by Flora Fraser
‘The Queen is almost overpowered with some secret terror,’ Miss Burney wrote. The drawing room on the 4th was put off, ‘all the house uneasy and alarmed.’ The following day the King went out with the Princess Royal for another airing, ‘all smiling benignity’, but he badgered the postilions with contradictory orders and got in and out of the carriage twice. In conversation with Sir George Baker the King’s speech was ‘very unconnected and desultory.’ A man of rigorous punctuality, the King kept dinner waiting, deferred coffee and the evening concert till well past their appointed times, and did not go to bed before two in the morning. He spoke of going to Hanover when he got well. But would he ever get well?
The mounting anxiety at Windsor came to a head on the evening of the 5th. At dinner that night at the Queen’s Lodge, where the King and Queen and princesses were joined by the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, the King was in a terrible way. He had no longer the least command over either his body or his tongue. ‘His eyes’, the Queen later told Lady Harcourt, ‘she could compare to nothing but black-currant jelly. The veins in his face were swelled, the sound of his voice was dreadful. He often spoke till he was exhausted and the moment he could recover his breath, he began again, while the foam ran out of his mouth.’
Somehow the awful meal was got through, while the King, speaking without stopping, praised the Duke of York and forgave the Prince of Wales. The company, according to Lady Harcourt, was ‘drowned in tears’. The King at one point – the conversation turning to murder – seized the Prince of Wales by the collar out of his chair and threw the corpulent young man across the room. The Queen, as soon as she could, left the table and made for her room where she fell into strong hysterics, Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave comforting her. While the King followed her there, the Prince of Wales in the eating room burst into tears and was only prevented – he believed – from fainting when Princess Elizabeth rubbed his temples ‘with Hungary water’. The King’s physical symptoms were now subsidiary to his symptoms of mental disturbance. Members of the royal family and of the royal household who gave accounts of this dreadful dinner spoke of the King’s ‘delirium’. Sir George Baker went further. The King was ‘under an entire alienation of mind’, he wrote in his diary.
While the household were still ignorant of the exact events in the eating room, the atmosphere throughout the Queen’s Lodge was highly charged. ‘A stillness the most uncommon reigned,’ wrote Fanny Burney.’… Nobody stirred; not a voice was heard; not a step, not a motion … there seemed a strangeness in the house most extraordinary.’ In the apartment where ladies of the household customarily dined and dispensed tea to those equerries not in waiting, all was mystery. No equerries came, and Miss Burney and Miss Planta sat without talking. The former was ‘shocked’ at she scarcely knew what; the latter ‘seemed to know too much for speech’. Confirmation that something was afoot came with news that the evening concert had been cancelled and the musicians ordered away, But when the Queen’s reader Mme de la Fite came from Princess Elizabeth they were no better informed. She had found the Princess ‘very miserable’ but unconfiding.
The royal family’s private drama had shifted to the King and Queen’s apartments. The King, on being told that the Queen was unwell, said he would take care of her himself, then insisted on removing her to the drawing room. Here he made a sort of bed out of one of the sofas for her to lie on, and then placed Princess Royal, Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth round it. With all the candles except two put out, the unhappy woman and her daughters were forced to remain in this funerary arrangement while the King talked fondly and deliriously on.
When the time came to retire for the night, the King eventually agreed to move into the dressing room next door to the bedroom he shared with the Queen, on being told that she was really ill. And ill indeed she was. From this evening on, the princesses saw their mother crushed, despairing and unwilling to take any sort of lead. For thirty years she had played the queen consort with all her might, bearing child after child, organizing childcare and education, managing household and Court life, dispensing charity and encouraging the arts. Now, with her husband ‘under an entire alienation of mind’, the Queen wilted.
