A few days later, clearly still angry, the queen summoned Frederick to announce that a concert was to be held at Windsor to celebrate the king’s recovery. Both he and his brother were formally invited: ‘But it is right to tell you that it is to be given to those who have supported us during the late business, and therefore, you may not possibly choose to be present.’ The duke ‘tried to laugh the thing off’, protesting that everyone would be welcome, as all had acted as they thought best. The queen was having none of it. ‘No, no, I don’t choose to be misunderstood. I mean expressly that we have asked ministers and those persons who have voted in Parliament for the king and me.’ Frederick was outraged. Elliot thought it ‘tells one a great deal and shows something of the queen. You see that the princes are represented in the king’s family by the queen herself as enemies of their father, and are denied any opportunity to justify themselves to the king.’200 Certainly the king did not seem in any hurry to meet his sons again. Perhaps, as Elliot suspected, what the queen had told him about their behaviour made him less ready than he had been to forgive and forget all. As late as December 1789, Princess Augusta was working hard to persuade her mother to do either, ‘endeavouring to obtain her favour’ for her two eldest brothers. The princess was fighting a losing battle: ‘there were some parts of the princes’ conduct she could never forget’, Charlotte insisted; and by now, her husband felt much the same. ‘The king looked to amendment of conduct, not declarations.’201 George’s health recovered far more quickly than did either his or Charlotte’s feelings for their eldest sons.
*
The queen was never the same again after the long ordeal of the king’s illness. Always slender, she was now ‘dreadfully reduced’, thought Mrs Harcourt. In a graphic demonstration of her loss of weight, Charlotte ‘showed me her stays, which would wrap twice over’.202 The king too was painfully thin. He had lost over three stone, and when he appeared at the service of thanksgiving held at St Paul’s in April, his face was observed to be ‘as sharp as a knife’. Both now looked old. Charlotte was only forty-four at the time of the service, but, as Mrs Papendiek recorded, her lustrous hair, one of her best features, was ‘now quite grey’. This was perhaps not the best time to sit for a portrait, but in September her daughters persuaded the queen to be painted by the rising young artist Thomas Lawrence. Perhaps they hoped the process would occupy her mind, and calm her nerves; if so, it was not a success. ‘Her Majesty was rather averse to sitting for him,’ noted Mrs Papendiek, ‘saying that she had not yet recovered sufficiently from all the trouble and anxiety she had gone through to give so young an artist a chance.’203
Nothing went right from the beginning. Charlotte chose to be painted in a dove-coloured dress, which did not suit her sallow complexion and was ‘most unbecoming’. Unable to decide what to wear on her head, she gave up and wore nothing at all. ‘When the king came to look at the portrait,’ wrote Mrs Papendiek, ‘this disgusted him, as Her Majesty had never been so seen.’ Lawrence suggested that a scarf might be an appropriate ornament, but the queen refused to discuss it. ‘The manner in which Her Majesty treated him was not with her usual kind consideration,’ noted Mrs Papendiek primly. Impatient with the whole affair, the queen declared she would allow no further sittings. Mrs Papendiek found herself propelled into the limelight, required to serve as a stand-in for the queen, modelling a scarf pinned with her jewels. After all this trouble, no one liked the picture. The king declined to buy it, and it lingered for years in Lawrence’s studio, unsold until after the painter’s death. Only Mrs Papendiek admired it. ‘To my mind,’ she declared, ‘the likeness is stronger than any I recollect, and it is very interesting.’204
Mrs Papendiek’s judgement may perhaps have been swayed by Lawrence’s obvious interest in her; he went on to paint a portrait of her in her own right, and later made an exquisite and tender drawing of her with her young son. His depiction of Charlotte is far less obviously attractive. The queen looks out from the canvas with a wary, guarded expression. There is defeat in her gaze; she looks exhausted and subdued. In Lawrence’s picture, the reality of what she had suffered was subtly but powerfully captured. No wonder the king had little desire to see it on his walls.
