Items related to Maria Fitzherbert: The Secret Wife of George IV
Synopsis
Maria Fitzherbert became famous when in 1785 she secretly and illegally married the heir to the throne, later King George IV. Maria came from a Catholic landed family and had already been twice widowed. Sympathetic biographers, several of whom were fellow Catholics, presented her as a much abused and almost saintly woman who was used, betrayed and taken up again by a fickle and mentally unstable Prince.
This biography, using for the first time diaries kept by her closest friends, shows that Maria was far from abused. She had a healthy, if not excessive, opinion of herself and it was her pride more than her religious convictions that demanded marriage before pleasure. She was sophisticated and cultured, if not highly educated, an acute businesswoman and strong willed. While this biography does not ‘debunk’ her it does give us, at last, a fully rounded portrait of a fascinating woman, her topsy-turvy marriage and the bizarre worlds of court and politics in which she lived and for a time, triumphed.
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About the Author
James Munson read Modern History at Oxford University between 1966 and 1969. In 1968 he won the Matthew Arnold Historical Essay Prize and, in the following year, began his doctorate in Victorian religious and political history. In 1974 he received his D. Phil. degree.
For ten years he taught history in the University. In 1981 he began writing scripts for BBC Radio and Television and by 1991 he had written scripts for over 60 programmes. His seven part series on Queen Victoria, written with Richard Mullen, led to a highly successful BBC book.
James Munson has also written for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers including The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, The Illustrated London News, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, The Listener, Country Life, Die Presse (Vienna), Radio Times, British Heritage, Essex Countryside, The Oxford Times, Essex Journal, Orient Express, Contemporary Review, Singapore Airlines, The Economist, Catholic Herald, The Baptist Quarterly, The (Cambridge) Historical Journal, Church History, and The British Journal of Educational Studies.
In 1994 he was appointed Literary Editor of Contemporary Review, the monthly journal of international affairs founded in 1866. He has recently finished researching a biography of the Victorian radical reformer and publisher, John Cassell, and is presently working, again with Richard Mullen, on a book on Victorian travel to Europe.
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