While the princesses went to their rooms upstairs, the Queen sat upright in her bed, with Miss Gouldsworthy on a chair at her side, and listened to the King next door as he talked without stopping. Once he came into the room and pulled back the curtains to check, with a candle held to her face, that she was really there. ‘Gouly,’ he said, addressing his daughters’ governess of fifteen years, ‘… they said the King was ill, he was not ill; but now the Queen is ill, he is ill too.’ He stayed half an hour. In the morning the Queen was still trembling from the anticipation of another such visit, but still desperate to hear, through the door, what the King was saying and to judge his mental state. ‘I am nervous,’ the ‘poor exhausted voice’ cried out. ‘I am not ill, but I am nervous: if you would know what is the matter with me, I am nervous.’
What was the matter with the King? The question plagued the doctors – for now there were three. In the night, Sir George Baker, feeling unwell – or unable to attempt alone a diagnosis of such a portentous illness – sent for fashionable Sir Richard Warren, a favourite in the Whig households of London. He had no more special knowledge or experience of cases of mental illness than Sir George, but he was the Prince of Wales’s own physician. The King refused to see Warren when he arrived, and Warren had to base his diagnosis of the case on what he could glean by listening through the door. He pronounced the King’s life to be in the utmost danger, and declared that ‘the seizure upon the brain was so violent, that if he did live, there was little reason to hope that his intellects would be restored.’
This statement overwhelmed the Prince of Wales as much as his mother and sisters. If his father was unfit to rule, as seemed the case, then the Prince or the Queen were the obvious candidates for regent. If the King died – and he seemed, leaving aside his mental impairment, all at once mortally weak and debilitated – then the Prince automatically became king. Leaving aside his filial feeling for the King – and the Prince was decidedly tenderhearted – he had reason to exult privately at the opportunities presented to him. Not the least of his concerns for the last few years had been the pressing need to clear his debts, or at least to receive a larger annual grant. Chief among the opponents to this project had been William Pitt. As regent – or as king – the Prince could at a stroke dismiss Pitt, call Charles James Fox and the Whigs into office, and name his sum. Although he was genuinely moved by his father’s plight, the Prince waited with growing excitement to see whether he would maintain his state of delirium, sink further, or recover. The doctors, deeply uncomfortable at the idea of diagnosing insanity or something resembling it in a monarch who might then recover, called in a third consultant, Dr Henry Revell Reynolds, to help them in their deliberations.
The Queen – the other obvious candidate for regent – wanted none of it. She had settled into a modest suite of rooms far removed from the anteroom where the King continued to babble. There she cried aloud, ‘What will become of me! What will become of me!’ (As Miss Burney, who said she could never forget ‘their desponding sound’, averred, the words ‘implied such complicated apprehensions’.) The Queen recommended leaving all arrangements to the Lord Chancellor. The question of a regency she appeared to regard as none of her business, and likewise she seemed to have no faith in the doctors’ ability to cure her husband, apparently regarding his death as inevitable – and insupportable. The princesses were almost more alarmed by their mother’s staying in bed all day – an unheard-of occurrence – than they were by their father’s plight. She received them, dressed in a dimity chemise that served her as dressing-gown and a close gauze cap, and the princesses, confronted with her in this unfamiliar condition, struggled, ‘from a habit that is become a second nature’, to repress all outward grief.
In Lower Lodge, Mlle de Montmollin, Miss Gouldsworthy and Miss Gomm �
� with Lady Charlotte Finch as overseer – kept the younger princesses busy. Five-year-old Amelia was impervious to adult fears. Mary and Sophia ate their dinners like good little girls, but the future looked very black.
On 6 November, the Prince of Wales and Duke of York spent the night with a selection of gentlemen and attendants on an arrangement of chairs and sofas placed in the antechamber next door to where the King paced and talked. At one point he entered the room before the pages could stop him, apparently with the intention of going to the Queen. Distinguishing his sons in the darkness by the stars on their coats, he asked what they did there, and could only be persuaded by the use of some force to return to his room.
