inquired, "Are all the ladies of England as
beautiful as you?" Court gossip had apprised
her that her intended lord had already tendered
his heart to a subject—the most beautiful girl
of the day—the Lady Sarah Lennox, daughter
of a ducal house, in whose veins flowed the blood
of the Stuarts. The future mother of the
Napiers would have been a consort worthy of a
sovereign. Her son, Sir William Napier, the
historian of the Peninsular wars of Wellington,
in his memoirs of his brother Charles, the
conqueror of Scinde, states that, "When scarcely
eighteen years of age, George the Third offered
her his hand. She refused; he persisted, and
was finally accepted, partly because of his
apparently sincere passion, partly from the influence
of her brother-in-law, the first Lord Holland.
But the politicians worked on royal pride, hurt
by the first refusal, and the monarch fell back."
Although the German precedent of a morganatic
marriage would not have satisfied the purer
delicacy of the English lady, still, probably with
a view to tranquillise the apprehensions of the
queen, Lady Sarah Lennox appeared as the first
of the royal bridesmaids at the wedding. The
rank of those of her own family who attended
the bride would seem not to have entitled the
queen to assume any very lofty airs; her brother,
Charles Louis Frederick, who was present, being
but a colonel in a regiment of Hanoverian foot
guards. Educated in the prejudiced traditions of
a German house, her majesty constantly boasted
of purer blood than her lord, and often
reproached him with the stain in his lineage by
the union, a hundred years before with the
noble "French family of D'Olbleuse. At a dinner
given by her at Frogmore, there were present
with her children some foreign members of the
house of Brunswick. One of the guests having
remarked that every person at the table was
descended from the Electress Sophia, the Queen
started, and haughtily pointing to her heart,
exclaimed, "II n'y a pas de D'Olbleuse ici!"
Married herself, and surrounded by every earthly
enjoyment, his German spouse was earnest and
unceasing in pressing the king to enforce the
most rigid restrictions on the natural rights and
connubial happiness of future generations.

"Under the pressure of those various influences,
the Royal Marriage Act was forced with
precipitation through parliament. Its preamble
adopted the language of the message from the
crown, and its first provision prohibited any
descendants of George the Second, male or
female, other than the issue of princesses, who
have married or may hereafter marry into foreign
families, from contracting matrimony without
the consent of the crown signified under the
great seal, and declared every such marriage
null and void. Its second provision enabled any
member of the royal family above the age of
twenty-five, to contract a valid marriage, although
dissented from by the crown, by giving twelve
months' previous notice to the privy council,
unless both Houses of Parliament should, before
the expiration of that period, express their
disapprobation. Its third and last provision
declared that every person who should solemnise,
assist, or be present at any royal marriage without
such consent, should incur the penalties of
a praemunire, as provided by the statute made
in the sixteenth year of King Richard the
Second. The second provision was introduced
apparently to mitigate the severity of the first,
but its absurdities were glaring. In the succession
to the crown, a member of the royal family
was competent to sway the sceptre at eighteen,
to be regent at twenty-one, but not to choose a
consort until over twenty-five. This preposterous
innovation led at the time to the following
epigram:

Quoth Dick to Tom, this act appears
       Absurd, as I'm alive,
To take the crown at eighteen years,
       The wife at twenty-five.

The mystery how shall we explain?
       For sure as wise men said,
Thus early if they're fit to reign,
       They must be fit to wed.

Quoth Tom to Dick, thou art a fool!
       And little know'st of life—
Alas, 'tis easier far to rule
       A kingdom than a wife!

The penalties of a præmunire—a corruption of
the Latin word præmonere, to forewarn, originally
devised to check papal interference in state
affairs—were adopted from a barbaric age and
the unfortunate reign of our feeblest monarch.
Horace Walpole states that this silly provision
was left by its devisers in the bill, "in order
that nobody might be punished: a secret they
probably did not tell the king!"

The bill was prepared by Henry Bathurst,
who was raised to the peerage by the title of
Lord Apsley. We learn from Lord Campbell
that "although when attorney-general to Frederick
Prince of Wales, his master being at variance
with George the Second, he had seen great
reason to doubt the asserted authority of the
king respecting the marriage of his descendants,
now, as chancellor to George the Third, he had all
his doubts cleared up," and supported the
measure in his maiden speech as a peer.

The bill was strongly opposed in the House of
Lords. Amongst others by Lord Camden, who
had been lord chancellor, and whose talents as a
great lawyer and unprecedented popularity as a
constitutional judge had elevated him to the
peerage. Lord Campbell declares: "He was
one of the brightest ornaments of my profession
and my party, for I glory, like him, in the name
of Whig." "When the Royal Marriage Act was
brought forward," while "he admitted that some
regulations were necessary to prevent the
mésalliance of those near the throne," he strongly
resisted the bill. "His manliness," observes
his biographer, "deserves great credit, considering
that the reigning sovereign was resolved to
carry the bill as originally framed against the
advice of several of his ministers, and had
expressed himself personally offended with all who
questioned its wisdom." The opposition was
unavailing, for, according to Horace Walpole,
"the king grew dictatorial, and all his creatures