Most of her thoughts were directed not at the high politics of the Revolution but towards the horrible predicament of Louis XVI and his family. As a fellow queen, she felt a special sympathy for Marie Antoinette, whose earlier peccadilloes – which Charlotte herself had been quick to condemn – counted as nothing compared to the trials of her current situation. ‘Whatever faults she had,’ Charlotte told Mrs Harcourt, ‘she could but pity her – she had more than paid in suffering for them. She thought her present conduct had much merit, and her former errors much excuse.’33 Throughout the early months of the Revolution, Charlotte hoped fervently that somehow the French queen and her family would escape their dark destiny. ‘I pity both the king and her, and anxiously wish that they may meet with some well-disposed people to extricate them hourly out of their great, horrible distress.’34
The king, whilst he recognised his wife’s sympathies, was reluctant to intervene, sharing the opinion of his government that it was impossible for Britain to involve itself in the internal politics of another nation. Month by month, the position of the French royal family grew progressively worse. In October 1789, hungry Parisian crowds marched on Versailles, demanding bread and storming the palace. The desperate violence of the mob moved Charlotte to appalled astonishment: ‘I often think this cannot be the eighteenth century in which we live at present, for ancient history can hardly produce anything more barbarous and cruel than our neighbours in France.’35 She was not alone in the strength of her reaction.
Both Charlotte and Fanny Burney found much to admire in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, the most influential British refutation of revolutionary principles and practices, and one of the foundations of modern conservative thought. ‘It is truly beautiful,’ wrote Fanny, ‘alike in nobleness of sentiment and animation of language.’ It was also marked by a profound feeling for the personal sufferings of the French royals, arguing that Marie Antoinette in particular deserved the sympathy, if not the more active support, of any honourable, chivalric man. Burke’s florid and emotional style earned him a good deal of ridicule from his erstwhile Whig colleagues, but Fanny, whose father knew Edmund Burke well, was not among them: ‘How happy does it make me to see this old favourite once more on the side of right and reason!’ With a faint echo of the occasional spasms of liberalism that had surfaced since she entered the royal service, she did ask herself whether, ‘I call it the right side only because it is my own?’ But in truth, Fanny was in little doubt where her loyalties lay. In 1792, she was present at a private dinner with Burke, in which he treated the other diners to a passionate diatribe on the threats posed by the French Revolution, ‘even to English liberty and property from the contagion of havoc and novelty’. ‘I tacitly assented to his doctrines,’ confided Fanny to her journal. She had little difficulty in agreeing with Burke on the importance of monarchy, and the absolute necessity of protecting the persons of kings. ‘Kings are necessary,’ Burke insisted, ‘and if we would preserve our peace and prosperity, we must preserve THEM! We must put all our shoulders to the work, and aye, stoutly too.’36
All Burke’s persuasive powers had done nothing, however, to deliver any practical assistance to the beleaguered Louis XVI. In the summer of 1791, he and his family had failed in a last-ditch attempt to flee France. They were caught at Varennes, just miles from the Belgian border, spotted by a man who recognised the king’s familiar profile from the coinage. Both George and Charlotte were said to be ‘much affected’ by the news. It was hard to see what hope now remained for their stricken French counterparts. In August 1792, the Tuileries Palace was attacked, Louis’s Swiss Guards were massacred and he and his family taken into custody. ‘Nothing can be so dreadful as the affairs of that unfortunate country,’ wrote the Princess Royal, who was as shocked by the extremity of events as her parents. ‘I think they must defeat their own plans by pushing them on with such violence, as it opens everyone’s eyes.’37
Royal’s hopes were unfounded – in fact, the establishment of a European military coalition to restore order in France had probably already sealed Louis’s fate. In a pre-emptive action, France declared war on Austria in April 1792, instigating over two decades of worldwide hostilities that ended only with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The unexpected defeat of Austria’s Prussian allies, routed by French forces at the village of Valmy as they attempted to march on Paris, transformed the prospects of the revolutionary government. Buoyed up by the extraordinary and unexpected success of their armies, the French briskly abolished the monarchy on 21 September 1792 and proclaimed the First Republic. In December, Louis – or ‘Citizen Capet’ as he was now known – was brought to trial. He was allowed no legal representation, and on 21 January 1793, he was executed. Marie Antoinette followed him to the guillotine in October. Their children were imprisoned in the Conciergerie fortress where they were abused and humiliated, treated with such systematic cruelty and neglect that the dauphin, Louis’s ten-year-old heir, died in 1795. His older sister survived the ordeal, but was so traumatised by her experiences that she did not speak for years.
