Mrs. Fitzherbert

With the publication of Mr. Shane Leslie’s Life of Mrs. Fitzherbert, which appears a little over a century after her death, the clouds which so long hung over the name and fame of that sorely maligned woman have surely lifted at last and for ever. None will more rejoice at a final vindication than will the spiritual descendants of the English Catholic body, to which she belonged, and which (even when appearances seemed most adverse) always clung loyally to her. Her fellow Catholics were sometimes puzzled at and bewildered by her actions, but remained convinced that ultimately she would be found never to have strayed from the right path. Dr. Kirk, writing in her life-time his Biographies of English Catholics, well expressed their feeling: ‘Mrs. Fitzherbert’s long and mysterious connection with George IV when Prince of Wales rendered her the topic of general conversation, more than perhaps any other woman of her time; but by her friends and relations, and by all who ever enjoyed her acquaintance, she has always been regarded with the most unqualified sentiments of approbation and esteem.’To all students of her period, Mrs. Fitzherbert’s name and personality are well known. This ‘wife who for reasons of state had to pretend to be a mistress’ figures constantly in the histories, memoirs, pamphlets, lampoons, newspapers, paintings and caricatures of the entire epoch, by some sneered at as a light o’ love, by others placed on a level with the Valiant Woman of the Scriptures. Mrs. Fitzherbert’s father was one of the Smythes, Baronets of Eshe and Acton Burnell, her mother an Errington of an ancient Catholic family in the North.