At Windsor on the 7th, Mr Pitt learned details from the Prince of the King’s conversation and behaviour over the past few days, showing the ‘derangement’ of his mind. To substantiate the Prince’s opinion, the three doctors, Baker, Warren and Reynolds, were then called in to give their opinion. ‘His Majesty’s understanding is at present so affected’, they said, that there did not appear to them ‘any interval, in which any act that he could do, could properly be considered as done with a consciousness and understanding of what it was about’.
They spoke of the ‘disorder’ either being ‘locally fixed on the brain’, in which case they anticipated it being permanent and life-threatening, or then again not life-threatening. Or it might be a case of ‘a translation of a disorder from one part to another’. They might be able to remove it, but then it might ‘attack some part where it might be dangerous to life’. They concluded their desperate ramblings with the more intelligible statement ‘That on the whole there was more ground to fear than to hope, and more reason to apprehend durable insanity than death.’ Later that day, the Prince wrote more coherently still that the King was now ‘in infinitely a more dangerous state than he has hitherto been, having no recollection whatever.’ The Duke of York came out from the King’s room to look over the shoulder of one Court reporter, the Prince’s ‘creature’Jack Willett Payne, and bid him say that the King’s situation was every moment becoming worse. His pulse was weaker and weaker and the doctors believed it was impossible for him to survive long. ‘All articulation even seems to be at an end with the poor King,’ Payne wrote, two hours later. The monarch was in a ‘most determined frenzy’; poultices, or ‘cataplasms’, had been applied to his feet, and ‘strong fomentations’ had been used without effect. The general agreement was that, if the King did not recover within twenty-four hours, all was over.
It was Princess Augusta’s twentieth birthday on 8 November, a day when it had been intended that Mrs Siddons should read a play before a large company. The birthday passed instead largely unremarked. With tears her birthday present from her mother was offered. The Queen had wondered whether it was right to give it in the circumstances. With tears, Princess Augusta received it, and made a silent curtsey.
But the King recovered his physical health, at least, within twelve hours, passing a bowel movement and perspiring heavily, after which he fell into a profound sleep at midnight on the 9th. He woke within hours, with no fever, but his case was hardly better, for, according to Payne, he awoke ‘with all the gestures and ravings of the most confirmed maniac, and a new noise, in imitation of the howling of a dog.’ He did not have a lucid interval through the night, according to the Duke of York, who sat up with him. He raved all next day on the theme of religion, and of his being inspired, and also of Dr Heberden and of the Trinity and of the Queen. A new horror dawned, that the King would be permanently insane, yet healthy.
During these anxious days, the Prince remained at Windsor in his apartments in the Castle. He sent an urgent message to Charles James Fox in France, begging him to return, but he was not otherwise politically active. He confided his own plans for the future to no one, unless to his brother York. His creature Jack Willett Payne was not so reticent, and he had appeared at the Whig bastion, Brooks’s Club, and gave vivid imitations of the King in his distress, mimicking his spasmodic gestures and revealing that he ‘howled like a monkey’. As late as the end of October it had been given out that the King was unable to attend the weekly levees and drawing rooms because he was ‘dropsical.’ Few believed that, odd rumours having circulated about his behaviour in Cheltenham. It was whispered that his attack at Kew had been delirium, or even ‘alienation’. But Payne’s account, from inside the Castle itself, was of a mania on a different scale.2
Several courtiers, in a desperate attempt to reduce the damage, and to the derision of Whig Society, announced that they had suffered a period of insanity themselves with no lasting effects. ‘You see how I am now,’ a very sane Lord Fauconberg offered, after revealing that he had had a strait waistcoat on for a week once upon a time. But the floodgates of gossip were opened with Payne’s contribution. One Whig, ‘Fish’ Crawfurd, writing to the Duchess of Devonshire, was sure of the King’s case: ‘the humour to which his whole family is subject has fallen on his brain, and … nothing will save him except an eruption upon his skin’. In some parts of the country, the King’s near-death calcified into confident reports of his actual death, mourning was prescribed in the newspapers, and tributes paid to him.
