The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  Princess Mary, Amelia’s companion and support during all her suffering, was with her when she died on 2 November. Sir Henry Halford felt her pulse, held a candle to her mouth and told her sister it was all over. Mary kissed her and then went upstairs to tell her parents.213 The king, already in the grip of the relapse of madness that was shortly to overwhelm him, refused to believe she was dead, declaring: ‘I know very well she can be brought to life again.’ Lady Cranley, a courtier, noticed the queen standing, alone and unregarded, in the passage outside Amelia’s room, ‘looking half distracted’. She took her hand and led her away.214 Mary had already gone to write a note to Fitzroy. ‘Our beloved Amelia is no more, but her last words to me were, “Tell Charles I die blessing him.” Before I leave the house, I obey her last wishes.’215 Fitzroy acknowledged her death with grave dignity. ‘To the memory and transcendent purity of the adored and departed angel, I owe every self-value I possess.’216 A few months later, Mary Anne Gaskoin, Amelia’s companion through so many years of sickness and adversity, died herself, probably of the same tuberculosis that had killed her mistress. The king, who was moved by her death, had her buried ‘as near as might be’ to ‘his beloved daughter’.217 In her own way, Mary Anne was the final victim of a complex web of unhappiness that had tainted the lives of everyone caught up in it – and which, as the queen had predicted, had in the end produced nothing but misery for all concerned.

  *

  In the last months of her life, Amelia had occupied herself reading Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, which she had not altogether enjoyed. It is not surprising that the novel, with its unforgiving moral message, did not entirely please her, for Amelia was at heart a romantic. The intensity of her emotional life was far closer to the dramas later to be imagined by the Brontës, in which passions too profound and powerful to be contained by the ordered world of everyday life end up consuming the lovers themselves. It was her sister, Sophia, whose experience was far closer to the tragic heroines of Richardson’s severe mould, in which a single departure from moral rectitude, whether willed or not, results in a lifetime of bitter atonement. Elizabeth’s thwarted attempts to find happiness might be seen as a dark inversion of the plots of Jane Austen – presented with two men who offered different visions of rational happiness, she would have been content to accept either, but was denied both. It had been powerfully demonstrated to the sisters that each of them had, in their different ways, chosen very much the wrong lovers; but there was no suggestion at all as to what might constitute a more acceptable solution, and they prepared to enter the next decade no more advanced in the pursuit of happiness than they had been ten years before.

  CHAPTER 14

  Established

  ON 25 OCTOBER 1810, SHORTLY before the death of Princess Amelia, the king had made a halting, tentative appearance at court. It was the fiftieth anniversary of his accession. George was seventy-two years old, and had now been on the throne for longer than any monarch since Henry III in the thirteenth century. It was a remarkable tribute both to his personal powers of endurance and to the stability of the institution of kingship itself. Despite the forebodings of many of his subjects, fears which George himself had sometimes shared, the British crown had survived not just the loss of the American colonies; it had also weathered the storms of twenty years of political upheaval that had seen dynasty after dynasty fall across Europe in the face of the seemingly unstoppable advance of Napoleon and the ideas he represented.

  As the war against the French dragged on, George was now well established as a symbol of the values for which many Britons believed they were fighting. In the toasts raised at formal dinners, in the fulsome language of loyal addresses composed in cities, towns and villages, in the banners of processions that marched through the streets, the king was praised as the defender of a mild and beneficent constitution and the guarantor of traditional liberties. Observing the outpouring of affection, the radical politician Samuel Romilly commented with some bemusement that George had gone from being ‘one of the most unpopular princes that ever sat upon the throne … to one of the most popular’. He had little doubt that it was the horrors of the French Revolution which had prompted such a decisive shift, arguing that it had ‘added tenfold strength to every motive of endearment to the king’.1 In London, crowds turned out in huge numbers and in uncharacteristically respectful demeanour to show their appreciation. ‘All most perfectly quiet and civil,’ noted one witness, ‘not an offensive word or insulting gesture.’ He could not recall ever before seeing ‘such perfect order and decorum in any great assemblage of the middling and lower orders’.2

