Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  In January 1811 – despite a period of paroxysms in late December – the King’s health seemed better. He walked on the terrace outside his rooms for an hour in mid-month and asked to go ‘upon a particular part’ of the south terrace next day, ‘that it might be seen that he was alive.’ Eight days later on the 26th he talked ‘in the most collected manner’ for over an hour with Perceval and the Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon. The physicians had asked the politicians to give the monarch an account of what was passing in Parliament, as ‘His Majesty’s understanding and comprehension were perfect to every purpose of such a communication.’ But he would not discuss public affairs, and, as often as they tried to bring him to talk of them, ‘turned the conversation with much dexterity…’.

  With the Regency Bill nearing enactment at the end of January, Perceval returned to tell the King of its provisions on the 29th, and stressed that it allowed for him to take up the reins of government immediately he recovered. George III countered that at his age he should be thinking of retirement, but evaded overtures from Perceval regarding a voluntary resignation of his powers. And the next half-hour was ‘not so good’, wrote Perceval after he came away.

  The King’s vacillating sanity placed his Cabinet in a predicament for the last time a few days later when the Lord Chancellor came down to Windsor on 5 February to see if he were fit to give his royal assent to the Regency Bill. Although that day the King was calm and collected, Eldon thought it politic not to obtain his signature, and the bill was passed with the assistance of the unequivocally rational Great Seal, enabling the Prince to be sworn in on 6 February at Carlton House as prince regent of the United Kingdom – with restricted powers to be reviewed after a year.

  The Prince’s decision on becoming regent to keep his father’s Tory ministers caused some consternation among the Whigs, but they chose to believe his assurances that he would never forgive himself if his father recovered and found his ministers gone. Sir Henry had indeed told the Prince that news of a change of ministry would ‘produce such an exacerbation … as might put an end to his life.’ The Whigs waited impatiently for February 1812. If the King were not better by then, the Prince’s regency would be confirmed and unrestricted, and then, the Prince intimated sorrowfully, he would no longer feel compunction about introducing his own advisers. Meanwhile, a Queen’s Council of seven privy councillors – including Lady Harcourt’s brother, the Archbishop of York and Lady Charlotte Finch’s son Lord Winchilsea – was established to advise the Queen on the King’s care at Windsor, and to visit the monarch weekly to remark on his condition. The princesses, who had not seen their father since those dark days surrounding their sister’s death, now began again to pay him visits with their mother – visits which were sometimes painful to endure, and which sometimes raised their hopes. The King, Mary told Mrs Adams after her first visit in early February 1811, had greeted the announcement that the bill was passed ‘with much composure and calmness.’

  ‘His Majesty is recovering,’ Mrs Kennedy wrote optimistically that month. ‘He walks every day upon the terrace, attended by Drs Willis and Heberden. The terrace is shut up from the public, but the people walk in the park and see him with pleasure daily recovering.’ George Ill’s attendants were replaced with pages, and there was a brief flurry of activity in late spring when the other physicians concurred briefly with Heberden’s advice that the King could not recover without stimulus. ‘This day,’ wrote Mrs Kennedy on 20 May, ‘… His Majesty rode out on horseback for the first time with the Princesses and only attended by his equerry and gentleman as usual – no physician. He rode up the Long Walk in the park, appeared in great spirits, was out for about an hour. When he got back to the Castle, Dr Willis stood at the door to receive him. He stumbled getting off horseback and laughing said, “Don’t report me ill, Doctor, it is only the old man not so alert as formerly.’ ”

  The next day the King unexpectedly spoke to Elizabeth of Princess Amelia, and declared he would not have her live again, her mind was so perfect when she was taken. Elizabeth was comforted to think he accepted what had happened. Mary’s hopes for a full recovery weakened, however, when, from her room, she saw her father return from another ride with her sisters. She ‘really was quite overcome at seeing him so much altered on horseback’. He appeared to her to sit his horse ‘with great difficulty and as if he was very weak’. Earlier he had had to struggle even to get his boots on to his swollen legs. He did not succeed, ‘despite much pulling from the jackboots’, and finally, in cloth shoes, struggled on to his mount at ‘Sophy’s door’. He did not enjoy the ride, despite his anxiety to go, and when Princess Sophia said it was his dinner hour, he turned back immediately.

