His son, Albert Honoré Charles, the present Prince, married Lady Mary Victoria, daughter of the Duke of Hamilton and Brandon, on September 21st, 1869, and by her had a son, born in 1870.
But they apparently got tired of each other, for the Pope was approached by Lady Mary, with the full consent of the Prince, to get the marriage annulled.
Now the Church of Rome holds very strict views as to the indissoluble nature of marriage. Even the successor of S. Peter protests his inability to pronounce a divorce. _But_, he can annul a marriage on various grounds; and to help this out, all sorts of bars to legitimate marriage have been devised, as consanguinity within seven degrees of relationship, affinity, spiritual relationship through sponsorship at the font, or legal relationship through guardianship, beside many others, by means of some of which, with a little greasing of palms, hardly a legitimate union cannot be annulled. Accordingly, on January 3rd, 1880, after eleven years of married life, the Pope declared the marriage to have been void, on the plea put forward by Lady Mary that she had been over-persuaded to marry the Prince, by her mother. But the Papal Court laid down that although the connexion had been one of mere concubinage, yet, nevertheless, the son was to be regarded as legitimate. “Which is the humour of it,” as Corporal Nym would say. It further ordered that the re-marriage of either party must take place where the State did not require civil marriage, as civil courts considered the first marriage as valid. “Which,” again as Nym would say, “is the humour of it.”
Eleven months after this decree Lady Mary Hamilton married Count Tassilo Festitics, at Pesth; and the Prince married, October 30th, 1889, Alice, dowager duchess of Richelieu, a Heine of New Orleans. The name is Jewish.
The Pope seems to have felt that his proceeding in this matter had made the sensitive consciences of Roman Catholics wince, for he shortly after issued an Encyclical on Marriage, and pointed out what were the pleas on which the Papal Court was justified in dissolving existing marriages. The _Tablet_ also, on March 31st, 1894, published an apologetic article, in which it assured the world that the official fees paid to the Propaganda for annulling a marriage were trifling, that, in a word, a marriage could be dissolved at Rome, dirt-cheap, for £120. More shame to it, if true. But “Credat Judæus Apelles non ego.”