CHAPTER 11

An Intellectual Malady

LIKE LORD HERVEY BEFORE HER, Fanny Burney thought the royal family had little true understanding of what it was like to be ill. ‘The fatigues of a court attendance are so little understood by them,’ she confided to her journal in 1788, ‘that persons known to be able to quit their rooms and their bed are instantly concluded to be qualified for all the duties of office.’1 Her own frequent indispositions were, she thought, greeted with a wounding lack of sympathy by those around her – especially the queen. Charlotte did indeed find the many ailments that beset the female members of her household frustrating. Determinedly healthy herself, she found their continual parade of fevers, headaches and ‘lowness of spirits’ extremely trying. Fanny, who took her health very seriously, was most offended at any implication of self-indulgence she sensed in the queen’s remarks. ‘Illness here … has been so unknown, that it is commonly supposed it must be wilful and therefore meets little notice till accompanied by danger or incapacity of duty,’ she wrote tartly, before adding her own explanation for behaviour that so contradicted her usual vision of the natural condescension of her employers. ‘This is by no means from hardness of heart – far otherwise – there is no hardness of heart in any one of them; but it is prejudice and want of personal experience.’2

Like the queen, George was rarely unwell. He had quickly recovered from a bout of chickenpox in 1761. Four years later, he had been ill with chest pains and a recurring fever which, for a few months, refused to respond to treatment. Tuberculosis was suspected, and his condition had been sufficiently threatening to trigger plans for a regency if he did not rally. Since his recovery he had been as healthy as it was possible for a middle-aged man to be in the eighteenth century. Now aged fifty, he attributed his wellbeing to his ascetic lifestyle, telling an observer who commented on his careful diet that he simply preferred eating and drinking sparingly to ‘growing feeble and diseased’ through overindulgence.

His sudden sickness in the summer of 1788, therefore, took everyone – including the king – by surprise. On 12 June, George told his first minister, William Pitt, that he was too ill to leave Kew and come to town, having suffered ‘a pretty smart bilious attack’ that had caused him severe pain. Writing some weeks later to her brother Augustus in Göttingen, Royal stressed ‘how ill our dear Papa has been. His complaint was very disagreeable and indeed alarming for the time that it lasted; the spasm beginning at three in the morning and continuing till eight in the evening.’3 Sir George Baker, the royal doctor, had been summoned – a measure in itself of how ill the king felt, for, as he told Fanny Burney, he ‘had a detestation of all physicians’ and was extremely averse to consulting them.

No one, least of all Sir George, had any idea what had caused the king’s sudden indisposition. ‘It is supposed,’ wrote the queen, ‘that the dryness and the heat of the season has occasioned these violent attacks, for everybody has been troubled with this complaint.’4 Once the initial spasm had subsided, Baker had little to offer, either as cure or preventative. The best he could suggest was a trip to Cheltenham to take the waters there, which were thought to be particularly effective in curing bilious complaints. The king was persuaded and, with his usual economy, borrowed a house from Lord Fauconberg, and on 12 July set off for the first real holiday he had taken in nearly thirty years. He had no doubt that ‘the efficacy of the waters, the salubrity of the air … and above all the exercise of riding and good mutton will do what may at present be wanting’.5

‘A smaller party for a royal excursion cannot be imagined,’ wrote Fanny Burney as she packed for the trip. The queen and her three eldest daughters were to accompany the king. Fanny and Miss Planta travelled with them; few other members of the household were invited. Even so, their departure was not achieved without the upheaval that was inseparable from all royal journeys. ‘We were all up at five o’clock,’ wrote Fanny, ‘and the noise and confusion reigning through the house and resounding all around it, from the quantities of people stirring, boxes nailing, horses neighing and dogs barking, was prodigious.’6 Once begun, the route westward was an adventure in itself. News of the excursion generated great interest amongst those living on its route, and Fanny noted that the crowd ‘waiting for the king and queen to pass was immense and almost unbroken, from Oxford to Cheltenham’. The many spectators were, she observed approvingly, remarkably well behaved: ‘So quiet, so decent, so silent … How unlike a London mob!’ In more populated places, the curiosity of eager sightseers was even more intense. ‘All the towns through which we passed were filled with people as closely fastened to one another as they appear in the pit of a playhouse. Every town seemed all face.’ Fanny’s goodwill did not, however, extend to the spontaneous musical tributes that accompanied the travellers, and which owed more to enthusiasm than skill. As the sister and daughter of musicians, her judgement was merciless. ‘All the way upon the road, we rarely proceeded five miles without encountering a band of most horrid fiddlers, scraping “God Save the King” with all their might, out of tune, and all in the rain.’7

When the royal party finally arrived at Cheltenham, Fanny was astonished to discover that Lord Fauconberg’s house was really very small for such grand occupants. The queen was unperturbed, showing Fanny to her room ‘in excellent spirits’. When Fanny commented on its lack of space, Charlotte assured her that she had seen nothing yet. ‘“Oh, stay,” cried she, laughing, “till you have seen your own before you call it little!”’8 Once squeezed into their accommodation, the family soon established the orderly routine the king and queen enjoyed. At six in the morning, the king and Royal went to the wells to drink the famous waters (Fanny tried them only once, finding that more than enough). Afterwards, George and Charlotte, together with the three princesses, promenaded together on the gravelled public walks that were at the heart of the town’s sedate social life. The king then took a morning walk, which he followed with a lengthy ride in the surrounding countryside. At four, he sat down to dinner and then ‘strolled out, like a citizen, with his wife and daughters, on the public walks after seven; and by eleven at night, everything was as completely hushed at Fauconberg Lodge than as at any farmhouse’.9 Sometimes the royal family stayed up late enough to attend Cheltenham’s small playhouse, much to the gratification of the locals. One night, the royal couple saw Mrs Jordan, the celebrated comic actress, perform; the king enjoyed it so much that he sent a present backstage to thank her for the pleasure she had given him. They did not know then that one day, through her long liaison with their third son William, she would provide them with ten illegitimate grandchildren.10

