by Flora Fraser
As Fox returned from France and the Houses of Parliament adjourned for a fortnight, to resume business in December with a debate over the regency, the Prince was elated, his sisters desperately unhappy.
During the afternoon of 24 November there was a flurry of movement within the walled garden that lay behind the Queen’s Lodge at Windsor. And now into the garden, emerging into the walled space and moving down the sloping ground in the direction of the trees and shade at the other end, came a hesitant band of princesses. Their father’s doctors, at their wits’ end to know how to deal with an unprecedented royal malady, had that morning in conference had an idea: ‘they thought they would try what effect the letting him see his children in the garden would have’. The forlorn hope was that the deranged King, looking on from a window, would gather strength from the mere sight of the daughters for whom he pined in his confinement.
Despite the doctors’ determination to try ‘the effect’, the King had become agitated at the prospect earlier in the day, and had endeavoured to forbid the scheme. ‘No, I cannot bear it; no, let it be put off till evening, I shall be more able to see them then,’ he begged. But the doctors were adamant, and outside the girls now trooped to take part in the experiment. For a moment all was still on the lawn. The younger princesses were unaware of the watcher at the window. And then, startled, they looked up. There was their father struggling at the windows, making efforts to open them, gesticulating at his daughters and banging in frustration on the pane. But how could this be their father, this pale and haggard man wearing a nightgown and nightcap in the middle of the day? And now others appeared at the window, and the King was removed from sight.
While the elder girls were still shaken and the younger ones stared uncomprehendingly, a gentleman appeared with a request from their father that they would come nearer. They approached, and their father called to them through the window. But by now the Princess Royal was quite overcome, as was Princess Mary, on whom the horror of the scene had not been lost. The matter was decided when it appeared that Princess Elizabeth was about to faint. ‘And, in truth,’ Mrs William Harcourt wrote to Lady Harcourt, ‘they all seemed more dead than alive when they got into the house.’
The princesses, love their brothers though they did, could not but feel uncomfortable about the growing hostility towards their father. As the Prince plunged deeper into politicking, he became more callous towards his father’s suffering, and even took to mimicking him and his mania in public. The Duke of York, not to be outdone, mimicked his father to some friends in a coffeehouse. Their sisters did not know of these excesses, but of one turbulent act of the Prince’s they had personal knowledge. At the end of November, the headstrong Prince drove his three elder sisters and Lady Charlotte Finch around Windsor one evening. Apparently he drove with such ferocity that countless lampposts were left shattered in his wake.
The King’s close confinement at Windsor was coming to an end. ‘There is not only no impropriety in removing him to Kew,’ wrote the doctors on 27 November, ‘but it is advisable.’ They declared that a ‘change of place and objects’ would facilitate recovery, while ‘air and exercise’ were ‘necessary for His Majesty’s cure’. The princesses left for Kew with their mother and an assortment of ladies on the morning of 1 December 1788. They found the house – not usually used in winter – freezing and with their names daubed in chalk by the Prince of Wales on the various apartment doors. Fanny Burney was grateful for a rug which the Queen gave her, though it was a very small one. The news was then broken to the King that they had gone before, and he was invited to join them at Kew House. He had been anxious for the Princess Royal to accompany him in his carriage, which could not be allowed. He had lascivious thoughts in this state, although they generally focused on an elderly lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth, Lady Pembroke.
At first, George III refused to leave Windsor, his favourite residence, and became so frantic that ‘they were obliged for the first time to threaten him with a strait waistcoat’. Finally, he hobbled past a mournful gauntlet of members of the household who lined the passage of the Queen’s Lodge and, braving crowds who clung to the railings outside the house to see him go, departed back to the house at Kew where he had first been taken ill.
