His father, the king, called him into the royal presence and said: 

“George, it is time that you should settle down and insure the succession to the throne.”

“Sir,” replied the prince, “I prefer to resign the succession and let my brother have it, and that I should live as a private English gentleman.”

Mrs. Fitzherbert was not the sort of woman to give herself up readily to a morganatic connection.  Moreover, she soon came to love Prince George too well to entangle him in a doubtful alliance with one of another faith than his.  Not long after he first met her the prince, who was always given to private theatricals, sent messengers riding in hot haste to her house to tell her that he had stabbed himself, that he begged to see her, and that unless she came he would repeat the act.  The lady yielded, and hurried to Carlton House, the prince’s residence; but she was prudent enough to take with her the Duchess of Devonshire, who was a reigning beauty of the court.

The scene which followed was theatrical rather than impressive.—­ The prince was found in his sleeping-chamber, pale and with his ruffles blood-stained.  He played the part of a youthful and love-stricken wooer, vowing that he would marry the woman of his heart or stab himself again.  In the presence of his messengers, who, with the duchess, were witnesses, he formally took the lady as his wife, while Lady Devonshire’s wedding-ring sealed the troth.  The prince also acknowledged it in a document.

Mrs. Fitzherbert was, in fact, a woman of sound sense.  Shortly after this scene of melodramatic intensity her wits came back to her, and she recognized that she had merely gone through a meaningless farce.  So she sent back the prince’s document and the ring and hastened to the Continent, where he could not reach her, although his detectives followed her steps for a year.

At the last she yielded, however, and came home to marry the prince in such fashion as she could—­a marriage of love, and surely one of morality, though not of parliamentary law.  The ceremony was performed “in her own drawing-room in her house in London, in the presence of the officiating Protestant clergyman and two of her own nearest relatives.”

Such is the serious statement of Lord Stourton, who was Mrs. Fitzherbert’s cousin and confidant.  The truth of it was never denied, and Mrs. Fitzherbert was always treated with respect, and even regarded as a person of great distinction.  Nevertheless, on more than one occasion the prince had his friends in Parliament deny the marriage in order that his debts might be paid and new allowances issued to him by the Treasury.

George certainly felt himself a husband.  Like any other married prince, he set himself to build a palace for his country home.  While in search of some suitable spot he chanced to visit the “pretty fishing-village” of Brighton to see his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland.  Doubtless he found it an attractive place, yet this may have been not so much because of its view of the sea as for the reason that Mrs. Fitzherbert had previously lived there.