Venturing beyond Cheltenham, George and Charlotte saw, for the first time in their lives, something of the country over which they reigned. The king’s travels had previously been very circumscribed, taking him mainly across the southern English counties, for naval business at Portsmouth and the Nore (a base in the Thames estuary) and for military reviews on the southern plains. He visited Oxford twice, perhaps because it was so close to the home of the Harcourts in Nuneham Courtenay. The roads he knew best were those that linked Windsor, Kew and London. He never reached the north, Wales, Ireland or Scotland. But now George sought to extend his limited experience, exploring Worcester, where he and Charlotte attended the Three Choirs Festival, and Tewkesbury and Gloucester, where they inspected the cathedral. Not all their trips were to seek out culture or visit antiquities; George was equally keen to observe at first-hand evidence of industrial prosperity. ‘I am this instant returned from seeing the most beautiful sight I ever saw,’ he wrote eagerly to Pitt, ‘namely, the clothing country near Stroud; above 40,000 people were assembled and they all confess the trade is now brisker than the oldest person remembers.’11 So unusual were these royal journeys that the press covered the king’s movements with unprecedented and enthusiastic detail. ‘There is nothing, however minute and unimportant, that His Majesty does at Cheltenham but what the newspapers report to us daily,’ observed Anthony Storer, a politician of Whiggish sympathies, ‘so that we now know more about how he passes his time than if he were living at Buckingham House. He eats cherries, it is found out, like other men, but walks further than most.’12 Readers could also discover that George ordered bats and balls sent down to Cheltenham so that his servants could play cricket and keep themselves fit. The first royal holiday had, it seems, ushered into being the first royal news reporting.

The king told Sir George Baker that he felt better for his visit. ‘The waters certainly agree, they only give good spirits and appetite.’ They also delivered a more intimate outcome. ‘He finds’, George confided to his doctor – his use of the regal third person contrasting with the personal nature of the information – ‘that a pint and a half of the water is the proper quantity to give him two openings … he finds himself in better spirits and has never been obliged to take the rhubarb pills.’13 A few weeks into the trip, everyone around him thought the king completely recovered from his brief episode of illness. Fanny Burney noticed he had ‘a flow of spirits quite unequalled’ during his stay. She thought his decision to construct ‘a portable wooden house’, designed to accommodate his visiting son Frederick, for whom there was no room within Fauconberg Lodge, seemed eccentric and noted that it was pushed forward by the king with an almost manic intensity. But whatever was to be asserted in retrospect, Lady Harcourt was firm that she had seen nothing untoward in the king’s behaviour at Cheltenham. ‘Living with him as I did, in the most unreserved intimacy from six in the morning to eleven at night … I can most solemnly affirm that I never saw the least symptom of mental derangement, and that the king was invariably good-humoured, and often declared that from the beginning of his reign, he had never known such happiness as he then experienced, from the conviction of being loved by his people.’14

When the time came to leave, none of the party wanted to go home. ‘Melancholy, most melancholy was the return to Windsor,’ declared Fanny Burney on 16 August. She had enjoyed herself and did not look forward to the resumption of the old routine, ‘destitute of all that could solace, console or delight; replete with whatever could fatigue harass and depress!’15 The queen, too, was sad to depart, telling Augustus ruefully that ‘we are now returned from Cheltenham after a stay of nearly five weeks, and never did schoolboys enjoy their holidays equal to what we have done our little excursion’.16

Once back at Windsor, it was soon obvious that whatever good had been done for the king at Cheltenham was quickly ebbing away. In September, he confessed to Pitt that he did not feel himself and was again under the care of the doctors. He was well enough to celebrate Royal’s twenty-second birthday on 29 September with a concert and supper, which went off, Lady Harcourt loyally maintained, very cheerfully; but soon she too had heard that the king was ill again, this time complaining of a stubborn rash. Lady Harcourt recounted that on 12 October, after a day’s hunting, ‘he told Princess Elizabeth, from whom I had these particulars, that the rash upon his body was gone in, but that were some remains of it on his arm, which he showed her. She told me it looked very red, and in great weals, as if it had been scourged with cords. She advised him to take some care, but he disregarded the caution.’17 Against all advice, on 15 October, the king went to London to hold the levee at St James’s Palace. ‘He ate no dinner, as was frequently his custom on levee days,’ noted Lady Harcourt, ‘and having had no nourishment but a cup of coffee and a dry biscuit (his common breakfast) at nine in the morning, he went in the evening to the Hanoverian ambassador’s … there he ate several pears but nothing solid.’ The next day, the king was even more neglectful of himself. ‘Early in the morning when the dew was very strong upon the ground, His Majesty walked round Kew and Richmond gardens, and being afraid when he returned that he should hardly be in town time enough for the queen and princesses to be dressed for the Drawing Room, he only pulled off his boots, which were so wet that the water ran out of them, and without changing his stockings, got into the coach.’ The consequence of such thoughtlessness was, to eighteenth-century eyes, entirely predictable. ‘That night he was seized with spasms in his stomach and bowels which gave him the most excruciating pain.’18

