One of the next things related is a royal visit to Nuneham (Lord Harcourt’s), which included excursions to Oxford and Blenheim. Miss Burney was one of the party, but — to use a phrase of Horace Walpole — did not greatly feel the joy of it, owing to the many discomforts and fatigues arising out of the defective arrangements which had been made for the Royal Suite. Mrs. Schwellenberg had assured her that she should “appear for nobody,” and the assurance was very literally carried out. It was in connection with this Nuneham trip that occurred the incident of the gown which has so much exercised some of Fanny’s biographers. Just before the visit took place, Mrs. Schwellenberg informed “Miss Bernar,” with much patronising importance, that she was to have a gown, as the Queen said she was not rich. Fanny protested that [like Dogberry] she had two gowns, and did not need another. “Miss Bernar,” said the scandalised old lady, “I tell you once, when the Queen will give you a gown, you must be humble, thankful, when [even if] you are Duchess of Ancaster,” — i.e. Mistress of the Robes. Further, she was not to be allowed to thank the Queen herself. “When I give you the gown,” added Mrs. Schwellenberg, “I will tell you when you may make your curtsey” — and then for the time the disagreeable conversation stopped. It does not appear that Fanny got her gown in time for Nuneham, as she went in a Chambéry gauze of her own. But it is an error to say — as Lord Macaulay does — that Queen Charlotte’s promise was “never performed,” for a few days later, in September, we find her wearing her “memorable present-gown” in honour of the birthday of the Princess Royal. It was “a lilac tabby,” we are told; and the King professed to admire it greatly, calling out that “Emily [i.e. the Princess Amelia] should see Miss Burney’s gown now, and she would think her fine enough.” But from a subsequent entry, it appears that it had been given through Mrs. Schwellenberg, for Miss Burney refers to the far greater pleasure that she received from a gift of violets presented to her by the Queen herself. Lord Macaulay, in his unwillingness to believe that Miss Burney obtained any “extraordinary benefactions” from Their Majesties, also overlooked the fact that, both in 1787, and 1788, Miss Burney received (though always through Mrs. Schwellenberg) New Year’s presents from the Queen. On the first occasion it was “a complete set of very beautiful white and gold china for tea, and a coffee-pot, tea-pot, cream-jug, and milk-jug of silver, in forms remarkably pretty.” In 1788 it was a gift of plate.[61]
Life at Court, whether at Kew, Windsor, or London, was not riotously eventful, and it has often been described. The usual humdrum routine repeated itself, diversified only by concerts, birthdays, and change of equerries. During much of the latter part of 1786, Mrs. Schwellenberg was ill, and Fanny reigned in her stead over the Windsor tea-table. Early in 1787, the Court went to London, taking up its abode at St. James’s Palace. During this time, Miss Burney also was occasionally ill, and went home for change. Once she visited Drury Lane with the Royal Family; and was startled by a complimentary reference to herself in the Epilogue to Holcroft’s Seduction— “a very clever piece,” — she says,— “but containing a dreadful picture of vice and dissipation in high life.” The reference was to “sweet Cecilia,” —
“Whose every passion yields to Reason’s laws,”[62] —
and seems to have delighted her Royal Master and Mistress as much as — we are assured — it embarrassed and disconcerted herself. “I took a peep at you!” said the kind King later,— “I could not help that. I wanted to see how you looked when your father first discovered your writing — and now I think I know!” Not very long subsequently, she had a compliment on the subject of Cecilia from another quarter. Mrs. Siddons, who was staying in the neighbourhood of Windsor, was ordered to the Lodge to read a play; and Fanny was requested by the Queen to receive her. Almost the first thing the other Queen — the stage Queen — said to Miss Burney was, that “there was no part she had ever so much wished to act as that of Cecilia.” Notwithstanding this most conciliatory speech, Mrs. Siddons — stately and beautiful as she was — does not appear to have impressed Cecilia’s author. “I found her” — says Fanny— “the Heroine of a Tragedy, — sublime, elevated, and solemn. In face and person, truly noble and commanding; in manners, quiet and stiff; in voice, deep and dragging; and in conversation, formal, sententious, calm and dry. I expected her to have been all that is interesting; the delicacy and sweetness with which she seizes every opportunity to strike and to captivate upon the stage had persuaded me that her mind was formed with that peculiar susceptibility which, in different modes, must give equal powers to attract and to delight in common life. But I was very much mistaken.” The play Mrs. Siddons read was Vanbrugh and Cibber’s Provoked Husband. As Fanny did not hear it, we have no account of its effect. But it would be interesting to know whether the entire absence of applause on these occasions, which so paralysed the mercurial Garrick, had the same effect on the majestic Mrs. Siddons.
