George III, King of Great Britain, 1738-1820; Great Britain -- History -- George III, 1760-1820
In the July number of the same periodical "A Warminster Correspondent"
states that the name of the girl was not Wheeler but Hannah Lightfoot,
that Hannah had lived at the corner of St. James's Market, with her
mother and father, who kept a shop ("I believe a linen-draper's"), that
the Prince of Wales saw her, fell in love, and persuaded Elizabeth
Chudleigh, one of his mother's maids of honour,[111] to act on his
behalf. "The royal lover's relations took alarm, and sent to inquire for
a young man to marry her," he continues. "Isaac Axford was a shopman to
Barton the grocer, on Ludgate Hill, and used to chat with her when she
came to the shop to buy groceries. Perryn, of Knightsbridge, it was
said, furnished a place of meeting for the royal lover. An agent of Miss
Chudleigh called on Axford, and proposed that on his marrying Hannah he
should have a considerable sum of money. Hannah stayed a short time with
her husband, when she was taken off in a carriage, and Isaac never saw
her more. Axford learned that she was gone with Miss Chudleigh. Isaac
was a poorheaded fellow, or, by making a bustle about it, he might have
secured to himself a good provision. He told me, when I last saw him,
that he presented a petition at St. James's, which was not attended to;
also that he had received some money from Perryn's assignees on account
of his wife." Isaac, it seems, set up as a grocer at Warminster, his
native place, but retired from business before his death, which took
place about 1816 in the eighty-sixth year of his age; having long
before, believing his wife to be dead, married a Miss Bartlett, of
Keevil, North Wilts. "Hannah was fair and pure as far as I ever heard,"
the Warminster correspondent concludes, "but 'not the purest of all
pures' in respect of the house of Mr. Perryn, who left her an annuity of
£40 a year. She was, indeed, considered as one of the most beautiful
women of her time, disposed to _en bon point_."
[111] Elizabeth Chudleigh (1720-1788), married, first, Augustus Hervey
(afterwards third Earl of Bristol), and, second, Evelyn Duke of
Kingston.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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