The opposition Whig politician Sir Gilbert Elliot heard a similar account of the king’s illness, which he reported to his wife in terms far less respectful than those of Lady Harcourt. He too knew the story of the pears, the dew and the wet stockings, but he described what happened next in far greater detail. On returning from the levee, the queen ‘wished him to take some cordial, but Georgy boy liked his own way’ and refused:

He was unwell all evening, and went to bed at his usual hour. About one in the morning, he was seized violently with a cramp or some other violent thing in the stomach, which rendered him speechless, and in a word, was ‘all but’. The queen ran out in great alarm, in her shift, or with very little clothes, among the pages, who were at first retiring out of respect, but the queen stopped them and sent them instantly for the apothecary at Richmond, who arrived in about forty minutes, during which the king continued in the fit, and speechless.

Like the queen before him, the apothecary ‘tried to make him swallow something strong, but the king … still liked a bit of his own way, and rejected, by signs, everything of that sort. They contrived, however, to cheat him, and got some cordial down in the shape of medicine, and the fit went off.’19

Sir George Baker, who arrived the following morning, transcribed his own impressions into his diary: ‘I found the king sitting up in his bed, his body being bent forward. He complained of a very acute pain in the pit of the stomach, shooting to the back and sides and making respiration difficult.’ The king told Sir George that he had ‘of late been much troubled in the night by cramp in the muscles of his legs’ and that ‘he was lame, especially on first going out in the morning’. Baker did what any of his contemporaries would have done faced with a case such as this, and administered a purgative, a copious amount of castor oil and senna. But ‘the effect of this being too much’, he then gave him laudanum to counteract it. Baker noticed that there was also ‘some yellowness in the eyes, and urine bilious’.20 The king was now considered too ill to travel and the household’s planned departure from Kew to Windsor was postponed.

Fanny Burney had heard that the king was ill, but could get no clear information about his condition. She could see that the queen was uneasy, ‘but she talks not of it’. As the days passed and the stay at Kew was extended again and again, life there became increasingly uncomfortable. The attendants’ clothes had been sent to Windsor against their expected arrival and, as Fanny remarked, ‘as to books, there are not three among us’. In such miserable circumstances, Fanny could think of only one thing to occupy her increasingly anxious thoughts. ‘I have just begun a tragedy. We are now in so spiritless a situation that my mind will bend to nothing less sad, even in fiction.’21

The king himself was aware that he was not improving, and found his official duties increasingly beyond his strength. ‘I must admit,’ he told Pitt, ‘I have been so thoroughly fatigued by the medicines that continued active all night that it has required several hours for my reading my papers.’22 He still hoped for the best, but on 22 October his condition took a new and alarming turn. Sir George Baker attended him and prescribed his usual purgative. He was completely unprepared for what came next.

A few hours later, the king sent for Baker ‘to scold him, as he said, for giving him a medicine that always disagreed with him. His Majesty spoke with so much more warmth and displeasure than usual’ that Baker was completely taken aback.23 He confided to his diary how shocked he was by the king’s ‘very unusual manner’, of which ‘I had not the least expectation. The look of his eyes, the tone of his voice, every gesture and his whole deportment, represented a person in the most furious passion of anger. One medicine had been too powerful; another had only teased him without effect. The importation of senna ought to be prohibited, and he would give orders that in future it shall never be given to any of the royal family.’ Angrily repeating his complaints over and over again, the king kept Baker for nearly three hours and sent him away so concerned that the doctor wrote immediately to Pitt, ‘and informed him that I had just left the king in agitation of spirits bordering on a delirium’.24

The next day, the king seemed calmer; but the queen was now very worried about her husband’s condition. She asked Baker to urge him not to travel up to London for the levee as she knew he intended, but to stay and rest at Kew. George ignored the doctor’s advice. ‘I shall go to St James’s to show I am not as ill as some have thought,’ he wrote on the 24th.25 If it was intended ‘to quiet the fears of the people’, the king’s appearance in London was not a success. ‘It was remarked that he looked ill,’ reported Lady Harcourt, ‘and that his skin appeared muddled, as if there was an eruption under it that wanted to come out.’26 His dress was untidy, his speech hurried and agitated. The first minister was among those shocked by his looks, as the king did not fail to notice. He admitted that he no longer felt capable of attending to public business and instructed Pitt not to send him the usual dispatches for a week. He hoped to feel better soon.

