Sussex Arms Review: The Duke Who Married Illegally, Twice

Prince Augustus, Duke of Sussex, married for love in defiance of the Royal Marriages Act, and had both marriages annulled

The Sussex Arms holds a 4.4 from a thousand and forty-one people and charges ten to twenty pounds, and the title on the sign belonged, for most of the nineteenth century, to a man who spent his life arguing with his own family.

Prince Augustus Frederick

Sixth son of George III. Asthmatic, bookish, and in almost every respect the least likely member of that family to cause trouble.

In 1793, in Rome, aged twenty, he married Lady Augusta Murray. He married her for love, in secret, and then again in London to be sure.

Both marriages were annulled by his father, under the Royal Marriages Act – a piece of legislation George III had personally driven through Parliament, and which made it illegal for a descendant of George II to marry without the sovereign’s consent.

The King had made a law to prevent exactly this, and then used it on his own son.

What happened to her

She was not the Duchess of Sussex. She never was, because the marriage legally never happened.

They had two children, who were not princes, and who took a surname the family invented for them, and who inherited nothing.

Augustus and Augusta lived together for years and then separated. He married again, late in life – Lady Cecilia Buggin – and that marriage was not recognised either, and she was given a made-up title as a consolation.

He was, by every account, a decent man. He collected fifty thousand books. He was president of the Royal Society. He supported Catholic emancipation and the abolition of the slave trade and parliamentary reform, all of which put him at odds with his relatives, and he did not appear to care.

He asked to be buried in a public cemetery rather than at Windsor, because he did not want to be put in the family vault, and he was, at Kensal Green – which we wrote about at Paradise, and which is a twenty-minute walk from this pub.

The naming pattern

We have now done the full royal set across two surveys. The Prince of Wales, whose feathers came off a blind king, probably. The Princess of Wales, a title with enormous visibility and no security. The Princess Royal, which only one woman may hold. The Kings Head, one of which we removed.

And the Duke of Sussex, who married the woman he wanted and was told, by an Act of Parliament his own father wrote, that it had not happened.

The pub

Cheap, solid, well-liked, a proper local, and a 4.4 across a real sample.

Verdict

Good pub, cheap pint, and a name belonging to a man who fought his family for fifty years, lost every round, and had himself buried somewhere they could not follow.

The Act is still there

Reduced, but alive.

The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 was finally repealed in 2013 and replaced with something much narrower: the first six in line to the throne still require the sovereign’s consent to marry, and a marriage without it is void.

Six people. In a country of sixty-eight million, six people cannot legally marry whom they choose without asking permission first.

The Prat has no view on the monarchy and would simply note that the law that annulled Augustus’s marriage twice is not entirely gone, and that it was written by a king who was annoyed about a different son altogether.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]