The marriage of the Prince of Wales to Mrs Maria Fitzherbert comes into the film as it didn’t into the play. The Prince had married her secretly (in her own drawing room) in 1785, really in order to satisfy Mrs Fitzherbert’s Catholic conscience as she refused to sleep with him otherwise. Valid in the eyes of her Church, the marriage was always invalid in legal and constitutional terms, as the Prince could not marry without his father’s permission and if he married a Catholic he forfeited his right to the throne. Not that this mattered to Mrs Fitzherbert, who, sensible woman that she was, had no interest in the throne anyway. No one has a wrong word for her: sweet-natured, amiable and no great beauty, she was received at court and was on good terms with the King and Queen, both of them seemingly in no doubt about her relation to the Prince. However, when, early in 1787, the existence of the marriage was raised in Parliament, the Prince of Wales denied it even to his friend Fox, who, believing him, stood up in the Commons and denied it too. Not surprisingly, Mrs Fitzherbert was very cross and, though she forgave the Prince, she never forgave Fox, who in turn found it hard to forgive the Prince.

All this had blown over by the time George III became ill late in 1788 and the marriage played no part in what came to be called the Regency Crisis. In my script it does, partly because the plot needed thickening and also because I wanted Mrs Fitzherbert to have her own story and not just be sitting around as the companion of the Prince. At the end of the film the Prince is seen to have rejected Mrs Fitzherbert, but in fact they lived together openly for another fourteen years, even after the Prince’s marriage (legal but disastrous) to Princess Caroline of Brunswick. Rejection, when it did come in 1803, was as crude and brutal as royal behaviour often is, recalling the unfeelingness with which a later Prince of Wales, having met Mrs Simpson, briskly put aside his long-time mistress, Mrs Dudley-Ward. Sometimes it’s as if royalty know about good behaviour by hearsay and can give only a faulty imitation of it, or, as Willis remarks before meeting the King, ‘Deferred to, agreed with, acquiesced in. Who can flourish on such a daily diet of compliance? To be curbed, stood up to, in a word thwarted, exercises the character, elasticates the spirit, makes it more pliant. It is the want of such exercise that makes rulers rigid.’ Or spoiled, as Nanny would say.