Georgina and Harry's plan of concealing their marriage until the autumn proved to be hopelessly naive. Four days after the event they went to Phillips, a jeweller in Cockspur Street, and ordered a ‘sham ring’ to conceal Georgina's wedding ring. Whilst they were in the shop, the author William Makepeace Thackeray came in. Georgina rushed into a back room to hide, but Thackeray, whom she had met at Little Holland House, spotted her. He immediately put two and two together. When he met Poodle Byng in the street a short while later he stopped him with the words ‘Poodle, you’ve lost your singing-bird! Miss Treherne has married some fellow!’ Poodle was an inveterate gossip, and the news was soon all over London.

A more judicious couple might have decided to lie low until the initial storm had subsided, but Georgina and Harry had no intention of doing so. Instead they came out fighting: on the following evening Harry got Lord Palmerston's box for the first night of Fabio Campana's opera Almina at Her Majesty's Theatre. He and Georgina bought ‘all the bouquets with the tricolor Italian colors, red, green and white’ and they and their friends ‘made a great row’. Four days later they took another box at the same theatre for a benefit performance for the soprano Marietta Piccolomini.

Though she had as yet received no word from her family, it was now obvious that Georgina could not simply return home to Gate House as she had intended. She therefore decided that she had better go and live with her husband. The marriage was consummated on 28 April at Long's Hotel in Bond Street. Georgina's accounts of her first night with Harry vary. In her diary she wrote: ‘Nothing can be more kind or more gentle than my own darling husband – so kind to his poor weak little wife. God bless us both – it surely can't be wrong to love as we do.’ But, as Georgina noted many years later, this diary was originally written in shorthand, and Harry subsequently made her rewrite it all in longhand as he was unable to read it. She may well have edited some of the original entries.