At Kew the King occupied a suite of three rooms, with two equerries or pages always in attendance. The Queen, as at Windsor, took a separate suite of rooms – in this case, a bedroom, the drawing room and the gallery on the first floor – and the princesses had their apartments beyond hers. The house, never designed for winter habitation, was so cold and draughty that the Vice Chamberlain, Colonel Digby, of his own accord and shuddering at the ‘naked, cold boards’, sent out to purchase not only carpets but sandbags for doors and windows to stop the wind whistling through the rooms. ‘The wind which blew in upon these lovely Princesses’, he declared, ‘was enough to destroy them.’ But they were made of sterner stuff. The dullness of those hours when the crocodiles of royal children snaked around the shrubberies and lawns seemed, to the princesses in retrospect, an idyll. Now at night, in company with the other inhabitants, they feared that they heard the King, though his apartments faced towards the garden and only the animals in the menagerie could hear his cries.
The day after Parliament met following the November adjournment to consider the King’s case, seventy-year-old Dr Francis Willis joined the medical team at Kew. Willis was a ‘mad-doctor’, a physician who devoted himself to the care of the insane at an asylum at Gresford near Lincoln where, with his two sons John and Thomas, he supervised 800 lunatics. Queen Charlotte found Willis’s arrival hard to bear. It announced to the world, as much as if the King had been placed in the care of Dr Monro of Bedlam, that he was now regarded as a madman. Moreover, with the Lincolnshire doctor – a rough man with none of the sophisticated manners of Baker or Warren – came the odious instrument then commonly employed in the management of the mentally ill, the strait waistcoat or straitjacket.
On 8 December, Willis, examined by a House of Commons committee keen to establish the prognosis of the King’s case, declared that he had treated no fewer than thirty patients a year with mental disorder for twenty-eight years, and he believed, like Baker, that the King would recover. Three months was, in his estimation, the normal time of recovery for nine out of ten people who had been placed in his care. But he submitted that the King’s cure might take a little longer. ‘When His Majesty reflects upon an illness of this kind, it may depress his spirits, and retard his cure more than a common person.’ At any rate, he saw no ‘present signs of convalescence’.
Lady Charlotte Finch led the Queen and princesses in prayer on the Sunday. The prayers that they said so fervently seemed answered when the King appeared to be recovering day by day, and he even went for a walk in the Gardens. In another ‘experiment’, Mary and five-year-old Amelia were held up to a window so that he could see them. But ‘when he had fixed his eyes upon them, he pulled off his hat, which in his agitation he flung one way, his gloves and cane another, and ran into the house’ – where he burst into tears. Next day, 13 December, despite this scene, the King’s incessant pleas to be allowed to see his ‘Emily’, Princess Amelia, were answered, and she was brought to him. (At night he rolled to and fro, reciting her name and asking her wraith how she could let him be subjected to these humiliations.) He ‘pressed the Princess Emily in his arms who cried very much and was frightened.’ In just a few weeks the King had become very thin, and he had grown a beard. Furthermore, his speech was rambling, though he tried to check it in front of his daughter, and even his movements were wild and abrupt. Princess Amelia was hurried away, and that night Dr Willis took the decision to ‘confine’ the King for the first time in the strait waistcoat, and he remained in it till morning.
Four days later, the waistcoat was employed again. Dr Warren reported from Kew that the King had become ‘very unquiet… had no sleep during the whole night, and was confined by Dr Willis early this morning’. Dr Warren released the King from this
confinement at ten in the morning, and left him eating breakfast but talking at the same time in ‘a very disturbed manner – the whole resembling our worst Windsor days’. The following day the King was even more ‘agitated and confused’, Sir Lucas Pepys informed the Prince of Wales, ‘perhaps from having been permitted to read King Lear, which he is now reading and talking about.’ The King’s mind, although turning on a few subjects only, was not deprived of guile or logic. When a doctor forbade him the play, he asked instead for Colman’s Works, which he knew contained the original ‘altered by Colman for the stage’.
Such was the King’s fear of the straitjacket, so docile did he become when threatened with it, that the punitive measure came slowly to be regarded as having magical curative powers. Both family and politicians began to afford Dr Willis a certain respect, although the King remained wary of him. On one occasion when the monarch was castigating him for having left the Church to join the medical profession, Dr Willis objected: ‘May it please your Majesty, Our Saviour went about healing the sick.’ ‘Yes,’ replied the King, ‘but I never heard that he had £700 a year for doing so.’
