Fanny saw Charlotte’s daughters through a similarly rose-tinted prism; like their mother, their true characters struggle to escape from the limitations of the framework Fanny imposed upon them. They are first and foremost illustrations of the new idea of royalty, rightly conscious of their status but with their moral compass securely in place, modest, unaffected and with an easy, simple dignity that equally disarms and impresses the candid observer. For Fanny, this was to be seen even in the behaviour of the junior princesses, two of whom she encountered for the first time in August 1786, when Princess Mary was ten years old and Sophia a year younger. ‘I met the Princess Mary just arrived from the Lower Lodge; she was capering upstairs to her elder sisters, but instantly stopped at the sight of me, and coming up to me, inquired how I did with all the elegant composure of a woman of maturest years.’ This happy combination of the uninhibited behaviour that marked out the natural, unforced child with the polite requirements of rank greatly impressed Fanny. ‘Amazingly well are these children brought up. The readiness and grace of their civilities, even in the midst of their happiest wildnesses and freedom are at once a surprise and charm to all who see them.’48 Later that day, she was equally pleased by Princess Sophia, who came to collect a basket belonging to Badine, the queen’s latest dog. ‘“Miss Burney,” cried she, curtseying and colouring, “Mamma has sent me for the little dog’s basket.” I begged permission to carry it to the queen’s room; but she would not suffer me, and insisted on taking it, with a mingled modesty and good breeding extremely striking in one so young.’49 Sophia’s shyness and self-consciousness are entirely to her credit in Fanny’s mind, far preferable to the pride or arrogant lack of consideration which might have been the result of a less careful upbringing.
Even Amelia, the youngest princess, displayed a similarly pleasing blend of authentic feeling and gracious good manners. ‘She is a most lovely little thing, just three years old, and full of sense, spirit and playful prettiness; yet decorous and dignified when called upon to act en princesse to any strangers, as if conscious of her high rank, and the importance of condescendingly sustaining it. This little princess,’ concluded Fanny approvingly, ‘thus in infancy, by practice and example taught her own consequence, conducts herself on all proper occasions with an air of dignity that is quite astonishing, though her natural character seems all sport and humour.’50 Fanny, who liked the company of children, was soon established as a particular favourite with Amelia. The little girl occupied a special place in her father’s affections too; she had been born weeks after Octavius’s death, and although no one could replace the boy in the king’s mind, her company seems to have eased his grief, and he spent a great deal of time with her. When Amelia burnt her fingers by ‘playing with some wax given her by Princess Mary’, it was her father and Fanny whom she wanted near her. ‘She wanted to come to you,’ said the king, ‘very much – would not be denied; Miss Burney is first in favour with her now.’51
Perhaps Amelia appreciated not just Fanny’s tenderness, but also her ready willingness to indulge in some boisterous fun. Along with Mr Smelt, Fanny and Amelia once played a game in which the young princess pretended to drive around the room in a carriage. Soon things had become ‘rather noisy, by Mr Smelt’s choosing to represent a restive horse’. Then, without warning, the king entered the room. Immediately the entertainment came to an end. Amelia’s efforts to make Fanny resume the game were all in vain. When Fanny explained that they must not disturb the king, Amelia insisted that her father should leave: ‘Papa, go!’ ‘What!’ cried the king. ‘Go Papa – you must go!’ repeated Amelia. The king refused to oblige. ‘He took her up in his arms, and began kissing and playing with her,’ ignoring his daughter’s loud, indignant protests.52 It was a scene redolent with symbolism for Amelia’s future experience, suggesting as it did that even the most loving father was capable of looking in the other direction when his daughter’s desires did not coincide with his own.