  At Windsor, the tone was very different. The mood was sombre, darkened by both the final stages of Amelia’s illness and the parlous state of the king’s own health. His sight had completely failed him, and he walked unsteadily. A small family party was arranged as most appropriate for the subdued circumstances. The king was led into a circle of sympathetic friends and specially favoured courtiers, leaning on the arm of the queen. Cornelia Knight, the last in the long line of Charlotte’s literary-minded lady companions, watched him hobble into the room. ‘As he could not distinguish persons,’ she recalled, ‘it was the custom to speak to him as he approached.’ His responses were disconcerting. ‘He said to me, “You are not uneasy I am sure, about Amelia.” At the same time, he squeezed my hand with such force that I could scarcely help crying out … As he went round the circle as usual, it was easy to perceive the dreadful excitement in his countenance.’3 Everyone could see something was wrong; but few could have predicted the scale of what was to come. This was the last time the king was seen in public by anyone other than his ministers, his family and his doctors.

  The king had suspected that his health was again about to fail. George Canning, the Tory disciple of Pitt, reported that ‘he was conscious that the complaint was coming on some days before it actually seized him … He said on Thursday or Friday last, “I am sure I am going to be ill – for I had the same dream last night that I have had every night before my illness.” Accordingly, on Friday night he was taken decidedly ill.’4

  His friends and family were certain it was anxiety about Amelia that had triggered the attack. ‘Aggravating subjects have been the cause of his former illnesses,’ wrote Princess Elizabeth to Lady Harcourt, ‘this one’s owing to the overflowing of his heart for the youngest and dearest of his children; a child who never caused him a pang, and whom he literally doted upon.’5

  His early symptoms were horribly familiar. When Spencer Perceval, who had been first minister for just over a year, saw him on 29 October, he found ‘his conversation was prodigiously hurried, and … extremely diffuse, explicit and indiscreet’.6 His mind was agitated, and he did not sleep. ‘The truth is,’ Canning told his wife, ‘poor old Knobbs is as mad as ever he was in his life … The hearing of him … was most dreadful – a sort of wailing, most heart-rending to hear.’7 Whilst he remained docile, the king’s case was managed by his physicians, Matthew Baillie, Henry Halford and William Heberden. But when he became more violent – on 4 November, he was put into a strait waistcoat – ministers insisted that more specialist expertise was required, and, inevitably, sent for Dr Robert Willis, who was later joined by his brother John. Thomas, the third Willis brother, did not attend; the king regarded him as principally responsible for his humiliating confinement in 1801, and his absence may have been an acknowledgement of the scale of the king’s hostility towards him. However, if Thomas was singled out for particular resentment, none of the Willises was regarded by George with anything but dislike. The queen protested at their appointment, saying she had promised the king he should never again be left in the care of the Willis family, but her objections were overruled and Robert Willis arrived on the 6th. For a few days, the king appeared to improve. He was lucid enough on 11 November to ask how long he had been confined, saying that he remembered nothing at all of the last few weeks and that ‘this was the fourth blank in his life’; but he grew worse as the mo
nth went on.8 Princess Mary wrote that she held out little hope for the future. ‘I have had no heart or spirit to write since Dr John Willis came … My heart has been quite broke, for he is decided he can be of no use, as he finds no mind to work upon.’9

  Willis’s assessment was more circumspect when he and the other physicians were called before a parliamentary committee in mid-December. The king, they said, had recovered before, and might do so again, although they saw no evidence that this was imminent. It was true he had rational moments, which might – or might not – become more frequent. His age and general ‘bodily infirmity’ counted much against him, but they would not rule out the possibility of an eventual return to health. The queen, refusing to succumb to despair, placed the most optimistic gloss on the doctors’ evasions. ‘Our beloved king’s illness leaves us still under some anxiety,’ she wrote to Lady Harcourt, ‘but thank God, there is not the smallest doubt of his perfect recovery, of which the physicians give us all the greatest assurance … and if we go on, improving by degrees, great hopes may be entertained of some unpleasing events not taking place, comprenez-vous?’10