The case appeared hopeless. The King was ‘good humoured, but as incoherent as ever’, wrote Baker and Reynolds on Christmas Eve. He slept one hour or maybe two a night, and Christmas Day 1788 was a sad day at Kew. The bells of St Anne’s Church on the Green clamoured, but none of the inhabitants of Kew House joined the congregation. A regency appeared inevitable.
And then, without warning, the King began to improve. He was ‘in a much more composed and collected state yesterday than he has been hitherto’, the report of 28 December read. On New Year’s Day, Dr Willis reported that the King had played several games of backgammon with him, and ‘conversed in a collected, sensible manner yesterday evening for seven hours’. The King, he believed, was ‘more himself than I have ever seen him since I have had the honour to attend His Majesty’. So the question now arose, and was to grow more urgent: was the King to be judged incapable of conducting public business and even of going down to Parliament because for an hour or two a day he was ‘raging’? The Whigs deemed him incapable; Pitt and the Tories now believed, or affected to believe, that he was on the verge of a full recovery. Before the point could be resolved, the King worsened again.
The princesses themselves were spared the sight of their father after the failure of the November and December ‘experiments’ at Windsor and at Kew until he again seemed on his way to recovery. Visiting him on 17 January 1789, and seeing him play a game of piquet, the Queen judged – and Dr Willis agreed – that he had behaved with propriety. The following day the King’s request to see his daughters was granted, although he had awoken ‘never more disturbed in his life’. (After the princesses had gone, the King told one of his pages that the Queen had consented that ‘Esther’ – Lady Pembroke, the elderly lady of the Court for whom he had conceived a passion – should come to him.)
On another occasion the King called to Miss Burney whom he had spied in the garden, and when she desperately tried to get away he lumbered after her to try her nerves a little further. But while the King was still for hours at a time ‘very deranged, his looks wild’, he was also now rational for long periods. The manner of his greeting Royal and Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth on one occasion was affecting. He told them he had been reading King Lear, to which they could think of no response. But, the King continued good-humouredly, ‘in some respects he was not like him, he had no Goneril, nor Regan, but only three Cordelias.’
In the course of February 1789 the Queen took twelve-year-old Princess Mary to visit her father. ‘Twice,’ she believed, ‘he was going to say something wrong, but he put his hand upon his mouth, and said “hush” and then in a moment spoke properly’. Princess Sophia read to him from a Life of Handel later in the month. Although there were worse days, on 26 February the doctors announced: ‘There appears this morning to be an entire cessation of His Majesty’s illness’. And the following day the glorious news was posted on the railings of the Queen’s House: ‘A perfect recovery.’ The prayer for that recovery, which the Queen had instigated, and which was read in all parish churches on Sunday mornings, had at last been answered. It was discontinued, and a prayer of thanksgiving substituted.
7 Hope
Desperation and humiliation were alike over, and in euphoric mood the Queen and her daughters – all but Amelia – drove to London with the Willises on 10 March 1789 to enjoy the illuminations there that marked an end to the progress of the Regency Bill. Sir Joseph Banks had illuminated his house with a transparency of Hygeia, and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall described the city splendour: ‘London displayed a blaze of light from one extremity to the other; the illuminations extending … from Hampstead and Highgate to Clapham, and even as far as Tooting; while the vast distance between Greenwich and Kensington presented the same dazzling appearance.’ The royal ladies stayed out till one in the morning, revelling in this public display of affection and support for the recovered King.
Meanwhile, at Kew Princess Amelia led her now benign father to a window to observe the transparency – shining with representations of the King, providence and health – and illuminations that the Queen had had the painter Biagio Rebecca create in the Palace courtyard. She first knelt to him to speak lines written, at the Queen’s request, by Miss Burney and ended, with appropriate action: ‘The little bearer begs a kiss from dear Papa for bringing this.’