It was not only Charlotte’s outward appearance that had changed. She never recovered the cheerfulness that she had embraced so eagerly when her ‘long campaign’ of childbearing came to an end, and which had so endeared her to her new-found friends. The betrayal and alienation of her eldest sons hardened her heart, and the humiliations heaped upon her by her husband helped consolidate the very character traits he had deplored during his ravings. Her personality darkened and her temper grew worse. She became resentful and suspicious. The king did what he could to make amends. Lady Charlotte Finch had told Mrs Harcourt, on 23 February, that ‘the king showed the greatest affection to the queen. It was the attention of a lover. He seemed to delight in making her presents – kissed her hand and showed every mark of tenderness.’205 But she could not forget the cruel things he had said during his illness and never felt the same uncomplicated confidence in her husband’s fidelity that she had enjoyed for the past twenty-seven years. At the celebration concert held in April, Elliot heard that ‘the king showed very marked attention to Lady Pembroke; that the queen often seemed uneasy and tried to prevent it as often as she could; but that the queen being at last engaged with somebody in conversation, the king slipped away from her, and got to the end of the room where Lady Pembroke was, and there was extremely gallant and that Lady Pembroke seemed distressed, and behaved with a becoming and maidenish modesty’.206 Knowing how eagerly such episodes were watched for, and with what relish they were recorded, can only have added to Charlotte’s acute sense of public embarrassment.
In an attempt to clear the air, the king had written to Lady Pembroke about his behaviour whilst ill, and she had replied in terms of delicately distancing forgiveness: ‘Your Majesty has always acted by me as the kindest brother, as well as the most gracious of sovereigns.’ Since he had asked for her friendship, ‘I give it most sincerely, and if I might presume to say, that I felt like the most affectionate sister towards an indulgent brother, it would exactly express my sentiments.’207 Eventually Lady Pembroke became again what she had been before the events of the winter of 1788/89: a valued friend of both king and queen. But for Charlotte, there could never be a return to the way things were before. For her, as much as for her sons, the king’s ‘intellectual malady’ changed everything. The queen was never again the woman she once was, and never became the woman she might have been if her husband had not fallen ill.
The effects of the king’s illness upon his daughters were harder to gauge. The brothers spent the crisis travelling up and down from London to Kew, plotting and politicking in clubs and fashionable drawing rooms; for them, there was a whiff of horrified exhilaration about the whole affair. The experience of their sisters was very different. They spent the entire period of the king’s illness closeted in seclusion, seeing no one beyond the embattled redoubt of their reduced and chilly household. They bore without complaint week after week of anxious confinement – Fanny Burney described it as ‘the terrible Kew campaign’ – long, emotionally exhausting days succeeding one after another in dreary monotony. They lived entirely with their mother, spending all day in her room, and often all night too, attempting to protect her from the fear she never lost of being once more intruded upon by her deranged husband. Although they were constantly exposed to the misery, fear and dejection that coloured Charlotte’s days, the daughters were, almost without exception, mute witnesses. Though they doubtless discussed their parents and their predicament among themselves, virtually nothing remains that describes how they felt. Fanny Burney reported approvingly that they ‘behaved like angels, they seem content to remain in this gloomy solitude forever, if it prove comfort to their mother, or mark their duteous affections to their father’.208 Had any of the sisters left first-hand accounts of their experience, it is doubtful that they wo
uld have added much to Fanny’s perception of their state; as she had herself observed, they were well schooled in concealing their emotions, and were trained to present an imperturbable face to the world. What they really thought when confronted with the reality of their shambling, agitated and incoherent father; how they responded when he told their mother, in their presence, that he no longer loved her and preferred Lady Pembroke; from what horrors they imagined they were protecting their mother as they slept in her room each night to deny her husband access to her; with what hidden feelings they struggled through another painful evening of manic choral singing – no one will ever really know.
