At this time Lady Jersey, a lady of mature age, had great influence over the Prince, and this probably made his rupture with Mrs. Fitzherbert the easier. The caricaturist (this time J. Cruikshank), who always seems to have been as well posted up in any Court scandal as one of our Society papers, has a picture, August 26, 1794, 'MY GRANDMOTHER, alias the JERSEY JIG, alias the RIVAL WIDOWS.' Old Lady Jersey, who is taking snuff, sits on the knee of the Prince, who says:
'I've kissed & I've prattled with fifty Grand Dames, And changed them as oft, do you see; But of all the Grand Mammys that dance on the Steine, The Widow of Jersey give me.'
Mrs. Fitzherbert, one hand clasping her forehead, and in the other holding a bond for £6,000 per annum, cries distractedly: 'Was it for this Paltry Consideration I sacrificed my--my--my--? for this only I submitted to--to--? Oh! shame for ever on my ruin'd Greatness!!!'
It came very suddenly. Both Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Prince were to dine with the Duke of Clarence; the lady was there, but Florizel was not; instead, a letter from him was handed to his wife repudiating her. Lord Stourton had the story from her own lips. Let him tell it:
'Her first separation from the Prince was preceded by no quarrel, or even coolness, and came upon her quite unexpectedly. She received, when sitting down to dinner at the table of William the Fourth, then Duke of Clarence, the first intimation of the loss of her ascendancy over the affections of the Prince; having, only the preceding day, received a note from his Royal Highness, written in his usual strain of friendship, and speaking of their appointed engagement to dine at the house of the Duke of Clarence. The Prince's letter was written from Brighton, where he had met Lady Jersey. From that time she never saw the Prince, and this interruption of their intimacy was followed by his marriage with Queen Caroline; brought about, as Mrs. Fitzherbert conceived, under the twofold influence of the pressure of his debts on the mind of the Prince, and a wish on the part of Lady Jersey to enlarge the Royal Establishment, in which she was to have an important situation.
'Upon her speaking to me of this union (confiding in her own desire that I should disguise from her nothing that I might conceive to be of doubtful character as affecting her conduct to the Prince), I told her I had been informed that some proposals had been made to her immediately preceding the marriage of the Prince, of which her uncle, Mr. Errington, had been the channel, offering some terms upon which his Royal Highness was disposed to give up the match. She told me there was no truth whatever in the report; that a day or two preceding the marriage, he had been seen passing rapidly on horseback before her house at Marble Hill, but that his motive for doing so, was unknown to her; and that, afterwards, when they were reconciled, she cautiously abstained from alluding to such topics; as the greatest interruptions to their happiness, at that period, were his bitter and passionate regrets and self accusations for his conduct, which she always met by saying--"We must look to the present and the future, and not think of the past."