  The ‘unpleasing event’ Charlotte hoped to avoid was a regency, which would declare to everyone the nature and severity of the king’s illness, and which had, through a combination of luck and political manoeuvring, been avoided during all his previous attacks. But Perceval, with none of the queen’s emotional investment in her husband’s predicament, could see that there was now no alternative. On 20 December, he wrote to the Prince of Wales, telling him he planned to introduce a Regency Bill into Parliament without delay. The prince would be offered the job with a number of limitations, which echoed those devised by Pitt in 1788. He would not have the power to create peers, to appoint or dismiss office holders, or to grant pensions. At the end of a year, if the king’s condition had not improved, the regency would be made permanent, and the restrictive clauses dropped. The queen, meanwhile, was to be given the task of looking after the king, and a council appointed to help her do so.

  As he had done a generation ago, the Prince of Wales argued that the regency should come to him with no restrictions; but in the face of the first minister’s refusal to negotiate, he capitulated and accepted Perceval’s terms. The politics surrounding the appointment were very different from those of 1788/89. Now the king was an old man with a melancholy history of repeated illness; the political world had, on three earlier occasions, been forced to contemplate the prospect of his replacement by his eldest son, and, as a result, the idea had lost much of its power to shock. The prince, a middle-aged man, was a diminished political figure, a far less attractive figurehead for the Whig opposition than he had been twenty years before. His accession no longer seemed to presage the complete overturning of the balance of established party politics; and in the event, the bill progressed through Parliament relatively smoothly. On 6 February 1811, the prince took the oath of office as regent.

  The king was not unaware of what was happening. On 29 January 1811, Perceval went down to Windsor to explain to him the measures that had been put in place. The king offered no dissent, but observed that at the age of seventy-two, perhaps ‘it was time for him to think of retirement’. Hoping to encourage him towards the idea of voluntary abdication, Perceval highlighted how onerous his life would be if he returned, stressing the hard work that would await him, but the king refused to rise to the bait. ‘He listened with some unwillingness, and said “He should always be at hand to come forward if wanted.”’11

  In the early months of 1811, he enjoyed a number of rational intervals. He was lucid enough to have the contents of Amelia’s will read to him, with the frequent and potentially embarrassing references to General Fitzroy explained delicately away by Henry Halford in terms that successfully deflected any further enquiry about the exact nature of their relationship. He was able to signal his approval of the conduct of the regent, for whom, in his illness, he now seemed to feel an affection that had not been apparent when he was well. ‘The dear king … spoke in the handsomest terms of you,’ gushed Elizabeth to her eldest brother in February 1811, ‘and told my mother how right she had always been about you … His heart overflows at your amiable and affectionate manner concerning everything about him … he cried fit to break his heart.’12

  But for most of the time, even when seemingly calm, George’s mind was clouded and confused. The Duke of Clarence went to visit him in early 1811, arriving just as dinner was served. Although the king ate ‘with appetite roast mutton, took his broth with turnips and bread and cheese with pleasure’ and William thought his father looked quite well, ‘his thoughts flew from one subject to another’. He was full of eccentric schemes, planning visits to Kew, Weymouth and St James’s, and brimming with ideas for the redecoration of individual rooms and the deployment of servants. The duke had thought himself prepared for what he might find, but was deeply shocked. ‘Halford, in going over to the castle, told me this was a good day; if so, I do not understand what a bad one can be; in short the mind appeared to be amused by absolute trifles. There was not any obscurity or any tendency to it, but an absolute vacuum of mind.’13

  By March, the king’s obsessions had come to the notice of the queen’s council, a committee under the nominal headship of the queen that was charged with overseeing the king’s welfare, who instructed the physicians to ‘point out to His Majesty that the various plans and projects which he dwells upon are considered as inconsistent with his complete recovery’. His preoccupation with inventing new knightly fellowships and designing ribbons and medals to accompany them did not, they thought, bode well. The councillors were particularly distressed to discover his plan to establish ‘a new Female Order … which is altogether novel and inconsistent with the dictates of a sound and deliberate judgement … and does not correspond to His Majesty’s manly character’.14