  The King tried to check and contain himself in his daughters’ presence, especially towards the end of each week. The Council members paid their weekly visit of inspection on a Saturday, and he was determined to master himself and be declared well. He occasionally displayed the wit that had distinguished his illness in 1788-9. When he heard that the Prince was giving a fête or ball at Carlton House on 5 June, and asked if it was true, the Queen replied that it was designed to mark his own Birthday, and ‘at the same time assist trade’. The King replied trenchantly that he saw no reason to ‘put oneself out of the way to help trade’. But after the Queen had gone, Bott, the King’s page who served as his eyes, said the orders his master gave that day to imaginary subordinates were more than usually extravagant.

  The King, in hopes of being allowed to attend the Regent’s fête at Carlton House – a fête, sumptuous at the time, that grew in its extravagance in people’s minds as time and the war went on, till it ranked with banquets of antiquity – and feeling fever coming on, even submitted to restraint. But there was no suggestion that the princesses should themselves attend the merriment. Their part was to kneel as vestal virgins at the tomb of their father’s sovereignty, mourning its passing. ‘Is there no balm in Gilead?’ the Book of Jeremiah demanded in the cold church that they attended every morning. They might well have cried in response, that indeed there was none, as the tortuous days slipped by.

  During his daughters’ visits, the King occasionally meditated on Princess Amelia’s attachment to Fitzroy. But he had already accepted Sir Henry Halford’s bland account of Amelia leaving what she had to Fitzroy, in return for his attendance on her out riding and on journeys. And his mind did not rest long on any subject.

  The King’s recovery did not last. At the end of May the princesses wrote with sadness of a ‘new system’ that was about to operate ‘across the quadrangle’ in their father’s apartments – a system sanctioned by the Council and Cabinet in which the physicians’ and mad doctors’ positions were to be reversed. Dr Robert Willis, on 1 June, assumed the ‘whole responsibility of the sick room’, and, recommending extreme quiet for the King, forbade for the moment communication with his family. Furthermore, the blind King’s pages were removed from their responsibilities at his side, and instead burly keepers were supplied by Willis from his asylum in Lincolnshire. As for Halford, Baillie, Heberden and Dundas, though they might see the King every day, they were to observe only his physical wellbeing, and no longer occupy themselves with his mind. They could do nothing without the consent or presence of Dr Robert Willis, not converse with the King, nor – as Dr Heberden had wished – provide any stimulus for him.

  General Herbert Taylor resigned as the King’s secretary shortly before the ‘new system’ came in. One of his last tasks was to lock away in presses throughout the King’s apartments and library the state, historical and private papers that he had dealt with since 1805. At different times, the King had handed him papers ‘in great number from various presses, table drawers, bureaus, boxes etc’, and he had found others in bureaux and presses in the State Apartments at Windsor, in the Great Lodge in the Park, in the Queen’s House and at Kew. Taylor’s work completed, he gave to the Queen the King’s ‘private key’ to all the presses. With this locking away of the King’s vast correspondence, with
the paperwork that had been his chief tool as monarch sealed up and by recourse to which, even after his blindness, with Taylor’s help, the sovereign had so often confronted the Cabinet, the apartments ‘across the Quadrangle’ grew quiet.

  But there was one last eerie communication from those apartments. At an Ancient Music concert in London just before the ‘new system’ came into effect at Windsor, the Duke of Cambridge announced that his father had made the selection of all the music that followed – passages from Handel, the King’s favourite composer, all of them ‘descriptive of madness or blindness, particularly of those in the opera, Samson; there was one also upon madness from love and the lamentation from Jephtha on the loss of his daughter’. The resonance of the music was felt throughout the assembly, and the monarch’s absence was underlined when the concert ended with ‘God Save the King’ – a king ‘who was sometimes’, as his daughter Princess Mary put it, ‘so sensible of his own situation.’