Four days later, the King and Queen and the elder princesses travelled to Windsor from Kew: ‘All illness over, all fears removed, all sorrows lightened,’ as Miss Burney put it. ‘The King was so well as to go on horseback.’ And Mr Leonard Smelt, the Prince of Wales’s former tutor and now Deputy Ranger of Richmond Park, wrote some days later with satisfaction from Windsor to Miss Hamilton: ‘Their majesties and the three eldest princesses came here last Saturday, and the improvement in all their appearance is as rapid as the most attached and sanguine of their subjects could wish it – The youngest princesses, I understand, come here in a few days as, excepting the attendance on the drawing room (which the papers will inform you is only for the Queen and the princesses), the residence will be solely here for some time.’
Public anxiety and medical speculation about the ‘family disease’ that was held to have afflicted the King surfaced now in newspaper and magazine articles. And the King’s own reactions to his illness, and sentiments about his imprisonment at Kew, emerged. He did not forget the impertinences served upon him and indeed the humiliations to which he had been subjected. Some months later, he ‘talked of the coercion and asked, how could a man sleep with his arms pinioned in a strait waistcoat and his leg tied to the bedposts.’ When the Archbishop of Canterbury and others counselled against the service of thanksgiving for his recovery in St Paul’s Cathedral that the King demanded, he replied, ‘My Lords, I have twice read over the evidence of my physicians on my case, and if I can stand that, I can stand anything.’
Were the princesses disturbed by the widespread understanding that their father’s illness was hereditary, and alarmed that their prospects as brides in Europe might be affected? Time might tell soon enough, as the King’s promise of November the year before to make his Court at Hanover ‘gay’ for aspirants to his daughters’ hands had survived his illness. Or at least he threw out a ‘hint’ in March 1789 to Prince Augustus, back in Göttingen after wintering in the south, that he might receive a ‘call to Hanover’, as he contemplated a visit. And his equerry Robert Fulke Greville noted that the subject of a visit to Hanover was much on the King’s mind.
His daughters, meanwhile, were celebrating the end of their own confinement. For the four months of her father’s illness, the Princess Royal told her brother Augustus later in the year, she had written nothing. Princess Elizabeth told a friend she had seen nobody during those months. Now they more than made up for it, and on 15 April the Queen, Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth admired at the play an ingenious transparency featuring the
King’s recovery, while Mr Bannister, the leading actor, led the audience in six rousing choruses of ‘God Save the King’. ‘I always did and ever shall glory in being born an Englishwoman,’ Elizabeth wrote to Augustus, as they prepared for the great Thanksgiving planned for the 23rd in St Paul’s Cathedral.
On that day, the King and Queen drove down to the cathedral in splendour, in the gold coronation coach drawn by the famous Hanoverian Royal Creams. And the Queen, stalwart in her demonstrations of loyalty to the King here and at the drawing room, armoured herself with all the jewels the King had given her on marriage. Even Augusta, usually ‘so careless as to what she was dressed in, provided only that she was dressed’, and Elizabeth, ‘usually anxious to forget that she was burdened by being great’, dressed sumptuously for the service – in a prescribed uniform of imperial purple silk and patterned gold muslin over white satin. Only the Prince of Wales and Duke of York resisted the festive mood – they pointed at their parents in church, ate biscuits and burst into fits of laughter.
The King withstood the rigours at the Thanksgiving of the ‘good old Te Deum and Jubilate’ he had wanted. But many commented on his extreme loss of weight and altered appearance. His face, wrote one, was ‘as sharp as a knife, and … his eyes appeared therefore more prominent than before … He appears extremely weak in his manner of walking.’
The princesses launched themselves into further celebrations – including rival fetes given by the French and Spanish ambassadors – for their father’s recovery. For a gala celebration on May Day at Windsor of which the Princess Royal was hostess, they painted dozens of fans with the motto ‘Health to one and happiness to millions.’ The Whigs boycotted a ball at White’s, the government club in St James’s, but the princesses and other ladies sparkled in a ‘uniform’ of white and gold with purple bandeaux inscribed with the now familiar acronym GSTK in diamonds. The Queen thought highly of this ball, ‘as all the world was in accord and of the same opinion.’ But her Whiggish eldest daughter was of a different view, and preferred Brooks’s ball the other side of the street which all Society attended the following week.