This horrifying sense in which the personal was now irrevocably linked to the political – where no indulgence was extended on grounds of age or complicity, when it was no longer what you had done, but what you had been born that made you a target for popular hatred – must have introduced a new level of anxiety into the lives of George III and his family. The execution in Paris of Louis and Marie Antoinette could not have been contemplated by their counterparts in London without some apprehension that, if events in Britain followed the revolutionary pattern of those in France – a circumstance closer in the 1790s than at any time since the English Civil War – then they too might share the fate of the French monarchy.
The prospect of sudden and unexpected public death was not of course an entirely unfamiliar prospect for any member of the royal family, but before 1789, it seemed more likely to come about through the act of a madman than a revolutionary tribunal. George’s family had always lived with the knowledge that their role exposed them to the unwelcome attentions of the disturbed and the obsessed. ‘As soon as a man is mad,’ wrote Anthony Storer to his friend Lord Auckland, ‘he is sure to fall in love with someone of the royal family, or, as love and hatred are very near akin, to wish to assassinate some of them.’38 The principal target was, almost without exception, the king. One of the best-documented attempts on his life had occurred in 1786, as he arrived at St James’s Palace. As George told the story to Fanny Burney, he had just alighted from his carriage, ‘when a decently dressed woman who had been waiting for him for some time approached him with a petition’. As he bent forward to take it, she drew a knife ‘which she aimed straight at his heart!’ When the king started back, the woman made a second thrust ‘which touched his waistcoat before he had time to prevent her’. It was just as well she had not pushed harder or had a sharper knife, the king maintained, ‘for there was nothing for her to go through but a thin linen and fat’. Immediately, ‘the assassin was seized by the populace’, who were carrying her away when the king, ‘the only calm and moderate person there present’, came forward and said, ‘The poor creature is mad! Do not hurt her! She has not hurt me!’ Once he was satisfied that his assailant was safe, he ‘gave positive orders that she should be taken care of, and went into the palace and had his levee’.39
George was always remarkably phlegmatic about the ever-present danger of meeting a violent end. Responding to an earlier threat to kill him as he rode to the theatre in 1778, he observed that ‘as to my own feelings, they always incline me to put trust where it alone can avail – in the Almighty ruler of the Universe, who knows best what suits his all wise purposes’.40 When, in 1794 – at the height of the Terror in France – the London Corresponding Society, one of the most influential organisations of radical protest, was alleged to have concocted a plot to murder him with a poisoned arrow fired from an air gun, he took a similarly philosophical view.41 ‘I have ever
had but one opinion,’ he maintained. ‘We are all with the utmost caution open to events of the most fatal kind if men will at any hazard prosecute their plans, therefore anyone would be ever miserable if, not trusting in his own honest endeavours to act uprightly, and trusting in the protection of Providence, he did not banish the thought that men will be found to harbour such wicked intentions.’42
The king’s wife and daughters, however, did not share his sangfroid. When Fanny Burney first heard of the 1786 assassination attempt, she ‘was almost petrified with horror at the intelligence’. The queen took the news even worse, although the king did not perhaps break it to her in the most considerate manner. ‘He hastened up to her with a countenance of striking vivacity, and said, “Here I am! – safe and well – as you see! But I have very narrowly escaped being stabbed!”’ The two ladies-in-waiting immediately burst into floods of tears, and the Princesses Royal and Augusta ‘wept even with a violence’, while Charlotte sat stupefied, unable to speak at all. ‘After a most painful silence, the first words she could articulate were … “I envy you! I can’t cry!”’ The king, ‘with the gayest good humour did his best to comfort them’, and related the whole story in great detail, ‘with a calmness and unconcern’ that Fanny thought wholly admirable. He also insisted that the regular routine of walking on the terrace should not be postponed. Pale and silent, the queen dutifully accompanied him. The atmosphere of barely suppressed anxiety had still not lifted when the nightly concert performance was held as usual at their father’s insistence. ‘It was an evening of grief and horror to his family,’ wrote Fanny. ‘Nothing was listened to, scarce a word was spoken; the princesses wept continually and the queen, still more deeply struck, could only, from time to time, hold out her hand to the king and say, “I have you yet.”’43