In this way, what Fanny calls the “dead and tame life I now lead,” — of which the above was one of the rare variations, — went on as before, although there are signs in her Journal now and then, that it was sometimes less irksome to her. Indeed, on one occasion she goes so far as to write that she has now thoroughly formed her mind to her situation. “I even think” — she adds— “I now should do ill to change it; for though my content with it has been factitious, I believe it, in the main, suited to save me from more disturbance than it gives me.” With ampler space, it would be easy to fill a considerable number of pages by the vagaries of “Mr. Turbulent,” the divers humours of the equerries, and the whims of Mrs. Schwellenberg, who vacillates between endeavouring to kill her colleague by making her sit in a draught of a carriage window, and to conciliate her by the premature legacy of a sedan chair. But in the limits assigned to this chapter we can only hope to chronicle the more important events.
One of these was the trial of Warren Hastings, which began in February, 1788, in Westminster Hall. The Queen gave Fanny two tickets for the box of the Grand Chamberlain (Sir Peter Burrell), where she was just above the prisoner, whose pale and harassed face she could see distinctly with her glass when he looked up. Concerning the “high crimes and misdemeanours” alleged against him, she knew nothing, regarding the whole matter “as a party affair.” But her sympathies, like those of the Royal Household, were provisionally with Hastings, whom she had met two years earlier at the Cambridges at Twickenham, and had liked, — circumstances which she found somewhat embarrassing when presently she saw her other friend, Burke, with knit brows and scroll in hand, making portentous entry at the head of the Committee for the Prosecution. Great part of the first day’s proceedings was taken up by the interminably tedious over-reading of the charges; but Mr. Windham, one of the Committee, and her sister Charlotte’s neighbour in Norfolk,[63] speedily asked to be presented to her; and, from time to time, visited the Grand Chamberlain’s box, pointing out the different notabilities, — among the rest, Hastings’ arch-enemy, Philip Francis. Mr. Windham, who was a man of the world and a brilliant talker, made himself extremely agreeable, though he was probably not so convincingly impressed by Miss Burney’s instinctive conviction of the innocence of the late Governor General of Bengal as she imagined. A little later, she went again to Westminster Hall to hear Burke, her companion upon this occasion being her brother James. It was the second day of Burke’s speech, — the first she had not heard. What she did hear surpassed her expectations; and what she says is confirmed by other auditors of that splendid oratory. She notes its inequality, — its digressions. But, she goes on — not without a touch of the Johnsonian “triptology”— “when he narrated, he was easy, flowing and natural; when he declaimed, energetic, warm and brilliant. The sentiments he interspersed were as nobly conceived as they were highly coloured; his satire had a poignancy of wit that made it as entertaining as it was penetrating; his allusions and quotations, as far as they were English and within my reach, were apt and ingenious; and the wild and sudden flights of his fancy, bursting forth from his creative im
agination in language fluent, forcible, and varied, had a charm for my ear and my attention wholly new and perfectly irresistible.” In fact, she continues, “the whirlwind of his eloquence nearly drew me into its vortex.” Upon a third occasion, she heard Charles Fox raging for five hours at the Lords, who, in the opinion of the Committee, were favouring the accused. But Fanny thought Fox’s face looked hard and callous, and that Burke’s method of speaking was more gentleman-like, scholar-like, and fraught with true genius than that of Fox. On each of these visits, it should be added, she had much talk with Mr. Windham, who, for further recommendation, had been one of Johnson’s devotees; and she made careful report of her impressions to Queen Charlotte.