  His delusions had already taken on a familiar alarming tone. General Garth accompanied him on an uncomfortable walk on the terrace, telling Henry Halford on their return that the king’s speech had been ‘very incorrect indeed’. When the Duke of York visited the family in May, he too was shocked by his father’s comments, made ‘without the least regard to decency’, despite the presence of the queen and ‘all our attempts to change the conversation’. The main topic of his discourse was Lady Pembroke, who loomed just as large in the king’s disordered mind in 1811 as she had done in 1788. ‘Is it not a strange thing, Adolphus,’ the king declared to his son the Duke of Cambridge, ‘that they refuse to let me go to Lady Pembroke, although everyone knows I am married to her; but what is worst of all, that infamous scoundrel Halford was by at the marriage, and has now the effrontery to deny it to my face.’15

  The doctors were divided about the best way to manage the king. The Willises advocated more of what they had offered in the past – physical restraint coupled with extreme seclusion, a regime in which George was deliberately isolated from all sources of stimulation, any of which, they asserted, would agitate him and hinder a cure. William Heberden, a general physician and not a professional ‘mad doctor’, took a different view. He was a passionate advocate of greater freedom for the king, arguing that some participation in normal life would keep his mind engaged and distract him from ‘incorrect ideas’. With nothing to occupy his thoughts, was it any surprise he did not improve? ‘We must study to place him in a situation that may call forth the energies of his mind, and divert the wanderings of his fancy, not by vain expostulation, but by objects of natural interest.’16

  For a while Heberden got his way. The king was allowed to ride out with his gentlemen occasionally, and to see his family to drink tea, but the experiment came to an abrupt end in the summer when the king’s illness took a new and more sinister turn. His physical symptoms were severe: nausea, abdominal pain, constipation, sweating; his pulse raced and he could not sleep. By 15 July, the doctors were convinced he was dying. It was not until the end of the month that they felt he was out of immediate danger. Although his bod
ily health gradually improved, his mind seemed permanently damaged. At the height of the attack, he had been ‘so violent and unruly as to render restraint absolutely necessary … displayed bursts of passion, gross and indecent allusions, loud and continual talking’.17 When the violence of the ‘paroxysms’ subsided, there was no accompanying return of even occasional lucidity. The Duke of York reported that the king was still ‘under restraint’ on 31 July, and that ‘every delusion, even of the wildest kind, which had appeared at the height of his delirium, still continues in force’.18 The king now lived for the most part in a universe entirely of his own making. ‘His conversations for a fortnight now are with imaginary beings, or rather, with those that are dead,’ observed Lady Albinia Cumberland, who had known him at court. He spoke often to the long-dead Prince Octavius, ‘forming a plan for his marriage and supposing him 17 years of age’. He believed Princess Amelia was alive and living in Hanover. ‘He fancied that he had the power of raising persons that are dead, and making them 17 again and that an interview with the Almighty caused this power.’19 He referred to himself as ‘the late king’; on other occasions, he refused to answer any questions about his health on the grounds that he was immortal. He would wear only white clothes. ‘Bed-gown and drawers – no stockings, only gaiters. All his ideas on purity. He would drink only water and milk, and not eat. Sometimes he thought himself in heaven and that it was the day of judgement, and that he spoke for the wicked.’20 His tenuous connection with reality gradually ebbed away. ‘The patient has two or three times asked about his family,’ the doctors noted, ‘generally however he has an impression that his sons are dead or sent away to distant parts of the globe.’ Heberden concluded that George now much preferred the company of the imaginary dead to that of real people. ‘He actually described the dress, the conduct, and the conversations of different persons who are thus recalled to life. In short, he appears to be living … in another world, and has lost almost all interest in the contents of this.’21