  But the King was not always so alert to his circumstances. As the British army – General Spencer with it – forced its way forward in Portugal and won great victories at Almeida and at Fuentes de Oñoro, at home the Treasury computed the frightening cost of these Peninsular expeditions. The new expense of maintaining in state a Regent’s Court – even on lines not considered by the Regent himself sufficient to his position – as well as an establishment at Windsor for the ailing King and another for his wife and daughters, was also painfully felt.

  The country would have to economize somewhere, now that the Prince could to some degree claim that he had to be magnificent. Commissioners were therefore appointed, and carried out their brief – to make plans to reduce the King’s and Queen’s establishments, and transfer the appurtenances of state to their son’s new Court – with mathematical rigour. The King, ‘employed with the bedclothes’, sorting them by night and spending his day in his apartments ‘singing, laughing and talking a great deal to the queen’ of very trifling subjects, cared nothing for the changes around him that were meditated. But the princesses were humiliated and mortified by the ‘reductions’ that they began to understand would be required of them.

  The Queen rarely displayed her feelings, even in private. Her daughters spoke occasionally of her temper, and Princess Mary lamented that she seldom showed herself warm or affectionate. ‘Her unfortunate manner makes things much worse,’ Mary wrote. Only when she spoke of the Prince did a glow suffuse the Queen’s sunken features, and she was neither support nor companion to her daughters in their distress. In these sad times a visit in early June from Princess Charlotte, now aged fifteen, was very welcome. ‘Her spirits do us all good and keep the house alive,’ remarked her aunt Mary; ‘… she says everything that comes into her head and is very clever at the same time.’ Charlotte’s hoydenish ways, however, did not earn her aunt’s approval. She ‘requires much softening down, more than any young female I ever saw’, said Mary, ‘both as to manner and voice.’ Charlotte’s own response to life at Windsor was ‘Heavens, how dull.’

  For seventeen days in July 1811 the King suffered ‘paroxysms’ and was completely ‘lost, not knowing one soul or giving any marks of reason’. A month later his daughter Mary commented, ‘Nobody who loves the poor King can wish his life to be prolonged an hour.’ And in August Princess Augusta told Amelia’s old nurse Mrs Williams that she had all along had a bad opinion of this illness of the King’s, ‘because his affections could never be worked upon’. In all his other illnesses he had rejoiced to see his daughters, she added, and had even been vexed, sometimes ‘beyond measure’, when they left – inconsolable in the ‘forenoon’, though they were to return in the evening. Now he told his daughters his schemes or complained to them as to anyone else, and wished them goodbye without concern. On 15 August, Augusta declared not dispassionately but with finality: ‘Since the 28th of May I have never seen him, but at a distance – and now probably I shall never see him again. For’, she explained sadly, ‘under his melancholy state I would not see him for worlds, as I cannot serve him. I could do him no good, and he would not know me.’ Since July the King’s memory had become very impaired.

  Windsor, in a diarist’s words, took on ‘an Asiatic stillness’, with the Queen and princesses living far across the quadrangle and under considerable financial restraint, and the King often under physical restraint in his northern apartments. There was, the doctors agreed, ‘perfect alienation of mind’. His daughter Mary remarked that his changeable days were like ‘the shield in Homer which represents a city in war during the day as well as in peace in the evening’. Sometimes he was dosed with laudanum to counter his paroxysms, sometimes he was put in the strait waistcoat to curb violence. And he indulged for hours in fantastic thoughts and dreams – among them that Princess Amelia was alive and living at Weymouth, that King George I was a huge expense to him at the Great Lodge, that Prince Octavius was alive and his other sons dead. He refused to be shaved, on the ground that he was too young to have a beard, he planned for Princess Sophia to marry Prince Octavius, and he announced that the Duke of Clarence was to marry the Princess of Wales, and emigrate with her and the Queen to Botany Bay in Australia.

  The doctors were nonplussed. The large imaginary company that the King summoned up in his mind’s eye was sometimes so turbulent that he put his hands to his ears to block the noise out. He also liked to have lavender water applied to his head. This suggested to them that something was going on ‘within the head with which the mental disorder is associated’. However, the nature of the ‘wrong’ was not clear enough for them to ‘found any practice upon it.’

