That decision exposed the brutal difference between Maria’s marriage and a royal marriage recognized by the state.
In 1795, George officially married Princess Caroline of Brunswick.
The Royal Family’s own biography of George IV describes the sequence plainly: he had secretly and illegally married the Catholic Maria Fitzherbert in 1785, then officially married Caroline in 1795.
Caroline was therefore the woman who could occupy the legal position Maria could not.
The marriage was disastrous almost from the beginning.
George and Caroline quickly became estranged, although they produced one legitimate child, Princess Charlotte of Wales.
Charlotte’s birth in 1796 was dynastically vital.
She was the legitimate granddaughter of George III and stood in the line of succession.
Maria, meanwhile, occupied a far stranger position.
She had gone through a marriage ceremony with Charlotte’s father.
But legally, she was not his wife.
George Had Not Simply Forgotten Maria
The official marriage to Caroline did not erase Maria from George’s life.
The surviving evidence makes that especially clear.
On January 10, 1796—after his legal marriage to Caroline—George made a will containing provisions connected to Maria. That document survives among the Fitzherbert papers in the Royal Archives.
The Royal Archives says that after Princess Charlotte’s birth and the collapse of George’s relationship with Caroline, he made a new will bequeathing his possessions to Maria. He also later provided her with an annuity, although payments were not always reliable.
Financial records connected with that support survive as well.
The archives contain papers concerning Maria’s annuity from 1807 to 1830, including an 1808 arrangement securing payments for her benefit.
Their personal relationship experienced periods of reconciliation and further separation.
George continued to have other mistresses.
Eventually, the intimate partnership ended permanently.
But the evidence suggests that Maria never became simply irrelevant to him.
And the most poignant evidence emerged at the end of his life.
The Woman He Could Not Make Queen
George III’s health eventually deteriorated, and in 1811 his eldest son became Prince Regent.
When George III died in January 1820, the prince became King George IV.
Maria Fitzherbert did not become queen.
That position legally belonged to Caroline of Brunswick, despite the catastrophic state of her marriage to George.
George attempted unsuccessfully to divorce Caroline after becoming king. Their conflict became one of the great public royal scandals of the era. Caroline died in 1821, only a year after her husband became king.
By then Maria was living outside the king’s immediate romantic life.
But the secret of 1785 had never entirely vanished.
There was an extraordinary irony here.
George IV was a monarch whose public role depended upon the invalidity of the marriage ceremony he had willingly entered decades earlier.
If Maria had legally been his wife, the constitutional consequences under the rules then governing the succession would have been profound.
Instead, Britain treated the ceremony as void.
George became king.
Maria remained Mrs. Fitzherbert.
Yet privately, George seems to have preserved an attachment to her almost until death.
According to the Royal Archives, during his final illness George kept Maria’s last letter under his pillow. He also requested that he be buried with a miniature associated with her.
George IV died in 1830.
He was 67.
The throne passed not to a child of his own—Princess Charlotte had died tragically in childbirth in 1817—but to his brother, who became William IV.
Maria survived him by almost seven years.
And she still possessed evidence of what had happened in 1785.