Far from dying, the King had found a new lease of life. He was still alive, and gaining strength physically. But on the night of Tuesday, 11 November ‘the ramblings continued’, equerry Robert Fulke Greville recorded, ‘and were more wild than before, amounting alas to an almost total suspension of reason’. ‘No sleep this night,’ he added wearily. ‘The talking incessant throughout.’
The Prince of Wales now ‘took the government of the house into his own hands’. All was done and only done by his orders. His sisters passed all their time with their mother, who ‘lived entirely in her two new rooms, and spent the whole day in patient sorrow and retirement.’ The princesses did not go for walks, they did not ride, they did not even go to church. They lived in an atmosphere of whispers and silence and dread. News came from the King’s room that he was talking much, and with great hurry and agitation, of ‘Eton College, of the boys rowing, etc’. He complained of burning, perspired violently, and called to have the windows opened. By the evening he was turbulent and rambling, and at three in the morning he had ‘a violent struggle, jerking very strongly with his arms and legs’. He had not slept for twenty-nine hours. The only edict to emerge from the Queen’s rooms was that the Archbishop of Canterbury should ‘issue out public prayers for the poor King, for all the churches.’ John Moore, the Archbishop, accordingly produced a moving prayer, and Fanny Burney went to St George’s Chapel that Sunday to hear it read.
The elder princesses were anguished by their father’s state. One morning he attempted to jump out of the window, and in his loquacity did not hesitate to reveal various state secrets to anyone in the vicinity. But he was quieter, too, and arranged his watches and conversed rationally and ate bread and butter and drank tea with relish. His daughters accepted it all and hoped that the care of his poor jumbled mind and weakened frame would result in his recovery. However, as the days went by a new source of tension at Windsor developed. As he waited for Fox to return and direct affairs, the Prince began to be less amenable to the wishes of his mother and less moved by the plight of his father.
Members of the Whig leadership – Lord Minto, the Duke of Portland and especially Richard Brinsley Sheridan – made contact with the Prince and argued for action. The Whig doctor Sir Richard Warren pronounced the King’s recovery in doubt, and, prophesying a period of years during which the King would be incapable of conducting public business, or indeed of attending Parliament, urged a regency. The King himself was aware in his clouded mind of this possibility and had informed his doctors that he lived under ‘an absolute government, no, a republic, for there are three of you’. He begged them, when they had resolved something, to tell him of it, and he would give his order. ‘But let not these pages’, said the humiliated monarch, ‘say to the King, “You must and must not”.’ The other doctors di
ffered with Warren and predicted the King would recover, thus pleasing the administration and putting in doubt the need for a regency. The King believed that he had recovered already, and asked General Gouldsworthy to go to Eton and obtain a holiday for the boys to celebrate his return to life. Gouldsworthy was also to prepare the Queen for the firing of the guns at noon, and to order Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum in church.
Attempts were made to check the King’s ceaseless flow of words – he spoke on the 17th for nineteen hours, and not surprisingly developed a catch in his throat – and even to shave him, which he had resisted. But, after being shaved on one side, he rose and would not allow the operation to continue. As he had not been shaved for a fortnight the effect was bizarre. ‘Cabal flourishes,’ Lord Sheffield wrote. Yet the cause of the caballing was not melancholy but rather gay. The King talked for sixteen hours on 21 November, until the doctors set him to writing to divert him, when he made notes on Don Quixote. ‘He fancies London is drowned, and orders his yacht to go there,’ Sheffield continued. ‘He took Sir George Baker’s wig, flung it in his face, threw him on his back, and told him he might stargaze. Sir George is rather afraid of him. In one of his soliloquies he said, “I hate nobody. Why should anyone hate me?” Recollecting a little, he added, “I beg pardon, I do hate the Marquis of Buckingham.”’