The Bridal Night
This is the third and most delightfully finished of the Gillray prints devoted to the marriage of Charlotte Augusta, the Princess Royal, and the Hereditary Prince of Wurtemberg. The other two were For Improving the Breed, published when the engagement was generally announced, and Le Baiser a la Wirtembourg, published to commemorate the first meeting between the two partners. This print purports to show the bridal evening (May 18, 1797) with members of the extended Royal Family ushering the happy couple to their bedchamber at Windsor Palace.
© Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
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There is no record of such a bridal evening event, so it is likely that this is entirely a creation of Gillray's fertile imagination. He includes wonderful caricatures throughout the print. From left to right, we have the stiffly awkward Earl Salisbury, standing at the threshold and holding the door. As Lord Chamberlain, he would have been largely responsible for the planning and implementation of events such as this. The threshold about to be crossed both literally and figuratively is emphasized by the sturdy column before him.
Next we have the father and mother of the bride, King George and Queen Charlotte, dressed simply and without ostentation. The King, frugal as always, carries candlesticks with candles already substantially used. The Queen wears a simple bonnet in contrast with the elaborate plumed headdresses of the rest of the guests. She carries a traditional bridal posset, a hearty concotion made of sherry-sack, eggs, cream, spices, and sugar. In "The Fifteen Comforts of Marriage," it is called "an antient custom of the English Matrons who believe that Sack will make a Man lusty, and Sugar will make him kind."*
Between the King and Queen and the bridal couple, the Prime Minister, William Pitt appears in the background carrying a large sack of money labeled £80,000, the amount of the Princess's dowry voted upon by the Commons.
Beneath the obviously ironic picture of an elephant carrying a tiny Cupid called (in French) "The Triumph of Love", the grotesquely fat and highly decorated Prince of Wurtembeg gestures to his shy bride to proceed before him. In each of the successive prints by Gillray, the Hereditary Prince has become shorter and fatter. Here he is shown as to be as wide as he is tall. But, in fact, at six foot eleven inches, he would have been much taller than anyone else in the room.
In the foreground, behind the bridal couple is the Prince of Wales in his regimentals with a red sash. Directly behind him is the Duke of Clarence whose chubby profile is mostly visible along with some of his uniform. Between the two, only barely visible, is likely Prince Frederick, the Duke of York with his characteristic hook nose. Next to the Duke of Clarence in the foreground in full profile is the thin and splay-footed Prince William Frederick, the King's nephew, who appears much as he did in Gillray's 1795 portrait caricature, A Slice of Glo'ster Cheese. Behind "Slice" as he was sometimes called are a trio of profile portraits. They are (from top to bottom), Elizabeth Farren (recently married to Lord Derby) whose profile is recognizable from A Peep at Christies. . ., the Prince of Orange with his eyes closed as in The Orangerie, or the Dutch Cupid Reposing after the Fatigues of Planting, and an uncaricatured full length profile of the Princess of Wales, pointedly NOT at her husband's side. Instead, the woman next to the Prince of Wales looks suspiciously like the profile of Lady Jersey in Gillray's Jersey Smuggler. . .. The Evening Mail account of the wedding mentions the Countess of Jersey as one of the ladies attending. And Gillray's audience would certainly have appreciated the irony of the infamous mistress of the Prince appearing next to him among the crowd of wedding well-wishers.
Sources and Reading
- Commentary from the British Museum on The Bridal Night
- Draper Hill, Fashionable Contrasts, 1966, #61
- "Frederick I of Wurtemberg," Wikipedia
- "Charlotte, Princess Royal," Wikipedia
- Janice Hadlow, A Royal Experiment, 2014, pp. 464 - 472.
- Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #170
- * Quoted in Customs and Ceremonies Edited by John Brand and William Carew Hazlitt, p. 115
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