The older princesses were rarely as forceful in pursuit of what they wanted as their youngest sister. In Fanny’s accounts, they were always well behaved; but she was also keen to portray them as neither solemn nor pompous. The Princess Royal and Elizabeth once cornered her in their mother’s dressing room to interrogate her about her recent poor health. ‘Pray, is it really true that in your illness last year you coughed so violently you broke the whalebone of your stays in two?’ They were delighted to hear that it was ‘as nearly true as possible’.53 The sisters loved to talk, and did not stand on ceremony in pursuit of a good gossip. Fanny was proud of having often been in ‘easy and delightful chattery with Princess Elizabeth’, who was not above asking her advice on style when writing a letter and in general showed ‘truly amiable modesty and humility’.54 She recognised similarly relaxed virtues in Elizabeth’s elder sisters, Royal and Augusta, who ‘both came up to me and began conversing in the most easy, unaffected, cheerful and obliging manner that can be conceived’.55 When Royal chatted freely, whilst she held the queen’s snuffbox for Fanny to fill – and insisted that Fanny should sit in her presence – and when she took leave of the author, ‘with as elegant a civility of manner as if parting with another king’s daughter’, these were examples of Royal’s good taste and graciousness. ‘I am quite charmed by the Princess Royal,’ wrote Fanny approvingly; ‘open, unaffected condescension and native dignity are so happily blended in her whole deportment.’56
Fanny understood that theirs was not, nor ever could be, a relationship between equals; but it could be conducted on terms of mutual respect, in which the feelings of the junior partner were given proper consideration by her social superior. This was what was meant by ‘condescension’, a word which, in the eighteenth century, had none of the pejorative connotations it has today. The condescension shown by Charlotte and her daughters to all who deserved it was, in Fanny’s opinion, one of their most attractive traits.
There is little in Fanny’s picture of the Princess Royal that recalls the angry, needy teenager who had made the lives of her governesses so miserable. Her portrait of Royal – and indeed of all the sisters – does not at all attempt to capture the genuine reality of their lives. For all its apparent intimacy, it is an idealised image designed to show the princesses with all the petty disfigurements and difficulties of life expertly removed. It is very skilfully done, and it is not exactly untruthful in what it says. The characters of the sisters, as Fanny delineates them, are recognisably their own, but they are seen through a warm glow, a transformative mirror of goodwill that makes them both more and less than the people they really were.
In one sense, Fanny’s portrait is a literary version of the great painting made of the three eldest princesses by Thomas Gainsborough in 1784, two years before she arrived at court. The three sisters, then aged eighteen, sixteen and fourteen, are shown posed close together, arms entwined. They are fashionably dressed, with hair up-swept and powdered, their gauzy dresses rendered in subtle shades of gold, pink and turquoise. When working on the group of single family portraits which he had completed a few years earlier, it was said that Gainsborough ‘was all but raving mad with ecstasy in beholding such a constellation of youthful beauty’; none of that ecstatic moment is evident in this work.57 Its defining qualities are precisely those that Fanny celebrates: grace, restraint and easy dignity. The sisters are models of self-possession, gazing calmly out of the canvas; only Royal’s sideways glance catches the viewer’s eye. Behind their cool stares, however, there simmers a powerful sense of emotional control; for all their apparently relaxed manner, their eyes give nothing away. They are gracious but guarded, elegant yet remote. Gainsborough said the picture had been painted ‘in a very tender light’, and it is indeed an image of fragile, delicate beauty, albeit with a suggestion of steeliness glinting below its luminous surface. Like Fanny Burney’s writings, it takes the sisters’ characters and turns them into art, creating an image of royal majesty in which the qualities that make them human are both celebrated and denied.