Few shared his optimism. William Grenville, a member of Pitt’s administration, confessed to his brother that he and his Cabinet colleagues were now seriously worried by the king’s worsening condition. ‘We put as good a face as we can upon it; but I cannot but own to you that I think there is still ground for a good deal of alarm.’ His failure to rally so long after the original attack did not, in Grenville’s opinion, bode well. The physical symptoms were bad enough; but other aspects of his behaviour gave even more cause for alarm. ‘Part of the king’s disorder is an agitation and hurry of spirits which gives him hardly any rest … independently of the king’s great dislike of its being known that he is ill, we have the strongest reasons of policy … to wish that idea not to prevail.’27

Any serious hopes the government entertained of keeping the more unsettling aspects of the king’s illness secret were doomed. Throughout October, anyone who had dealings with him could not fail to notice a significant alteration in his behaviour. He was peevish and irritable. He had also become unstoppably voluble. ‘He now talked so much more than usual, and spoke to everybody on strange varieties of subjects. His incessant talking became at last so remarkable that it was thought necessary to recommend His Majesty to be a little more silent,’ wrote an observer.28

One night during this period, he waylaid Fanny Burney in a corridor at Kew. There she ‘had a sort of conference with His Majesty, or rather, I was the object to whom he spoke, with a manner so uncommon, that high fever alone could account for it; a rapidity, a hoarseness of voice, a volubility, an earnestness – a vehemence rather – it startled me inexpressibly’. She was at pains to stress that he was not a threatening figure: he behaved ‘with a graciousness exceeding all I have ever met with before – it was almost kindness!’, but the speed and eccentricity of his conversation puzzled her. She met him again the next day, and found him no better. ‘He stopped me and conversed upon his health for near half an hour with that extreme quickness of speech and manner that belongs to fever.’ He told her that he hardly slept ‘one minute all night’. He was desperate to convince Fanny that he was not really ill. ‘Nobody speaks of his illness,’ she noted, ‘nor what they think of it.’29 Although his physical symptoms had subsided, and he seemed well enough to undertake the journey to Windsor, nothing could dent his worrying loquacity.

In the midst of this climate of foreboding, ‘the queen grows more and more uneasy’. Fanny was not sure what to make of Charlotte’s oscillations between anxiety and glacial composure. ‘She alarms me, sometimes for herself, at other times has a sedateness that wonders me still more.’30 In the week to come, all Charlotte’s formidable powers of self-control would be tested to the utmost, but, as no one seemed to know what was wrong with her husband, or what to do about it, the long-delayed return to Windsor finally took place on 25 October. When the royal party arrived, all those who had assembled to greet the king were horrified by his disturbed state. ‘As the coach drew up to the door,’ wrote Lady Harcourt, ‘the king saw his four youngest daughters waiting to receive him, and was so overcome that he had a hysteric fit.’ The sight of their father, usually so assured and so dignified, in a state of extreme agitation was not what they, or any of those around them, had been expecting. ‘His children and attendants were all struck with the alteration in his looks, and he said to Colonel Goldsworthy, one of the equerries who had always had a great share of his confidence and favour, “I return to you a poor old man, weak in body and mind.”’31 This was the first occasion that the king acknowledged that his illness went beyond the purely physical, and ‘from this time’, wrote Lady Harcourt, ‘he allowed that his disorder was nervous’.32

This confession was especially hard for a man who, as Lady Harcourt recalled, ‘had always laughed at the idea of nervous disorders’. She herself had ‘often been the object of his pleasantry upon this subject’; Lady Harcourt’s mother had suffered from ‘nervousness’, a term which the king dismissed, telling Lady Harcourt that ‘“You may talk of them as you please, but the complaints you call nervous appear to me to be only to a greater or lesser degree, insanity.” Of what really deserved that name, he had a greater horror than any person I have ever conversed with.’ He had, Lady Harcourt recalled, ‘almost expressed a wish for the death of persons for whom he has had a regard, from the apprehension that such a dreadful calamity was hereditary in their family’.33 This deep-seated revulsion at the very idea of insanity can only have made the king’s next few days even more terrifying to him, as his inability to control his actions became increasingly pronounced. On Sunday the 26th, he went with his family to the service at the chapel at Windsor. ‘Just before the sermon started, he seemed to have lost all power over himself, embraced the queen and the princesses and then burst into tears.’ The royal pew was an enclosed one, and no one outside it could see the king’s distress; but his daughters were, as usual, witnesses to his disturbed and desperate behaviour. The king said to Princess Elizabeth: ‘You know what it is to be nervous, but was you ever as bad as this?’ When she was fifteen, Elizabeth had endured a series of debilitating ‘spasms’ which had laid her low for many months. She had made a full recovery, and her symptoms had been very different from those her father displayed, but she knew what was expected of her. ‘With great presence of mind,’ observed Lady Harcourt approvingly, ‘she answered, “Yes,”’ and gradually the king calmed down.34

The queen was now worried enough to ask Sir George Baker to attend the king without having sought his permission to do so, a considerable step for a woman in whom deference to her husband’s wishes was so deeply ingrained. The doctor watched George closely during a concert, and observed that ‘he talked continually, making frequent and sudden transitions from one subject to another’, but he noted there was ‘no incoherence in what he said, nor any mark of false perception’.35 Clinging on to this sliver of good news, the queen tried hard to keep up some semblance of normal life. On the 28th, she went with the king to visit their old friend Lady Effingham. During their stay, Charlotte thought she had observed ‘particular agitation’ in his behaviour, and his talking continued at the same frantic pace as ever. On the 29th, Baker arrived to take another look at his patient, discovering him again at a concert, but enjoying it far less than he had on the previous occasion. Music was no longer the pleasure it had always been for him: ‘It seems to affect my head; it is with some difficulty I hear it.’ He now confessed to Baker ‘that his vision was confused, that whenever he attempted to read, a red mist floated before his eyes, and intercepted the objects’.36