There was one last cruel disappointment for them to endure. Back in November 1788, with a rare flash of insight into the loneliness of their single state, the king had assured his elder daughters, Royal and Augusta, that in the spring he would take them to Germany and find husbands for them all. If the sisters had clung on to this sliver of hope through all the dark days at Kew, they might have been even more encouraged as he began to recover. He told Greville in February that he did indeed intend to go to Hanover, and on the 24th George wrote to his son Augustus in Germany, giving him ‘a little hint, not yet known to your brothers … that you must not be surprised if you have a call to Hanover, and find me accompanied by the queen and your three eldest sisters’.209
But, for all the king’s enthusiasm, the expedition came to nothing. No one but George himself – and perhaps his hopeful daughters – thought it a good idea. ‘One can hardly conceive anything so strong as sending the king abroad in his current condition,’ declared Elliot.210 Greville was equally opposed to the project, not just on grounds of its impracticality, but because all talk of Hanover was, he believed, irrevocably linked with the worst of the king’s delusions. ‘None have been more constant than the expression of his desire to go to Hanover, against which visit I do most earnestly pray.’211 Everyone around him conspired to dissuade the king from making the journey; little by little the prospect of the trip faded away, and eventually, it was totally abandoned.
George would never see the flat landscapes of his dynasty’s homeland, and there would be no parties and balls at German courts designed to attract husbands for his daughters. It was the onset of their father’s madness that had first held out the prospect of marriage to the princesses, in his hurried declaration that they should all be found partners. Now, the apparent irrationality of the scheme had fatally tainted it, ensuring it would never happen. The sisters would accompany their convalescent father on a trip to recover his health; not to Hanover and the Continental courts beyond, but to sedate and respectable Weymouth, in Dorset, where husbands suitable for princesses were unlikely to be found.
CHAPTER 12
Three Weddings
ALMOST A YEAR AFTER FANNY Burney had accompanied the king and queen on their ill-starred holiday to Cheltenham, she found herself on the road again as part of the royal entourage, travelling to the seaside resort of Weymouth. If the crowds that had marked their progress on that first journey had been vocal in their appreciation for their monarch, in the summer of 1789 they seemed even more delighted to see him. ‘His popularity is greater than ever,’ thought Fanny. ‘Compassion for his late sufferings seems to have endeared him to all conditions of men.’1 As the party travelled through Hampshire, they passed under floral arches festooned with mottoes celebrating ‘the king restored’, to the ever-present sound of the national anthem played by what Fanny called ‘the crackiest of bands’. At Lyndhurst in the New Forest, where the royal family stayed for a few days, they were greeted by ‘the delighted mob’ singing ‘God Save the King’ with great gusto. When George and his family sat down to dine, the villagers were allowed to watch the spectacle from the grounds of the house, looking in at the window. ‘They crowded so excessively,’ noted Fanny ‘that this can be permitted them no more, for they broke down the all the paling, much of the hedges and some of the windows.’ They had, she hastened to add, meant no harm; it was only their eagerness to catch a glimpse of the king that had led them on, ‘for they were perfectly civil and well behaved’.2
It was a small royal group that eventually arrived in Weymouth. The three youngest princesses had been left behind at home with their governesses, but even so it proved a tight fit to squeeze everyone into the accommodation arranged for them. Just as he had in Cheltenham, the king borrowed a house, Gloucester Lodge, to stay in, this time from his brother William. Again, there was not much space for the attendants. Fanny Burney was lodged in the attic, and although she enjoyed the views of the sea and the sands from her lofty perch, these did not, she felt, compensate for the pokiness of her room. ‘Nothing like living at a court for exaltation,’ she observed dryly.3 She was luckier than her male colleagues, who were obliged to find lodgings where they could; even the grand Colonel Goldsworthy, the king’s senior equerry, boarded at the house of a local farmer.