The queen, thought Fanny, was convinced ‘some latent conspiracy’ lay behind the attempt, and ‘this dreadful suggestion prays upon [her] mind, though she struggles to conquer or conceal it’. In fact, the king’s would-be assassin at St James’s was, as he had instantly recognised, motivated by insanity rather than political malevolence. Margaret Nicholson was an impoverished seamstress who lived alone after the failure of an unhappy affair. Neighbours in her lodging house later testified that she was often to be heard muttering to herself; in her room were found many letters to the king, asserting her claim to the throne. She had perhaps sewn for herself the stylish black silk cloak and fashionable hat that proved such a gift to the illustrators and caricaturists who rushed to picture the almost-fatal scene; but she had no other assets, her entire resources amounting to no more than one sixpence and three halfpennies. When the case was investigated, she was declared to be mad, and confined for the rest of her long life in Bethlem Hospital for the insane at Moorfields.
In 1795, a very different kind of attack was made upon the king, which had as its cause exactly the kind of political purpose the queen had so feared a decade earlier. Britain had by then been at war with revolutionary France for nearly three years; taxes were high, a succession of poor harvests had raised the price of food beyond what the poor could afford, and political ideas advocating a more equal distribution of wealth and power were proving unsurprisingly attractive to those suffering most acutely in such desperately hard times. ‘Everyone is in great trouble about the scarceness of provisions,’ wrote Charlotte to Lady Harcourt in July. Things were so bad that she had heard several families ‘are come to a determination not to use pastry or white bread and to furnish all the family with brown bread’.44 It was not long before the royal household followed their example. The queen sent the Prince of Wales a recipe ‘for the making of potato bread which proves to be remarkably good, and we have had it baked with great success at Windsor’. It is hard to imagine such a homely dish making an appearance in the studied elegance of Carlton House; but George and Charlotte, naturally economical and abstemious, had not needed the grim example of Marie Antoinette to remind them of the political inexpediency of eating cake when others went hungry. ‘The king has given orders to have no other bread served to the household but brown bread,’ Charlotte told her eldest son with satisfaction, ‘and it is to be hoped this will encourage others to do the same.’45 But the queen was not convinced that, even if other wealthy families did follow their lead, it would have the necessary calming effect. ‘Whether the poor will be brought to that submission is a question,’ she admitted to Lady Harcourt. ‘The proverb says necessity has no law, who knows but that this distress may serve those who are unfriendly as a foundation for many unpleasant scenes.’46
At the end of October 1795, just such an ‘unpleasant scene’ erupted in central London, with the king at its heart. The mood of the capital was volatile in the extreme, the tension increased by the knowledge that legislation was about to be introduced which would curtail severely traditional rights and liberties. The Treasonable Practices Act outlawed serious criticism of the king, the government or the constitution, whilst the Seditious Meetings Act banned mass political meetings. The previous year, George had supported the suspension of habeas corpus, effectively sanctioning imprisonment without trial in certain cases. For all his genuinely paternalist sympathies for the sufferings of the poor, George had no doubt that mass disorder was to be suppressed at all costs. His candid advocacy of measures he described as ‘highly right and salutary’ made him as unpopular amongst reformers as he had once been amongst American rebels. In response, radical balladeers composed songs which contrasted strongly with the loyal declarations of the populace in Weymouth.
