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Marriage of George III

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by Gran (U14388334) on Tuesday, 19th July 2011

  Does anyone know of the Marriage of George III to Hannah Lightfoot before he Married Charlotte of Mecklenburg.
  
  Gran

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 20th July 2011

  Gran
  
  I have looked at what Horace Walpole wrote about George III's love life. He takes the line that as heir to the throne he had been rather famous as a very chaste young man, very much under his mother's domination. It is possible perhaps that he was less so before the previous heir to the throne died in 1751, but George would only have been about 13 years old.
  
  As he came to the top job, according to Walpole, his mother and her good friend (and George's tutor) Lord Bute were very anxious to keep him under a tight reign. He explains that George very obviously fell in love with Lady Sarah Lennox, a great beauty. But she was being tutored by her eldest sister's husband Mr Fox, very much not a Tory like Bute. George's mother and Bute sent a Colonel Graeme in guise of a traveller to visit various little Protestant Courts to report back on the qualifications of several unmarried princesses. Graeme selected the Princess of Mecklenburg, and that was the candidate that the Queen mother put to her son. He bowed to his mother's will.
  
  Walpole adds that Graeme was a Jacobite who had been active in the Forty Five;
  
  "On a visit he made to Scotland, his native country, after this embassy, David Hume, the historian said to him, 'Colonel Graeme, I congratulate you on having exchanged the dangerous employment of making kings, for the more lucrative province of making Queens."
  
  Cass

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  Posted by Gran (U14388334) on Thursday, 21st July 2011

  Hi Cass,
  
  It looks as though Horace Walpole did not dig very deeply, there is a story that GIII married his Quaker lady love, had 3 sons then she was paid a lot of money to go off to South Africa. There are many descendents, by the name of Rex (a clue?) one Sir Robert Richmond Rex became Premier of the Island of Niue in the Pacific. He has many descendents. Others lived in South Africa and at least one went to USA. Apparently evidence of what happened has been β€œlost”.
  
  
  
  Gran
  
  

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• Message 4

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 21st July 2011

  Gran
  
  Well stories are stories. They did not have phone hacking back then.. but this was a great age of a vicious press that was free to employ English liberty and did so with quite a degree of impunity.because it was really beneath the Court to bother with denials etc..
  
  As for marrying a Quaker this looks problematic as there was no civil marriage yet and Quakers would not be able to be married in an Anglican Church, while a Quaker ceremony had no legal status as yet.
  
  As I say for him to have been able to sustain such a relationship and have three sons before his early twenties without someone like Horace Walpole knowing about it does sound more like a Tartan Romance.. And as I wrote even the man sent to find him a wife had been a Jacobite.. Bonnie Prince Charlie had escaped from Skye in 1745 and there was still mileage for some people in challenging the Hanoverian line.
  
  T.H. White called his study of this period "The Age of Scandal"
  
  Cass

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  Posted by Grasshopper (U3605803) on Friday, 22nd July 2011

  I've watched a couple of interesting docs about this story, both involving people from various countries who claimed to be descended from a marriage between George & Hannah.
  
  In the first, documents, including a wedding certificate, were forensically examined and watermarks on the paper were discovered which had not been used until 30 years AFTER the documents were produced. They were forgeries. The programme named a suspect, but I don't recall who.
  
  In the second, a man who claimed his family were descended from G & H was DNA tested. the results were the same as the families in the first doc - no link between them and royalty.
  
  And as for 'George Rex', an alleged descendant, Christopher Hibbert, in his excellent biog of George III, says that George Rex in fact came from a family of distillers, Rex being his surname and nothing to do with a secret marriage.
  
  Also, George III, when well, was very faithful to Charlotte. In fact, he was the only one of the Hannovarian Georges not to have any mistresses.
  
  Also, the so-called secret marriage was once claimed as the cause of his illness. In fact, he had a genetic disease (porphyria), and the misfortune to have doctors who thought they were dealing with a lunatic.
  
  HTH!
  
  
  KOTR

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• Message 6

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 22nd July 2011

  Thanks for that Grasshopper
  
  
  I was also wondering about that South Africa connection around 1760.. The Dutch had bases there, which Britain took over when the French conquered the Netherlands in the wars of 1793-185.. I believe that both Dutch Protestants (the Boers) and later French Huguenots were significant parts of the first European population, but one associates Quakers much more with Pennsylvania and "The City of Brotherly Love".. Surely a Quaker mother and her children could "get lost" and start a new life there..
  
  Cass

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• Message 7

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  Posted by Grasshopper (U3605803) on Friday, 22nd July 2011

  But there's no real proof of a secret marriage - the only documented 'evidence', being forged documents.
  
  
  KOTR

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• Message 8

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  Posted by Grasshopper (U3605803) on Friday, 22nd July 2011

  Hopping off to my pit now.
  
  Nite nite.
  
  
  KOTR

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