  Every medicine or management they tried ‘disagreed’ with the King. They even prevailed on the Queen to allow Drs Simmons and Monro and Dr John Willis to observe the King in October and November. For in the closing months of 1811, with the restricted regency coming up for renewal or closure in February of the following year, members of the Council – the Chancellor Lord Eldon among them – visited the Castle and ‘expressed great disappointment … that not one of the physicians in constant attendance could give any comfort’. There was no sign of the King recovering. Mary wrote in October to Lady Harcourt, ‘Sir Henry Halford, Baillie, Heberden, Willis and Dundas call the last month the very worst they ever witnessed … the King was all day Friday under confinement and the whole of the night from the Friday to the Saturday’ Within weeks, unless the King surprised his doctors, his son the Prince would become regent without restrictions.

  Princess Augusta, meanwhile, had an opportunity during her ride on the morning of 10 October to have ‘a very long and serious conversation’ with General Taylor. ‘We spoke of what might take place when the year expired …’, and of the ‘great and important changes’ that would almost certainly take place then in the royal household. The physicians and Council might possibly want the King to be nearer at hand at Kew, and it had much to recommend it. ‘The Queen’s House in point of lodging would be better, but it would be most cutting to our feelings’, she wrote, ‘that the King should be within a stone’s throw of the Regent’s House where all the royal horses must reasonably be fixed – and that he could not stir out in the garden for a little air without being overlooked by all the houses in Grosvenor Place …’ At Kew, though necessarily in different houses, she went on, she and her sisters ‘would not be so far off from him, as we are here across the Quadrangle’.

  The Princess went to her mother, to forewarn her of these plans, and found her obdurate. She would never leave Windsor, Queen Charlotte said, even when Augusta told her that it would be impossible for a large establishment to be kept up there for the King. Probably, Augusta said, the King’s attendants, ‘which were only those of State’, would be dispersed, while those who were his ‘private friends’ – his equerries and Taylor and a few others – might be continued. ‘For everything would be done with respect and kindness, but … his family must be very much reduced.’

  Princess Charlotte, visiting her grandmother and aunts in late October, n
ot unnaturally was unhappy herself. Her aunt Elizabeth wrote: ‘She in her heart hates being here and confessed it yesterday. She said three days was enough, more was horrid …’ Elizabeth declared herself ‘never in favour’ with her niece, ‘for you know I will not toady. Therefore I come out with the truth, and truth is often too rightly told to please a lady’s ears.’

  Amelia, when alive, had complained of Elizabeth’s plain speaking and lack of sympathy during her unhappiness. And Mary, as she had been Amelia’s favourite, was now Charlotte’s. ‘She has been all kindness to me but otherwise you know that I am always happy to quit the castle,’ noted Charlotte. Meanwhile Elizabeth said of her niece, ‘I do not think her at all improved, self-opinionated to a great degree, and holding every soul as cheap as dirt.’ Her governess, Lady de Clifford, had no control over her whatever, ‘and I believe she is so clever that she does not mind her in the least. I hope these visits will not harm her head but everyone here shows her so much adulation, that how can it be otherwise?’

  Towards the end of November the Council proposed to the Queen that they should bring in Dr John Willis and Dr Simmons to help Dr Robert Willis manage the King’s case. The Queen fended off Simmons successfully, but failed to keep John Willis at a distance, even when she cited the promise she had given her husband years before never to let that doctor have his management again. Overruled by the Council, she wrote to her brother Duke Charles with colossal understatement, ‘It is not a situation designed to lift the heart.’ When Dr John was introduced to the King on 23 November as a new doctor who would assist Dr Robert in the management of his case, George III did fall into a violent rage. But he appeared to have no memory of that time at Kew in April 1801 when Dr John had cornered him and kept him captive. The royal patient returned to arranging imaginary concerts, playing his harpsichord and ‘exerting his power of sending various individuals to the lower world’.