May we but live to see the day,
The crown from George’s head shall fall,
The people’s voice will then bear sway,
We’ll humble tyrants one and all.47
All this contributed to the hostile reception the king met with as he travelled to open Parliament. Along the route, an angry crowd surrounded the royal carriage shouting, ‘Peace and bread! No war! Down with George!’ Lord Onslow, who was sitting alongside the king, was appalled at what happened next: ‘a small ball, either of lead or marble, passed through the window glass on the king’s right hand, and perforating it, passed through the coach out of the other door … We all instantly exclaimed “This is a shot!”’ The king displayed his customary self-control, which was more than some of the other passengers could manage. ‘Sit still, my lord,’ he rebuked one of his companions who was fidgeting in alarm, ‘we must not betray fear whatever happens.’ The shaken entourage eventually forced its way through to Westminster, where George delivered his speech.
The journey home was worse. The crowd had grown bigger and far more restive, and threw so many stones at the royal carriage that all its windows were shattered. ‘Several stones hit the king, which he bore with signal patience, but not without sensible marks of indignation … at the indignities offered to his person and his office.’ At the end of the fraught journey, Onslow recorded that the king ‘took one of the stones out of the cuff of his coat, where it had lodged, and gave it to me saying, “I make you a present of this as a mark of the civilities we have met with today.”’48
The queen and the princesses, waiting for the king’s return at St James’s, were greatly unnerved by the events of the day, which they had seen and heard from within the palace. ‘It is impossible to paint to you in any degree what we have gone through,’ wrote Elizabeth to Lady Harcourt. The possibility that a bullet had been fired at her father was clearly ‘a most shocking thought’; but it was the hostility of the crowd that upset her most, the behaviour of ‘the Mob, who followed the coach in an insolent fashion, moaning and screaming “peace, no war”, “give us bread”, “down with Pitt” and “off with your guards”’.49 The princess was unable to get the images out of her mind. ‘I trust in God never to be again in the agonies I felt the whole of that day. It was indeed very horrid; and my poor ears I believe will never get the better of the groans I heard that Thursday in the Park, and my eyes the sight of that mob.’50 As she listened, transfixed, to ‘
the hootings, the screams’, did the experiences of Louis XVI pass through her mind?
She did not feel properly safe until back in Windsor, where, considering the circumstances, she thought ‘my sisters and myself are surprisingly well; but it has had such an extraordinary effect on me that I, who naturally cry a great deal, have scarcely shed a tear’. In contrast, her mother, as traumatised as her daughters by what she had seen and heard, finally gave way to her feelings. ‘I am much more comfortable about Mama,’ Elizabeth wrote, ‘as she cried yesterday, which she has never done while she remained in Town; for she always said that did she let herself once go she could never conduct herself as she ought.’51
Charlotte had embarked on the new decade of the 1790s with a renewed determination to keep her feelings firmly under control. Bruised, insulted and undermined by her husband’s illness, she fought hard not to give in to grief and despair. As a result, even her small domestic pleasures often seem undertaken as much in the spirit of ‘banishing remorse’ as in pursuit of genuine enjoyment. Anxiety dominated her existence. In the public sphere, a new threat, both political and personal, far-reaching and yet horribly immediate, had been introduced by the French Revolution, and given a cruel pertinence by the sad fates of Louis XVI and his family. In her private world, things were, if anything, worse. The king’s health remained a subject about which everyone worried and nobody spoke. The 1794 trip to Weymouth had been undertaken in an attempt to head off what had seemed like an ominous return of his old disorder. Princess Elizabeth told Lady Harcourt she thought the holiday ‘absolutely necessary’ in the light of ‘much hurry of mind’ and sleeplessness that everyone had noticed in her father although it was not openly discussed. ‘Never write to me on the subject, nor own to the family that I have mentioned it,’ she warned Lady Harcourt; ‘but the truth will out to you. We never talk on the subject.’52
The Strangest Family Page 57