In the face of such confusing symptoms, Baker had little to say. He was sure the king was no longer feverish, although he continued to attribute his distracted behaviour to delirium. His lameness and general physical debility were, he hoped, the consequences of ‘an unformed gout’, which had yet to reveal itself and settle recognisably in a distinct part of the body. A diagnosis of gout would, at this stage, have been regarded as a great relief, but Baker looked for its familiar presentation in vain. He was uncertain but still emollient, assuring the worried queen that ‘the king was certainly very ill, but that there was nothing that alarmed him’.37

The king, however, was not convinced; he kicked his foot against his heel, arguing that ‘they make me believe I have the gout, but if it was gout, how could I kick the part without any pain?’38 Lady Harcourt thought he had drawn his own conclusions about what was happening to him, ‘for much of his conversation seemed as if he intended to prepare the queen and princesses for some fatal event’.39 He made a new will, and began to set his papers in order. The queen urged him to take courage, declaring that ‘she thought everybody ought to bear up under their afflictions, and that she had a confidence in God not inflicting more than we are able to bear’. In response, ‘he took her round the waist and said, “Then you are prepared for the worst.”’40

The queen’s spirits must have been cast down by the king’s pessimistic sense of what was to come. She was also made increasingly anxious by the central role she had begun to play in her husband’s disordered mind. On their first return to Windsor, the king had told Lady Effingham that although he took all the medicines prescribed for him, it was to his wife that he looked for real improvement. ‘The queen is my physician, and no man need have a better; she is my friend, and no man can have a better.’ Fanny Burney, who witnessed this passionate affirmation, found it very moving; but an avowal that Fanny found ‘touching’, expressed as it was ‘in his hoarse voice and altered countenance’, might just as easily have seemed unsettling in its single-minded intensity. The queen’s misgivings about her husband’s behaviour could only have been made worse by the events of the night of 1 November. When Fanny arrived at Charlotte’s bedroom to undress her, the king was already there, as insistent and anxious as ever. ‘He was begging her not to speak to him when he got to his own room, that he might fall asleep, as he felt great want of that refreshment. He repeated this desire, I believe, at least a hundred times, though far from needing it, the poor queen never uttered one syllable!’ The ‘kindness and benevolence of his manner’ made no difference at all to the queen’s frozen, mute response; nor did his declaration that he ‘had no wish but to set the queen at rest’.41 Charlotte now seemed paralysed with shock at the man her husband had become.

On 2 November, the king went out for an airing in his carriage with Royal and Augusta. It was at this moment, in this distracted condition, that he explained why he had not sought husbands for them and promised to make amends by taking them to Hanover as soon as he was better, where they could choose any princely partners they wished for themselves. ‘There was nothing improper in what he said,’ maintained Lady Harcourt, implying that perhaps improper things had been said before now, ‘yet he spoke with a degree of eagerness that was very disturbing to the princesses.’42

An atmosphere of heightened tension engulfed the entire household. ‘We are all here in a most uneasy state,’ wrote Fanny Burney. The king had given up any pretence at keeping ‘the punctuality he used to observe in respect of hours’. Meals went uneaten on the table; ‘the drinking coffee and the concert were deferred beyond their usual time, nor could he be prevailed upon to go to bed before two o’clock in the morning’. On eventually retiring, his attention always focussed on Charlotte. ‘When he went to the queen’s room, he was particularly anxious to see that all the doors were locked,’ wrote Lady Harcourt, who added obliquely that ‘precautions had however been taken, and two pages attended in the passage to go in if necessary’.43

The following day, 3 November, was Princess Sophia’s eleventh birthday, but her mother was in no state to celebrate anything. ‘The queen is almost overpowered with some secret terror,’ wrote Fanny, appalled to see Charlotte’s much-tried self-control slipping away from her. ‘I am affected beyond all expression in her presence, to see what struggles she makes to support serenity. Today, she gave up the conflict when I was with her, and broke into a violent fit of tears. It was very, very terrible to see.’44 Hour after hour the queen walked up and down her room, without uttering a single word. The king’s very appearance had become a source of horror to her. She told Lady Harcourt that ‘his eyes she could compare to nothing but blackcurrant jelly; the veins in his face were swelled, the sound of his voice was dreadful; he often spoke till he was exhausted, and the moment he could recover his breath, began again, while the foam ran out of his mouth’.45

It was on 5 November – ‘O dreadful day!’, as Fanny Burney called it – that the storm which had been brewing since mid-October finally broke over the family’s heads. At noon, the king went out in a carriage with the Princess Royal. Fanny watched him leave from her window. He seemed cheerful and smiling; ‘but he gave so many orders to the postillions, and got in and out of the carriage twice with such agitation’ that she grew more worried. When she arrived at the queen’s rooms, she found her spirits ‘worse and worse’. Charlotte had been ‘greatly offended by some anecdote in a newspaper – the Morning Herald – relative to the king’s indisposition. She bid me burn the paper,’ and ruminated on who could be sent to tell the editor how close to treason he approached.46

In the evening, Fanny dined alone with Miss Planta. Neither had much to say. ‘A stillness most uncommon reigned over the whole house. Nobody stirred, not a voice was heard, not a motion.’ Then, at seven o’clock, Fanny’s servant came to tell them that ‘the music was all forbid, and the musicians ordered away! … I could not understand this prohibition; all seemed stranger and stranger.’ Finally, Mr Digby – Fanny’s favourite equerry – came in and asked her if she knew what had happened, ‘whether I was yet acquainted how bad all was become, and how ill the king … Oh, my dear friends,’ wrote Fanny, ‘what a history!’47

