The Queen’s House

by Edna Healey

  ‘After all the labours,’ cried he, ‘of the chase, all the riding, the trotting, the galloping, the leaping, the – with your favour, ladies, I beg pardon, I was going to say a strange word, but the – perspiration, – and – and all that – after being wet through over head, and soused through under feet, and popped into ditches, and jerked over gates, what lives we do lead: Well, it’s all honour! that’s my only comfort! Well, after all this, fagging away like mad from eight in the morning to five or six in the afternoon, home we come, looking like so many drowned rats, with not a dry thread about us, nor a morsel within us – sore to the very bone, and forced to smile all the time! and then after all this what do you think follows?’

  To his horror the King offered him

  ‘Barley water in such a plight as that! Fine compensation for a wet jacket, truly! – barley water! I never heard of such a thing in my life! barley water after a whole day’s hard hunting!’

  ‘And pray did you drink it?’

  ‘I drink it? – Drink barley water? no, no; not come to that neither! But there it was, sure enough! – in a jug fit for a sick-room; just such a thing as you put upon a hob in a chimney, for some poor miserable soul that keeps his bed! just such a thing as that! – And, “Here, Goldsworthy,” says His Majesty, “here’s the barley water!”’

  ‘And did the King drink it himself?’

  ‘Yes, God bless His Majesty! But I was too humble a subject to do the same as the King!’

  Fanny Burney’s ‘directions for coughing, sneezing or moving before the King and Queen’ were sent to her mother Mrs Burney – a wry commentary on the miseries of Court life.

  In the first place, you must not cough … you must choke … but not cough. In the second place you must not sneeze … you must hold your breath – … if the violence … breaks some blood vessel, you must break the blood vessel – but not sneeze … If a black pin runs into your head you must not take it out … if the blood should gush from your head … you must let it gush. If however the agony is very great … you may bite the inside of your cheek … if you even gnaw a piece out, it will not be minded, only be sure to swallow it, or commit it to a corner of your mouth until they are gone – for you must not spit.

  Protocol remained the same at Buckingham House, Windsor and Kew, though life was more relaxed in the country. Clothes were plainer at Windsor and even simpler at Kew. Later the royal family could be even more relaxed on their holiday expeditions. They could stroll down the promenade at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, or sit and sew in the bathing machines at Weymouth, Dorset, although even there the King might be surprised by a loyal band, in a nearby bathing machine, playing ‘God Save The King’ as he popped his head out of the water.

  Fanny Burney watched Court protocol with the curious eye of one observing strange customs in a foreign land. You did not knock at royal doors, you rattled the keys; you did not pass the open door of a room where royals were; you did not sit in the royal presence, unless especially invited; and you never turned your back on the royal family. Fanny Burney learned with difficulty the art of walking backwards, without ‘treading on my own heels, or feeling my head giddy’. In an Oxford college she watched with admiration a wonderful example of the ‘true court retrograde action’. Lady Charlotte Bertie, a Lady-in-Waiting, trapped with the King at the head of a long room, had to retreat.

  She therefore faced the King, and began a march backwards – her ankle already sprained, and to walk forward, even leaning upon an arm, was painful to her: nevertheless back she went, perfectly upright, without one stumble, without ever once looking behind … and with as graceful a motion, and as easy an air, as I ever saw …

  It was a feat worthy of a skilled circus performer.

  It was on this very tiring visit to Oxford that Miss Burney observed the discreet camaraderie among courtiers. Not allowed to eat in the King’s presence, and famished, the ‘untitled attendants’ watched in an envious semi-circle while the Princess Royal sat down to a splendid collation.