Another person to whom her accounts of the first scenes of the Great Trial had been specially welcome was now soon to be lost to her. On the 15th of April, 1788, not long after the above events, died Mrs. Delany. Her death was a serious blow to Fanny, who had resorted to her freely for sympathy when things went wrong either with the Senior Keeper, or in the “nice conduct” of the Equerries’ tea-table. In the July following, the King, whose health had hitherto been of the best, showed the first indications of that malady which was afterwards to be of so serious a character. As a consequence, it was decided that, in company with the Queen and the three elder Princesses, he should go to Cheltenham to drink the waters, — carrying with him the Royal household in concentrated form. Fanny and Miss Planta were of the party; Colonel Gwyn was the Equerry in Waiting; and Colonel Digby attended in his capacity of Queen’s Vice-Chamberlain. They were domiciled at Fauconberg Hall (Bay’s Hill Lodge), which was charmingly situated, but ridiculously restricted in point of accommodation. At Cheltenham, King George repeated his usual simple life, promenading daily in the Walks to the delight of the lieges; and from time to time making flying visits in the neighbourhood from which Miss Planta and Miss Burney were, of necessity, excluded. One result of these proceedings was to throw Miss Burney very much into the society of Colonel Digby, now a recently bereft and melancholy widower with a young family. The Queen’s Vice-Chamberlain was ten years older than Miss Burney; and rumour was already connecting his name with that of his eventual second wife, Miss Charlotte Gunning, a pretty Maid of Honour, who figures in the Diary as “Miss Fuzelier,” and was the eldest daughter of a baronet. Meanwhile, in the contracted limits of Bay’s Hill Lodge, both Colonel Digby and Miss Burney — like fellow-sufferers upon a raft — seem to have discovered that they had much in common. They exchanged ideas upon many subjects, staidly discussing religion and the affections, and particularly the second volume of a work with the “injudicious” title of Original Love Letters.[64] Fanny was admittedly much “flattered” by the Colonel’s attraction to her little parlour; and in her Diary the record of this pleasant oasis in her pilgrimage has all the aspect of a decorous sentimental idyll. Unhappily, practical confirmation of the doleful Colonel’s standing topic— “the assured misery of all stations and all seasons in this vain and restless world” — arrived suddenly with a fit of the gout. This effectually put a stop to any further study of Akenside’s Odes and Falconer’s Shipwreck; and on the 8th of August Colonel Digby was forced to obtain sick leave, and departed. Almost immediately afterwards, and not entirely without Fanny’s good offices, — he was appointed to the vacant Mastership of St. Catherine’s Hospital, a sinecure in the Queen’s gift. With this, what Fanny styles, in a double sense, “the Cheltenham episode” drew to an end; and the Royal Household went back to the “set, gray life” of old. To make matters worse, before a few weeks were over, the King was again indisposed. In October those about him were vaguely uneasy; and in the night of the 20th, he was alarmingly ill. This attack however passed off; and on the 25th the Court moved from Kew to Windsor. On that day Miss Burney had “a sort of conference” with the King, which she explains to mean that she “was the object to whom he spoke.” Though he was as gracious and kind as usual, she was shocked at the hoarseness, volubility, and even vehemence of his speech. The next day she met him again in the passage from the Queen’s room. “He stopped me, and conversed upon his health near half an hour, still with that extreme quickness of speech and manner that belongs to fever; and he hardly sleeps, he tells me, one minute all night; indeed, if he recovers not his rest, a most delirious fever seems to threaten him. He is all agitation, all emotion, yet all benevolence and goodness, even to a degree that makes it touching to hear him speak. He assures everybody of his health; he seems only fearful to give uneasiness to others, yet certainly he is better than last night. Nobody speaks of his illness, nor what they think of it.”
For the next few days, notwithstanding that the King seemed sometimes better than at other times, he grew steadily worse. He became appreciably weaker; he walked like a gouty man; he had talked away all his voice, and his hoarseness was pitiful to hear. Nevertheless he was as amiable as ever:— “he seemed to have no anxiety but to set the Queen at rest, and no wish but to quiet and give pleasure to all around him.” In the meantime the poor Queen is overcome with nameless apprehension; walks up and down the room without uttering a word, shaking her head in manifest distress and irresolution. So matters wear on until the 3rd November when Dr. Heberden is called in, “for counsel [it is announced], not that His Majesty is worse.” Yet on the following day the Queen is in deeper distress than before; the King is in a state almost incomprehensible; and all the household is uneasy and alarmed. On the 5th, His Majesty goes out for an airing with the Princess Royal; and the Prince of Wales arrives from Brighton. Then between six and seven, an inexplicable stillness comes upon the Upper Lodge, as if something had happened. No one stirs; no one speaks. The evening concert is stopped. The equerries are gloomy and uncommunicative, though it is vaguely understood that the King is much worse, and that the Queen herself has been taken ill. At last Miss Burney learns the truth from the Vice-Chamberlain. At dinner His Majesty had broken into a positive fit of delirium, and the Queen had been in violent hysterics. “All the Princesses were in misery, and the Prince of Wales had burst into tears.[65] No one knew what was to follow — no one could conjecture the event.”