Gradually she pieced together an account of what had taken place while she and Miss Planta had eaten in anxious silence. Earlier that evening, the royal family had gathered for dinner. The Prince of Wales and Frederick, Duke of York, had come down from London to join them, perhaps hoping to assess their father’s condition at first hand. Lady Harcourt heard that the king had raised the emotional temperature from the outset by telling the duke with great feeling ‘that he loved him so well it was not in his power to refuse him anything except where the Prince of Wales was concerned; and that though he had been ill used by him, he was his son and should always love him’. As the king’s loud and uncomfortable declarations rolled on and on, his wife and children sat horrified around the table, with no idea what to do next. The Prince of Wales, Lady Harcourt said, was so upset ‘that he was almost convulsed, and Princess Elizabeth was obliged to rub his temples with Hungary water; but neither this, nor the whole party being drowned in tears appeared to have the least affect upon the king’.48 From Digby, Fanny Burney heard even more distressing details that Lady Harcourt had perhaps tactfully omitted from her story. ‘The king, at dinner had broken forth into positive delirium, which had long been menacing all who saw him most closely; and the queen was so overpowered as to fall into violent hysterics; all the princesses were in misery, and the Prince of Wales had burst into tears.’49 The prince later told Lord Jersey that his father had thrown him against the wall in a paroxysm of rage.

The queen’s tribulations had not stopped with dinner. Lady Harcourt described how she had left the ghastly dining table, ‘having put a constraint on herself beyond what she had the strength to support’, and when she reached the privacy of her room, she collapsed. Soon the king arrived in pursuit of her. Her lady-in-waiting attempted to tell him that she was ill and could not see him, but George would not be deterred, declaring that he would take care of her himself. ‘Presently,’ reported Lady Harcourt,

the king proposed moving Her Majesty into the drawing room where he made a sort of bed upon one of the sofas, and placed her upon it; he then fixed where each of the princesses should sit, and ordered all candles, except two to be put out. Sometimes he hung over the queen with the kindest solicitude, at others he talked to his children with the most paternal fondness, yet in all he said and did, the strongest marks of a deranged mind were visible … it was not until past twelve that he could be prevailed upon to let the queen retire to her apartment.50

Allowed at last to go to bed, the queen summoned Fanny Burney, who had been waiting over two hours for the call. ‘My poor royal mistress! Never can I forget her countenance – pale, ghastly pale she looked.’ Charlotte sat unmoving and silent, waiting to be undressed. Fanny was herself so nervous that she could do little to help, ‘my shaking hands and blinded eyes could scarce be of any use’. Eventually the queen spoke. ‘“How cold I am,” she cried, and put her hand on mine; marble it felt! And went to my heart’s core!’51 The ladies could hear the king talking in the bedroom adjoining Charlotte’s. ‘He would not be further removed.’ Fanny was now dismissed, with Miss Goldsworthy, ‘by the king’s direction’, appointed to stay with the queen.

An hour later, the king returned. ‘About one o’clock,’ reported Lady Harcourt, ‘he came into her room; he had not been in bed; he shut the door, and going to the chimney, he took up the light, and then went to the bedside; he held the light to the queen’s face and said, “Yes I am not deceived. I thought she would not leave me.”’ He then turned to Miss Goldsworthy, who was lying on the bed next to the queen, and added, ‘“Gooly, you are honest, I can depend on you, you will take care of her. They said the king was ill, he was not ill; but now the queen is ill, he is ill too.” He then put down the light and walked fast round the room.’ Finding her voice at last, ‘Her Majesty entreated him to take some rest; and he left her, shutting the door with violence, and locking it.’52 Fanny Burney heard the next day – perhaps from the queen herself – that the king had ‘stayed a full half-hour’ watching her in bed. ‘The depth of terror during that time no words can paint. The fear of another such entrance was now so strongly upon the nerves of the queen that she could hardly support herself.’53 In fact, this was the last time Charlotte would see her husband for six weeks.

*

In the early dawn of 6 November, Fanny ‘dressed in haste by candlelight, and … stole along the passage in the dark’ to go to the queen. Miss Goldsworthy ushered her inside. As soon as she saw Charlotte, Fanny burst into tears, overcome by the queen’s misery. ‘She looked like death, colourless and wan; but nature is infectious; the tears gushed from her own eyes, and a perfect agony of weeping ensued, which, once begun, she could not stop … when it subsided, and she wiped her eyes, she said “I thank you Miss Burney for making me cry; it is a great relief to me – I had not been able to cry before, all this night long.”’54 Despite her prostrate condition, there was no question of the queen moving to a less exposed location – she had been advised by the doctors not to do so ‘lest the king be offended that she did not go to him’ – so she, Fanny Burney and Miss Goldsworthy sat immured in her dressing room, forced to listen to the king next door. ‘He kept talking incessantly; his voice was so lost in hoarseness and weakness that it was rendered almost inarticulate.’ Its tone was, Fanny insisted, ‘all benevolence – all kindness – all touching graciousness’, but that did nothing to calm Charlotte. ‘She would not let me leave her now; she made me remain in the room and ordered me to sit down. I was too trembling to refuse.’ Together, the women heard the king repeatedly berating his doctors. ‘I am nervous,’ he cried, ‘I am not ill, but I am nervous; if you would know what is the matter with me, I am nervous.’55 The princesses asked permission to come and join their mother, but she refused. ‘She burst into tears and declared she could neither see them, nor pray while in this dreadful situation, expecting every moment to be broken in upon, and quite uncertain in what manner.’ Fear of what the king might do next had filled her with alarm. ‘Who could tell to what height the delirium might rise? There was no constraint, no power; all feared the worst, yet none dared take any measures for security.’56

