that year and intended to marry Caroline of Brunswick partly as a way of addressing his continuing financial difficulties.