The Prince Regent's connection to the Royal Pavilion rests on entirely genuine and well documented royal history, George, Prince of Wales and later Prince Regent, having commissioned the extraordinary Indo-Saracenic pleasure palace as his fashionable seaside retreat, its exotic architecture and lavish interiors reflecting both his personal taste and the considerable wealth and status he was determined to display even while acting only as regent rather than reigning monarch in his own right. The secret tunnel connecting the Pavilion to what is now Brighton Dome, itself originally built as the Pavilion's own stables and riding house, gives this haunting a genuinely concealed, architecturally intriguing setting rather than any more conventional room or corridor.
Maria Fitzherbert's own documented history adds real weight to her proposed companionship in the tunnel: she and the Prince Regent had genuinely married in 1785, a ceremony conducted in secret and never legally recognised by the Crown, both because Fitzherbert was Catholic, barred from marrying an heir to the throne under the Act of Settlement, and because the marriage lacked the King's own required consent under the Royal Marriages Act. Their relationship, genuine in the couple's own eyes but never in the eyes of English law, makes her a fittingly ambiguous companion for his ghost, present but never quite officially acknowledged, in death much as she was in life.
No further detail about the specific staff witness or the date of the encounter has been traced in the sources consulted for this entry, and the identity of whichever mistress might join him on other occasions, given the Prince Regent's own well documented history of numerous relationships beyond Fitzherbert alone, remains unspecified. The haunting stands as a fitting continuation of a site built explicitly as a monument to its royal patron's own considerable personal indulgence, his reported ghost still occupying the private, concealed passage running beneath the grand public rooms he built to display himself in life.
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