Gossip circulating beyond Windsor suggested an even darker explanation for Charlotte’s frightened hysteria. Writing in late November, James Bland Burges, a politician with connections to the royal household, reported a disturbing story he had heard: ‘The first symptom of the king’s madness was his running naked into the queen’s room, he insisted upon throwing her on the bed and that the women in the room should stand by to see whether he did well.’ A few days later, Burges recorded that the king ‘seized the Princess Royal, and attempted to ravish her. She was rescued from him with great difficulty, and he was at such a rage at his disappointment as to strike the queen.’ Burges claimed as authority for the account Dr Majendie, an habitué of the royal household, ‘who was at Windsor when the affair happened’.57 It is impossible now to establish the truth of Burges’s allegations, but if nothing else, they illustrate the atmosphere of panic that had gripped Windsor, transforming it into a place where anything might be said to have happened.

It was at this point that Sir George Baker’s nerve failed him. Faced with a visibly deteriorating patient whose sickness seemed to follow no recognisable pattern, he declared he was not equal to managing the king alone. In the vacuum of all other authority, the twenty-six-year-old Prince of Wales took the decision to call in another physician, and summoned Dr Richard Warren. ‘From this fatal step,’ Lady Harcourt believed, ‘many of the evils that followed resulted.’58

In 1788, Richard Warren was considered to be at the very top of the medical profession. Even Lady Harcourt, who disliked him, did not deny that he was a clever man of undoubted skill; but she also thought him supercilious and arrogant, with ‘that sort of inflexible firmness that is rarely found in a feeling heart’. When it suited him to do so, he could be charming. He was especially skilled at dealing with wealthy female patients, to whom he judiciously recommended the kind of treatment they would have chosen for themselves, ‘dissipation in winter … and a spell at the watering place they liked best in summer’. In the light of such accommodating prescriptions, he had built himself a fashionable and very lucrative practice. He was extremely rich, and Lady Harcourt heard that he sometimes lent his patients money. When he looked at his own tongue in the mirror each morning, he was reputed to transfer a guinea from one pocket to another. But all of this paled into insignificance before Warren’s real besetting sin in the eyes of the king’s friends. His patients were drawn almost entirely from among the great Whig aristocrats, the Dukes of Devonshire and Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam and Charles James Fox. These men formed the opposition to the administration of William Pitt, the government party endorsed by the king. ‘Through their protection,’ wrote Lady Harcourt, ‘Dr Warren came to know the Prince of Wales and Carlton House [the prince’s London home] soon afforded him an ample field for the display of his talents in political intrigue.’59

None of Warren’s qualities, personal or political, was such as to commend him to the king, and when he arrived later that day, George refused point blank to see him. Undaunted, Warren eavesdropped on the king from outside his room, where he could hear all that he said. The queen had not been consulted about the summoning of Warren, ‘and would never have consented to the calling in of a physician for whom the king had a particular objection’, but now he was there, she was desperate to know what he thought about her husband’s condition. She waited ‘in dread incessant’ but ‘he neither came nor sent’. A message to Sir George Baker begging him for news was rebuffed: ‘he would not speak alone’. Eventually, Charlotte sent one of her ladies to find the recalcitrant doctor, but she returned with the appalling news that Warren had already left the house. ‘Run! Stop him!’ she said. ‘Let me but know what I am to do!’60

Charlotte was devastated to discover that rather than calling on her, Warren had instead gone straight to report to the Prince of Wales. There could have been no clearer demonstration of the speed with which her world was collapsing. As her husband’s authority fell away, that of her son grew by the hour. In a single day, the internal balance of the family had been completely overturned, and her position rendered entirely provisional.

Fifteen minutes later, Colonel Goldsworthy arrived in her room to bring the message which none of the physicians had been prepared to deliver themselves: ‘Her Majesty should remove to a more distant apartment, since the king would undoubtedly be worse from the agitation of seeing her.’61 Privately, Warren told the prince he believed ‘the king’s life to be in the utmost danger, and declared that the seizure upon the brain was so violent that, if he did live, there was little reason to hope that his intellects would be restored’.62 If this was what the queen suspected, no one discussed it with her.

Taken to her new room, which Fanny Burney noticed had only a single door, making it easier perhaps to secure against intrusion, she entirely lost control of her feelings. ‘The poor wretched queen once more gave way to a perfect agony of grief and affliction, while the words “What will become of me! What will become of me!” uttered in the most piercing lamentation struck deep and hard into all our hearts.’ After nearly thirty years of marriage, a life beyond the all-encompassing presence and authority of her husband was unthinkable to Charlotte; the raw incomprehension of her cries suggests she could imagine no other way of being. ‘Never can I forget their desponding sound,’ wrote Fanny with a heavy heart; ‘they implied such complicated apprehensions.’ In her extremity, she at last agreed to see her daughters. ‘The three elder hastened down. Oh, what a meeting! They all, from a habit that is become second nature, struggled to repress all outward grief, though the queen herself, wholly overcome, wept even aloud.’63 For the princesses, the obligation to support their mother took precedence over the anguish they themselves must have felt. Even in the worst of times, their emotions did not come first.

