A lot more attention-grabbing than William and Kate mugs

CULTURE SHOCK:HERE'S A TABLE-QUIZ question for the weekend that's in it: which British royal wedding entangled two great Irish writers? Answer: the one the Brits don't like to talk about.

In March 1786 the great but deplorably reactionary English cartoonist James Gillray issued a new print called

Wife & NoWife – or – A Trip to the Continent

. It shows the interior of a cathedral. A coachman is asleep in the left foreground. Behind him a Catholic priest, perhaps a Jesuit, is conducting a wedding ceremony.

The elegant young groom is holding the hand of his extravagantly coiffed bride. Three male witnesses stand behind them. The coachman is the British prime minister Lord North – asleep on the job.

The couple being married are the prince of Wales (later the corpulent and intransigent George IV) and Maria Fitzherbert. The priest is the Irish writer, orator and politician Edmund Burke. The identity of one of the witnesses, who has wine bottles in his pockets, is somewhat obscure, but it is probably meant to be the Irish playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

What made Gillray’s image incendiary is not its satire but its basis in truth. Fitzherbert was a twice-widowed woman whose marriages had left her with a decent fortune. She was not obliged to marry again or to become a kept woman. This gave her significant power when the prince fell for her. She refused to become his mistress. He agreed instead to marry her.

George and Fitzherbert were married in a secret ceremony in a private house in London in December 1785. The ceremony was performed by an Anglican clergyman and witnessed by Maria’s brother and uncle. A marriage certificate was drawn up and signed. This was, undeniably, a royal wedding. It was also doubly illegal. It was unlawful for the heir to the throne to marry a Catholic.

The Royal Marriage Act of 1772 also specifically forbade any prince or princess descended from George II to marry without royal approval or, once they were above 25 years old, without the approval of the Privy Council.

The secrecy of the marriage was relative. The couple appeared together at society occasions. Moreover, the prince’s new wife continued to attend Mass at embassy chapels, making it clear (a) that she was still a Catholic and (b) that she was not a sinner – in other words that she was a respectable married woman. Talk of the marriage quickly spread beyond the bounds of society rumour.

This scandalous royal wedding was, apart from being the juiciest bit of gossip for many decades, a huge embarrassment to the prince’s political friends. At this time George was in full-blown rebellion against his crusty father and had aligned himself with the radical wing of the Whig party that cohered around Charles James Fox.

This is where Burke and Sheridan came in. Both were allies of Fox.

Conveniently, both were Irishmen with Catholic antecedents and open sympathy for the cause of Catholic emancipation. It didn’t matter that neither was involved in the actual marriage. The heir to the throne had been captured by a Catholic. His political friends included two prominent Irishmen who could be painted as crypto-Catholics. For “Church and King” conservatives the royal wedding was a propaganda gift. It was obvious that the two Irish writers were at the heart of a Catholic plot to regain the throne of England.

This could not be said openly, but it could be depicted in caricatures.Thus was created a visual tradition in English popular art that persisted for 30 years. Gillray had already established the image of Burke as a Jesuit. His 1782 print

Cincinnatus in Retirement, Falsely Supposed to Represent Jesuit-Pad Driven Back to His Native Potatoes

, has Burke in Jesuit garb back in his Irish hovel. He is eating a pot of spuds from a table on which a crucifix is supported by a whiskey cask.

It was a small leap to have Burke as the Jesuit officiating at the prince’s secret marriage. These images began to appear in March 1786, even before Gillray’s famous print. The caricatures could be extraordinarily wild. One print from May 1786,

The Royal Exhibition – or – A Peek at the Marriage Heads

, has George and Maria with their clothes lifted to show their faces on their naked backsides. Floating over them are the pope and, as “high priest”, Burke.

The Jesuit dress remained a staple part of the representation of Burke until 1790, when he published his

Reflections on the Revolution in France.

At that stage he became the darling of the conservatives. A Gillray cartoon,

The Impeachment – or – The Father of the Gang Turned King’s Evidence

, shows him without the clerical garb, denouncing the cowering Sheridan and Fox. It was no longer convenient to associate Burke with the scandal of the secret royal wedding.

Sheridan was a different matter. He was much more directly involved in the affair than Burke had ever been. He spoke of it publicly in the House of Commons, making the supremely ambiguous claim that Fitzherbert’s situation was entirely respectable – which could mean either that she was married to the prince or that she had nothing to do with him. And Sheridan, unlike Burke, was further radicalised by the French Revolution, making him a constant target for Gillray and the other conservative caricaturists.

Sheridan and Fitzherbert continued to appear together in Gillray cartoons well into the 19th century, often in attacks on Catholic emancipation. Fitzherbert is depicted as an abbess, Sheridan as a drunken, thieving schemer. Gillray at one point represented the prince, Sheridan and Fitzherbert as a menage à trois, with her stroking the prince’s belly while Sheridan kisses her and fondles her breast.

The caricaturists were also fond of the analogy between Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, with his dissolute companions, and Prince George’s circle: Fox as Falstaff, Sheridan as Bardolph or Pistol and Fitzherbert as Doll Tearsheet.

One of Gillray’s most elaborate creations,

Pacific Overtures

, issued in 1806, has Sheridan and Fitzherbert alongside the former United Irishmen leader Arthur O’Connor negotiating peace with Napoleon. Here is the full array of enemies – Catholics, Irishmen, the French – with the Irish playwright and the prince of Wales’s secret wife at the heart of it all. It is the culmination of a visual tradition somewhat more interesting than the mugs and tea cloths with which royal weddings are now commemorated.