  Major Price & Colonel Fairly seeing a very large table close to the wainscot behind us, desired our refreshments might be privately conveyed there … while all the group backed very near it, one at a time might feed, screened by all the rest.22

  But through all the pains and longueurs of Court life Miss Burney retained her affection for the King and Queen – she, ‘full of sense & graciousness … speaks English perfectly well … though now & then with a foreign idiom & frequently a foreign accent’. She had not only read Miss Burney’s books but was generally well read, delighting in finding old books on bookstalls. As for the King, ‘he speaks his opinion without reserve … His countenance is full of inquiry, to gain information without asking it … All I saw of both was the most perfect good humour, good spirits, ease & pleasantness.’ Yet at the end, Miss Burney was to discover the insensitive side of the ‘sweet Queen’. When, broken by stress and ill-health, she wanted to retire, she found the Queen unsympathetic and unwilling to let her go. Even then she excused her – it was not unkindness but lack of experience.

  Mrs Papendiek’s view of Court life was different. It was she, not Miss Burney, who was in a foreign country: though born in England, her father, mother and husband and many of their friends were German. But she was bred to Court life, and the Queen was at ease with her old Mecklenburg-Strelitz acquaintances. Her father, Frederick Albert, and husband, Mr Papendiek, both cultivated, intelligent men, could count as friends some of the most distinguished artists, scientists and musicians of the time. Educated as she was to hold her own, Mrs Papendiek flourished. ‘Art & science hovering round us … attracted others & we became the centre of a charming coterie.’23

  In the pages of her memoirs the hierarchy of George Ill’s Court is seen with German eyes. She accepts with cheerful resignation their position. ‘People in our rank do not travel with servants,’ she writes. ‘Nor do they serve ices or have fine china.’

  But in their circle at George Ill’s Court, there was a cultural richness rarely met at other courts and to which she had an access. Through her words the famous names become human. Here are painters Reynolds and Gainsborough eyeing each other’s work warily; ‘Pretty little’ Angelica Kauffmann and the eccentric Henry Fuseli were guests at her hospitable table; the painter of exquisite miniatures, Jeremiah Meyer, and his wife were close friends; Benjamin West, the President of the Royal Academy, often dropped in, and his handsome son was a particular close friend. Mrs Papendiek tried in vain to help Sir Thomas Lawrence in his early unsuccessful attempts to gain royal favour. The wives of the famous told their life stories to her sympathetic ear: Mrs Zoffany, the artist’s wife, confessed how she had been his mistress at the age of fourteen. She admired the long-suffering Mrs Meyer, whose difficult husband sent their children away to a miserable school, and who generously gave his exquisite miniatures to the sitters after his death.

  She was equally popular with scientists such as Sir Joseph Banks and Sir William Herschel, who became the King’s Astronomer. She heard the history of his life from the time when he came to England, a deserter from the Hanoverian army, with a shilling in his pocket, before making his way to fame through his music and his skill in making telescopes. He, his brilliant sister and his wife were welcome visitors at her own home.

  Fanny Burney’s encounter with Herschel confirms the generosity of the King and the breadth of his patronage. Herschel came to Windsor to show ‘His Majesty and the royal family the new comet lately discovered by his sister, Miss Herschel’. Miss Burney went into the garden where Herschel ‘showed her “the first lady’s comet”, and some of his new discovered universes, with all the good humour with which he would have taken the same trouble for a brother or sister’.

  His success, she observed,

  He owes wholly to his majesty … he was in danger of ruin, when his … great & uncommon genius attracted the king’s patronage. He has now not only his pension … but … licence from the king to make a telescope according to his new i
deas … that is to have no cost spared in its construction, and is wholly to be paid for by his majesty.24

  There was much at Court to excite Miss Burney’s intellectual interest, but she was never at ease, unsure of her place in the social hierarchy.

  But no one enjoyed the cultural life of the Court more than the daughter of the Queen’s page. Though she might listen to the grand concerts at the Queen’s House from the next room, she never felt, as Miss Burney did, uncertain of her place or outside the pale. She, her husband and her father were part of the royal family, secure in their position among ‘people of our rank’.

