A Monkey Among Crocodiles: The Life, Loves and Lawsuits of Mrs Georgina Weldon – a disastrous Victorian [Text only]. Brian Thompson

enlisted in the Queen’s Westminsters and was present on parade, just as he had been for George III in the levy of volunteers fifty-seven years earlier. It was a strange time for the happy couple to be rattling towards Dover and the continent, but a letter from Lord Clarendon to the Duchess of Manchester may hint at the suddenness of the marriage:

      Don’t you remember Miss Treherne, who sang so well at Ashridge & the Poodle was so in love with? She has just eloped with Mr Welldon a respectable man of 3000 a year but who her father did not think fine enough for her. My sister knows her very well & had a letter from her to say how impossible it wd. have been for her to have acted otherwise.

      The £3000 a year did not exist of course. What was the reason for her being unable to act otherwise? Whether she was pregnant going across to Dieppe we do not know (though she was very soon after). Although Harry was married in uniform and attended by his fellow officers, he sold his commission the same day. At Paris, Georgina wrote to her brother Dal, asking him to intercede with her father. But it was no use. Morgan cut her off without a penny and she never saw him again.

      Harry had won his prize after all. The circumstances were less than ideal. He had met her parents only once at the Sudeley Ball. He knew her only through the days and nights they had stolen together. She knew nothing at all of his family and astounded him by supposing Manchester to be a town in Yorkshire. As the coach headed south and Georgina practised her French and Italian on the natives, their destination was – where else? – Florence. Less than two years after being presented at Court, a week after shaming her parents, she was talking with a wildness and lack of realism he must already have grown used to, of going on the stage. No matter that the Mediterranean sun began to shine on them and leaving aside the question of whether or not she was already pregnant, they were effectively ruined. The only way back from a fiasco like this was through love. Or genius.