What Weymouth lacked in luxury, it made up for in loyalty. ‘Not a child could be seen that had not a bandeau round its head, cap or hat of “God Save the King”,’ noted Fanny. The town’s principal business was selling the curative powers of sea-bathing to sick or convalescent visitors, and it lost little time in attaching the king’s name, as prominently as possible, to the source of its prosperity. ‘It is printed in golden letters on most of the bathing machines, and in various scrolls and devices it adorns every shop and almost every house in town.’4 The phrase also adorned the women known as ‘dippers’ whose job it was to immerse their clients in the water. ‘The bathing women had it in large coarse girdles round their waists,’ wrote Fanny. They ‘wear it in bandeaux on their bonnets, to go into the sea; and have it again, in large letters round their waists to encounter the waves’. Fanny was not sure it was a good idea to allow one’s loyalty to so decisively overwhelm one’s sense of taste. ‘Flannel dresses tucked up, and no shoes nor stockings, with bandeaux and girdles, have a most singular appearance; and when I first surveyed these local nymphs, it was with some difficulty I kept my features in order.’5
It was Dr Willis who had suggested Weymouth as a place for the king to convalesce. In keeping with contemporary medical opinion, Willis considered sea-bathing a stimulant to sluggish bodily function. Bathing, for Willis and his patients, did not mean swimming, but immersion, or ‘dipping’, below the waves, aided by professional attendants. Men could take the plunge naked; women were always fully clothed. Charlotte, who disliked the whole idea of watery immersion, was content to spend her time quietly, in a spacious bathing-machine where she could read and pursue her needlework uninterrupted. The king, in contrast, was a dutiful bather, arriving early in the morning to take his cure. However, at Weymouth, not even a royal wade into the sea could be attempted without due ceremony. ‘Think of the surprise of His Majesty,’ exclaimed Fanny, ‘when, the first time of his bathing, he had no sooner popped his royal head under the water than a band of music, concealed in a neighbouring machine struck up “God Save Great George Our King”.’6 In the face of such a relentless barrage of enthusiasm, even Fanny decided shortly after her arrival that ‘The loyalty of this place is excessive.’ But the king was undeterred, convinced that the sea air and the healthy regime of the little resort would do him nothing but good.
The king enjoyed himself so much on his first visit to Weymouth that the family returned again, this time with all six daughters, plus Prince Ernest, in 1794, 1798 and then on an almost annual basis for as long as his health allowed. Gradually, as the town became accustomed to its royal guests, it became less fervent in its demonstrations of loyalty, allowing them to spend time there with a minimum of ceremony and fuss. At Weymouth, and in the countryside that surrounded it, George came closest to living the life he so often declared he would have chosen for himself – ‘that of a Berkshire gentleman and no king’.7 Robert Greville went with the family on their 1794 trip, and accompanied the king on the bucolic, low-key activities he most enjoyed. Both George and Greville particularly relished the lengt
hy daily rides they took meandering over the rolling Downs that ran down to the coast. Even though he was now middle-aged and not in perfect health, the king still spent hour after hour in the saddle in the open air, devoting whole days to the pursuit of stags and hare. As late as 1801, when he was sixty-three, he spent from nine in the morning till four in the afternoon on horseback, hunting deer.8 As his equerry Colonel Goldsworthy had once mournfully complained to Fanny Burney, bad weather did nothing to diminish the king’s enthusiasm. He actively sought out punishing rides, sometimes covering thirty or forty miles at a time. For him, these demanding journeys were an escape from the pressures of office, a physical and emotional release from the confinement of his daily routine. They were also a vital form of exercise, an indispensable tool in his lifelong battle against corpulence.
The king’s rides also allowed him to indulge one of his great sustaining passions – investigating local farming practices. Nothing pleased him more than detailed, technical conversation with knowledgeable farmers. He was passionately interested in agricultural improvement, particularly in the breeding of sheep. He had converted some of the deer park at Richmond into grazing land, and later carved out three model farms from the parkland at Windsor. He was the first to import the merino breed from Spain into Britain, and reared them with more success than many of his competitors, making a real contribution to the improvement of the British wool stock. Although he showed little interest in the processes of mass production that were beginning to transform the industrial landscape of Britain, George was a keen and informed advocate of the new practices in agriculture whose effects were just as significant. Under the pseudonym Ralph Robinson – borrowing the name of one of the shepherds on the Windsor estates – the king contributed two letters to the influential periodical Annals of Agriculture, edited by Arthur Young, the campaigning proselytiser for the radical farming techniques that were so rapidly enhancing the productivity of the eighteenth-century countryside. He invited the great agriculturalist to inspect his farms at Windsor, giving him a personal guided tour. He was delighted to be told that all was ‘in admirable order, and the crops all clean and fine’. In return, George told Young: ‘I consider myself more obliged to you than any other man in my dominions.’9
The Strangest Family Page 55