  Mrs Papendiek took advantage of free tickets to theatres and operas, and was the friend of singers such as the great Mara, and actors and actresses including Mrs Siddons, Miss Farren, David Garrick and Roger Kemble. But it was among the musicians that she was most at home. Her father, Frederick Albert, played many instruments, and Mr Papendiek was an accomplished flute player. We must have Papendiek on his flute,’ George III exclaimed when they were discussing a forthcoming concert at Westminster Abbey. The Prince of Wales, no mean performer himself, often sent for him to accompany him in his musical evenings, but both her husband and father firmly refused to take part in the Prince of Wales’s wild evenings. As for Johann Christian Bach, he and his wife were for many years an important part of their lives. He taught her to sing and she never forgot the enchantment of his musical parties on the river at Richmond. She mourned his sad later years when he was neglected and wept with his wife at his death. Mrs Papendiek was a competent pianist herself, playing with great pleasure Bach’s compositions on the new grand piano – which they acquired when the King rejected it for Windsor. She gave balls in her kitchen and concerts in her sitting room to which some of the most talented men and women of the time were delighted to come. The German impresario, Johann Peter Salomon, was a frequent guest at her musical evenings. He gave her tickets to the concerts he organized for Franz Joseph Haydn’s ‘London’ symphonies.

  Her memoirs illustrate perfectly the atmosphere of the Court of a king and queen who encouraged the arts and sciences as perhaps no other monarchs have done. As a writer in the London Chronicle of May 1764 recognized, ‘The fine arts, hitherto too much neglected in England, seem now to rise from oblivion, under the reign of a monarch, who has a taste to perceive their charms, and a propensity to grant his royal protection to whatever can embellish human life.’25

  ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’

  Unfortunately this renaissance did not last. The autumn of 1788 brought a chill wind: the King suffered a serious mental breakdown. He had had an earlier illness, believed to have been similar, in 1765, from which he soon recovered. He recovered from the 1788 breakdown in the next year but it was the harbinger of a gathering storm, which eventually by 1810 was to destroy the King’s sanity. George III, who had been hailed as the ‘Apollo of the Arts’, slowly dwindled into a sad old man, blind and deaf, shut away at Windsor.

  The history of the King’s ‘madness’ can be sketched only lightly here. The current theory that he suffered from porphyria might well be true, but it is worth pointing out that even without it, the pressures weighing on him were enough to strain his mental health.

  During his reign he was battered by a succession of public and private tragedies, and he lost early the support of the man on whom he had completely relied. The Earl of Bute was an excellent tutor and his good influence in the education of George III should not be underestimated. But Bute, like many academics before and since, was out of his depth in the harsh world of politics. Besides, Bute was a Scot, and the 1745 rising of the Young Pretender (Bonnie Prince Charlie) was not forgotten – Buckingham House was called ‘Holyrood House’ by the satirists. The King made Bute his Chief Minister but in 1763 he resigned, leaving his pupil to stand on his own two feet and make his own decisions at a critical time. Bute retired to a house at Kew, where he wrote his botanical works and encouraged the Queen and her daughters in their studies and flower painting. In vain the young King searched for a substitute. Chief Ministers succeeded each other in rapid succession: George Grenville followed Bute in 1763, Rockingham followed Grenville in 1765 and Grafton followed Rockingham in 1766. The only minister of great stature, the elder Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, whom the King, after initial hostility, came to respect, suffered a nervous breakdown in 1767. Had he still been in charge, the waste and folly of the conduct of the American War of Independence might have been avoided. As it was, the King was guided through the years of war by the ineffectual Lord North, who, though painfully aware of his own inadequacy, could not persuade the King to allow him to retire. To a king with a deep sense of royal duty, losing the American colonies was a bitter blow.

  The pressures on George III were all the more heavy because, even had he been willing to delegate responsibility, after the resignation of his adored Bute there was no one he could trust. He felt he must oversee everything, from the hanging of pictures to the personal supervision of the defence of London during the Gordon riots.