Determinedly cheerful, Elizabeth was proud of her own sense of fun. She was an avid collector of jokes and squibs, passing them on to the Harcourts with great relish, even those she knew she was not supposed to enjoy. ‘I have just got some good lines upon the new peers, very good,’ she told Lord Harcourt, ‘in my next you shall have them, but remember, that as king’s daughters are among honourable women, I must not be named as the person that wrote them to you.’61 Alongside her taste for sharp witticism, Elizabeth took great pride in her love of plain-speaking and dislike of elaborate politesse. ‘Though brought up at court,’ she reflected in old age, ‘I could never form my mouth to make compliments.’ She sometimes referred to herself as ‘Sally Blunt’: ‘I just say what I feel and think … and cannot make fine speeches. I could as well spit.’ Indeed, she declared, ‘I had rather be spit at than anybody make me a head and shoulders compliment, which is detestable and not to be stood.’62 Like so many of her family, she believed she would have much preferred a simpler life. ‘It is a mistake, my living at court,’ she confided to Lady Harcourt; ‘It was certainly intended I should have lived in the country and been a younger brother’s wife.’63
Her older sister, Augusta, was much harder to read than the forthright Elizabeth. Mrs Harcourt, Lady Harcourt’s sister-in-law, thought her ‘a less marked character’ in every way, finding it hard to sum up her somewhat elusive personality.64 Her family thought her very shy. She surveyed the world with a watchful air of amused irony which those who recognised it found extremely attractive. ‘Augusta looks very well,’ commented her brother William on a visit home from sea in 1789; ‘she looks as if she knew more than she would say, and I like that.’65 Fanny Burney, who regarded her own shyness as a form of heightened sensibility, saw something similar in Augusta. She was very fond of her, with the appreciation of one quiet satiric eye for another, and Augusta eventually became Fanny’s favourite among the sisterhood. ‘She has a gaiety and humour about her that is resistless,’ she declared, ‘and much of true, genuine and original humour.’66 Fanny and Augusta once amused themselves ‘saying comical things about royal personages in plays’, and Augusta ‘very gravely asserted that she thought some of those princes on the stage looked really quite as well as some she knew off it’.67 Writing to Lord Harcourt on a wet day, she observed that ‘steady quiet rain puts me in mind of what I should think a Quaker’s grief must appear to persons of a more lively disposition’.68
Augusta was the only one of the sisters with a sustained interest in the active, wider world beyond the bounds of court and family. Although her own politics were conventional – ‘I was always proud of being born a Briton … No people can boast of such a heart as dear John Bull’69 – she was curious about new ideas, even those at the wilder edges of radical thinking. In 1798, when popular unrest and political agitation was at its height, Augusta and Fanny Burney sat down to discuss ‘loyalty and then its contrast, democracy’. Fanny was understandably surprised to hear Augusta quote at length ‘from a lecture of Thelwall’s … which was very curious from her mouth’. John Thelwall was a popular Jacobin orator who had stood trial for high treason in 1794, and narrowly escaped the death penalty. His speeches were uncompromising in their criticism of the established system, arguing that ‘one order of society has no right to pillage, to plunder and oppress the other parts of the community’.70 Fanny does not give any further details of what must have been a most unusual conversation, except to declare that Augusta, with her generous, candid character, was capable ‘of abstracting rays of light from the darkest shades. So she did, even from Thelwall.’71
Less surprisingly, Augusta was also a great partisan of the Royal Navy, and seized the opportunity to visit the thirty-two-gun frigate HMS Southampton when on a visit to Weymouth in 1789. She was not at all deterred by the precarious business of being ‘whipped’ into the ship, which, as she described, involved being drawn up the steep sides of the vessel ‘in a chair by two cables’.72 Her naval passion may have been related to the strong bond she felt with her sailor brother William. The relationship between the wild and unpolished third brother and the most reserved and introspective of the sisters was surprising, but built on a lifetime of genuine affection. ‘We had been each other’s early friends,’ Augusta explained, ‘and I had known every secret of his heart, the same when he was quite a lad, that I could believe and pity all his worries, real and imaginary.’ As they grew older, their love for one another grew stronger. ‘He was like my second self,’ said Augusta.73 Her admiration both for her brother and his way of life is enthusiastically apparent in a letter she wrote to her young brother, Augustus, in 1787. ‘I believe him to be, as I always did, a very hearty good English tar, liking a hammock better than a bed, and plain salt beef than all the fine dishes and luxury that townspeople fare upon.’ She was as insistent as Elizabeth in indicating where her own sympathies lay: with the plain over the pompous, the authentic over the falsely genteel. ‘He always wears his uniform and no curls, and yet looks as well dressed and more of a man than the fashionable powder monkeys. He talks’, she concluded with obvious approval, ‘of affectation in a man as the thing that has the same effect upon him as an emetic.’74
Augusta showed little interest in her own appearance, although she was reckoned to be the most attractive of the elder princesses. Fanny Burney thought her ‘exquisite’. She once watched Augusta prepare for a night at the theatre, utterly indifferent to the suggestions offered by the hairdresser working so assiduously on her complicated toilette. Asked what ornaments she wanted placed on her head, she had nothing to say: ‘You understand all that best, Mr Robinson, I’m sure. There are the things, so just take what you please.’ Fanny was impressed by ‘a mind so disengaged from vanity, so superior to personal appearance’. Augusta put it more simply: ‘Oh, I hate myself when so fine … I cannot bear it, but there is no help – the people at the play always expect it.’75
The Princess Royal was generally agreed to possess the most complex character of the three elder sisters. As she entered her twenties, and despite the unaffected dignity to which Fanny Burney often alluded, she was in some ways still as painfully self-conscious as she had been when a teenager. Mrs Harcourt noticed ‘the extreme quickness of her feelings, which show themselves in her perpetual blushes’.76 She seemed awkward and uncertain, combining ‘a great sense of her own situation’ with an ‘excessive sensibility’. She was not well understood or always appreciated by those around her. ‘She is unjustly considered proud,’ thought Mrs Harcourt, ‘and a peculiarity in her temper is mistaken for a less sw
eetness than it deserves.’ She was particularly devoted to her father, whom she was thought ‘in many points of character’ to resemble.77 Like him, she was literal, hard-working, prone to unsparing, critical self-examination, and inclined to censoriousness. She was the daughter he had longed for after a succession of sons, and she never lost a high place in his affections. She was, according to one observer, ‘his comfort and his darling’, and fully returned his love, declaring him in 1786 ‘the best of kings and fathers’.78
For her mother, her feelings were less straightforward. She was never less than dutiful in her attentions to her, but theirs was not an easy relationship. ‘She was always shy and under restraint with the queen,’ asserted Mrs Papendiek. ‘Timidity, with want of affectionate confidence in the queen’s commands and wishes always brought her forward as ill at ease; while out of the queen’s presence, she was a different being.’79 Her exacting character meant that she was often conscious of falling short of the high standards expected from her as the senior princess, and of incurring her mother’s formidable disappointment as a result. She knew that she did not always conform to the image of sophisticated composure with which Gainsborough had credited her in his shimmering triple portrait. ‘She was never elegant in exhibition,’ recalled Mrs Papendiek, ‘though her figure was good and imposing.’80 She rarely managed the sartorial style achieved by her mother, who, for all her protestations about the waste of time involved in her lengthy toilette, was always scrupulously turned out. Royal ‘did not take notice whether your gown was a new or an old one’, remembered Louisa Stuart, unlike her sisters and the queen, ‘who took an exact account of everyone’s wardrobe and trinket box’.81 She was a nervous dancer, her anxiety perhaps increased by a well-founded suspicion that she had no sense of rhythm. She felt isolated by her inability to share a passion which united every other member of the family. ‘I am not more partial to music than I was when you left us,’ she wrote sadly to her young brother Augustus on the eve of her twenty-second birthday. The occasion was to be marked by a concert which she knew she would not enjoy. ‘I am afraid you will not have a very good opinion of me from this confession, as a love of music to distraction runs through this family, of which I alone am deprived. Pray,’ she concluded, ‘do not love me any less for my want of ear.’82
The Strangest Family Page 44