What did follow has been told and retold, and much of it belongs to history. But Miss Burney’s Diary reveals the domestic details of the story as it is not recorded in the periods of the politician, or in the professional evidence of the doctors She depicts the wearing suspense of the household, the confusion and clash of conjectures, the grief and agony of the Queen, the waiting rooms and passages filled with silent pages and attendants, the thick, depressing November fog, the hoarse voice of the King, talking, talking, talking incessantly, — but still breathing nothing but consideration for those about him.[66] Then comes, by order of the physicians, to whom a third has now been added, the separation of the wife and husband. This was on the 6th. On the morning of the next day Miss Burney hears the Prince of Wales tell the Queen what had happened the night before. The King had got up, and insisted upon going into the next room, which to his amazement, he found crowded with members of the household ranged in dead silence around it on chairs and sofas. He inquired what they did there, spoke fondly of his favourite son, the Duke of York (then present, but not seen) and finally penned Sir George Baker [the Queen’s physician] into a corner, calling him an old woman, who did not understand his complaint, which was only nervous. During all this, no one dared approach him. At last Colonel Digby (who, in his own family, had some experience of demented persons) took him by the arm, and begged him to go back to bed. The King refused, and asked him who he was. “I am Colonel Digby, Sir” — he answered— “and your Majesty has been very good to me often, and now I am going to be very good to you, for you must come to bed, Sir, it is necessary to your life.” The King was so surprised that he let himself be drawn away like a child.
In the fortnight that followed, things passed from bad to worse for the dwellers in the Upper Lodge. To add to the general disquiet and apprehension, Mrs. Schwellenberg arrived from Weymouth “all spasm and horror.�
� Then, by order of the Prince of Wales, intercourse with the outer world was practically suspended. As the King’s condition did not alter, the physicians told Mr. Pitt plainly that his ailment was lunacy; and on the 28th it was decided that he should be transferred to Kew, a place he detested, but where it was possible for him to take exercise without observation. Accordingly, on that day, the Queen and Princesses made precipitate and miserable exodus to Kew, amid the tears of the sorrowing household, — even the sentinels crying bitterly as they looked on. Then came the difficult task of persuading the King to follow, which he eventually did, being induced thereto by the promise that he should see the Queen, — a promise which was not kept, with the result that the night which ensued was one of the most violently bad of any yet passed. And so, “in all its dark colours, dark as its darkest prognostics,” began the “Kew campaign” from which, as usual, Mrs. Schwellenberg was not absent.
To recapitulate the discomforts of the cold and carpetless building at Kew, never intended for a winter residence, and lacking sadly both in space and accommodation, is here needless. But, notwithstanding Miss Burney’s “darkest prognostics,” a brighter day was happily dawning. New doctors were added to the old; and the new were better. Dr. Francis Willis and his son, both of whom had special experience in mental disease, henceforth, and much to the satisfaction of the household, took practical charge of the case. Honest, open, cheerful and high-minded, their moral influence over their patient, in combination with a gentler and more humane method of treatment, was not slow to produce its effect. The King began to walk regularly in the gardens; and hopes of his recovery fitfully revived. But while his health vacillated, the world outside was agitating for a Regency. The Willises — of whom there were now three — persevered no less with their regimen. And so, — omitting many immaterial things, — we come to the 2nd February, a day memorable in Fanny’s annals. For the sake of her health, she had been advised to walk daily either at Richmond or at Kew, according to the report she received of the King’s whereabouts. On this particular day, she had been told that His Majesty would walk in Richmond Park, and she therefore directed her steps to Kew Gardens. It had been arranged that if, on any occasion, the King chanced to see her, she was to be allowed to run off. By some misapprehension, he was in the Gardens, and at once detected her presence. What was worse, she soon heard him hurrying after her, calling hoarsely “Miss Burney! Miss Burney!” Terrified beyond measure, she continued to run until she was peremptorily bidden to stop by the Willises, as His Majesty was doing himself harm. “When they were within a few yards of me,” she writes, “the King called out, ‘Why did you run away?’” Making a violent effort to regain her composure, she turned to meet him, when to her astonishment, the poor invalid, with “all his wonted benignity,” despite the wildness still in his eyes, put both his hands round her shoulders, and kissed her on the cheek, going on to exhibit such delight at seeing her again, that she straightway lost all her fear. A long, disconnected conversation ensued. He rallied her about Mrs. Schwellenberg. She was not to mind: he (King George) was her friend. He talked about the pages; about her father; about Handel, some passages of whose Oratorios he tried to sing — hoarsely. He spoke also, with tears in his eyes, of Mrs. Delany. At length, after repeated injunctions on the part of his medical attendants, he let her go — his last words being to reassure her upon the subject of Mrs. Schwellenberg. All this — some of the Schwellenberg part excepted — Fanny recounted faithfully to the Queen on her return.
Complete Works of Frances Burney Page 707