  The Gordon riots, named after Lord George Gordon, were provoked by a move to relax the intolerant laws against Roman Catholics. In the summer of 1780 drunken mobs were wrecking the City of London, setting on fire houses belonging to anyone sympathetic to the Catholics. Several thousand troops were quartered in the grounds of the Queen’s House, and the King spent the night with his men, as Henry V had before the Battle of Agincourt. Finding that they were sleeping on the ground, he promised them that ‘straw would be brought for the next night & my servants will instantly serve you with a good allowance of wine & spirits’. His grandfather, George II, had been the last king to lead his troops into battle, at Dettingen, Germany, and George III had the same Hanoverian courage. It was claimed that it was his decisiveness in calling up the troops that stopped the riots.

  Then there was the eternal problem of Ireland, which some of his ministers wanted to solve by granting Catholic emancipation, which the King believed would mean breaking his Coronation oath to preserve his Protestant inheritance. An invasion of the French into Ireland in 1789 doubled the threat.

  The French Revolution of 1789, culminating in the death by guillotine of the French King and Queen, sent a flood of refugees to Britain, bringing hair-raising tales of bloody massacre. The British monarchy itself was under threat. It was a dangerous world, deeply disturbing for a king with a profound sense of royal duty.

  ‘Burke’s blast’

  The troubles that beset George III in foreign affairs were made more difficult by the increasingly hostile opposition at home. The new radicals found the contrast between royal extravagance and public misery infuriating. The Queen’s House, now so little used, was expensive to maintain and such expenditure proved offensive. Angry questions in Parliament were followed by a brilliant speech by the statesman Edmund Burke. In 1779 he had propounded a ‘Plan of Economic Reform’, which proposed, among other things,

  the overhaul of the Royal Household and the abolition of scores of offices, notably those of treasurers, comptrollers and cofferers; the partial extermination of sinecures; a reduction of secret pensions; and a curtailment of redundant offices in the independent jurisdictions of Wales, Cornwall, Chester and Lancaster. He said: ‘There is scarce a family so hidden and lost in the obscurest recesses of the community which does not feel that it has something to keep or to get, to hope or to fear, from the favour or displeasure of the Crown.’

  On 11 February 1780 Burke made one of his greatest speeches – a bitter attack on the corruption in the royal Household.

  Our palaces are vast inhospitable halls. There the bleak winds, there ‘Boreas and Eurus and Caurus and Argestes loud’, howling through the vacant lobbies and clattering the doors of deserted guard-rooms, appal the imagination and conjure up the grim spectre of departed tyrants – the Saxon, the Norman and the Dane; the stern Edwards and fierce Henrys – who stalk from desolation to desolation through the dreary vacuity and melancholy succession of c
hill and comfortless corridors.

  The Household, Burke claimed, still retained ‘Buttery, Pantry and all that rabble of places which, though profitable to the holders and expensive to the State, are almost too mean to mention. Why not put the catering out to contract, as the King of Prussia did?’ There were superfluous offices: ‘Why could not the Lord Chamberlain take over the Great Wardrobe – a department which in a few years had cost the Crown £150,000 for “naked walls or walls hung with cobwebs”.’

  So many Offices were sinecures, given to MPs and others.

  Why maintain an Office of the Robes when the Groom of the Stole held a sinecure? These establishments, useless in themselves, had three useless Treasurers – ‘two to hold a purse and one to play with a stick’. Why pay a man £100 a year, with an assistant also at £100 a year, to regulate some matter not worth twenty shillings? Everybody knew the answer; that these dignitaries were paid for their vote in Parliament, not for their diligence in administration, cookery or catering.

  Then in a passage of ringing rhetoric he savaged the ‘principle that one person should do the work, while another drew the emoluments’.

  The King’s domestic servants were all undone; his tradesmen remained unpaid, and became bankrupt – because the turnspit of the King’s Kitchen was a Member of Parliament. His Majesty’s slumbers were interrupted, his pillow was stuffed with thorns and his peace of mind entirely broken – because the turnspit of the King’s Kitchen was a Member of Parliament. The judges were unpaid; the just of the kingdom bent and gave way, the foreign ministers remained inactive and unprofited; the system of Europe was dissolved; the chain of our alliances was broken; all the wheels of government at home and abroad were stopped; because the turnspit of the King’s Kitchen was a Member of Parliament.26