In his part of the house, the king continually asked for the queen and his daughters, but ‘they were not allowed to go to him, under the pretence’, as Lady Harcourt asserted, ‘that they would agitate him’. But if that was indeed the doctors’ policy, it was a very ineffective one. The king’s enforced isolation did nothing to calm him; on the contrary, Sir Gilbert Elliot heard that the king ‘was extremely impatient under this separation, and was indeed violent and outrageous in his attempts to get to [the queen’s] apartments. He once forced his way to her door, and finding the outer door made fast, he was near crying and said, “Surely they might have thought one door enough to stop me?”’64

By the next day, 7 November, he was so agitated that ‘four men were obliged to be constantly by his bed to prevent his jumping out of it’.65 The well-informed Cabinet member William Grenville wrote to his brother that ‘the king has now been two days entirely delirious, and during part of that time, has been thought to be in the most imminent danger’. The doctors seemed helpless, unable to say whether recovery or death was the most likely outcome. ‘The other alternative is one to which one cannot look without horror – that of a continuance of the present derangement of his faculties.’66

Now Pitt himself came hurrying down to Windsor to confer with the Prince of Wales. He returned to London in a bleak frame of mind, penning a memorandum that concluded, in the light of all he had heard, ‘that on the whole, there was more ground to fear than to hope, and more reason to apprehend durable insanity than death’.67 To others, death itself looked pretty close. Jack Payne, the comptroller of the Prince of Wales’s household, heard late that night ‘that all articulation even seems to be at an end with the poor king’. The Archbishop of Canterbury was ready to attend him, ‘but he is not required to come down, it being thought too late’.68 ‘His recovery is hopeless,’ echoed Elliot, ‘but he may linger a few days … The queen’, he added, almost as an afterthought, ‘does not now see him; the state of his head probably rendering the scene too painful to her.’69

Isolated, desperate and with no idea what to do next, Charlotte effectively gave up. ‘She lived entirely in her two rooms, and spent the days in patient sorrow and retirement with her daughters.’ Fanny Burney felt helpless to comfort her. There seemed nothing to do but sit and wait. ‘Even my melancholy resource, my tragedy, was now thrown aside. Misery so actual, so living and present, was knit too closely around me to allow my depressed imagination to fancy any woe beyond what my heart felt.’70

On 9 November, it was widely reported that the king had died. ‘The belief was universal throughout the metropolis,’ maintained a contemporary pamphlet, ‘that His Majesty was no more, and that the awful event was withheld from publication.’ Even Lady Harcourt found it impossible to discover whether the rumours she too had heard were true, so hard was it to ‘procure authentic information’. The doctors issued no bulletins. Gilbert Elliot was convinced that this was a deliberate policy, intended to hide the reality of the king’s illness from the public. ‘The physicians … talk of fever, but I am inclined to believe he has never yet had any fever, in the common acceptance of the word, and that they avail themselves of some occasional quickness of the pulse to avoid the true nature of his distemper.’71 On 12 November, Dr Warren wrote to Lady Spencer, one of his Whig grandee friends, offering the diagnosis that many had begun to fear was both accurate and inevitable: ‘Rex noster insanit; nulla adsunt febris signa; nulla mortis venturae indicia.’ Cloaked in the deliberate obscurity of Latin, Warren stated his opinion that the king was mad, that there was no sign of fever, and no danger to life.

What had caused the king’s sudden descent into madness the doctors did not know. In mid-November, Warren told Pitt that they had ruled out ‘the idea of its proceeding from some local cause … such as water on the brain, or by some change in the texture of the brain itself, by induration or ossification’. Shortly afterwards, Pitt passed on to his Cabinet colleague Grenville the doctors’ first, tentative explanation for the king’s condition. ‘The cause to which they all agree to ascribe it, is the force of a humour which was beginning to show itself in his legs, when the king’s imprudence drove it from thence into his bowels; and the medicines they were then obliged to use for the preservation of his life, have repelled it upon the brain. The physicians are now endeavouring by warm baths and by great warmth of covering, to bring it down again into the legs, which nature had originally pointed out as the best mode of discharge.’72

From this diagnosis derived virtually all the medical treatment which the king received over the next five months. Some of the procedures were benign, if useless, such as the ‘prescribing of carded wool and woollen bootikins applied to the king’s feet’; other, more invasive techniques were positively dangerous. Throughout his illness, the doctors sought to raise blisters on the king’s legs as a method of drawing out the malign humour that had settled on his brain. To do so, they used an irritant made from Spanish fly applied as a mustard plaster. This caused eruptions on the skin, which, when infected, discharged pus. Contained in this pus, the doctors believed, were the humours which had caused the sickness, and though unpleasant, blistering was therefore vital in effecting a cure. In practice, the discharging pustules were not only extremely painful, but potentially very harmful. In an age before antibiotics, any infection could, and often did, result in very serious consequences for the patient; to introduce one deliberately was, in retrospect, an act of astonishing recklessness. Blistering also added hugely to the discomfort and misery of the invalid; in every case, it would have been better to have done nothing at all than to have subjected sick and anxious patients to a procedure which could only weaken and distress them.

Yet none of the king’s doctors were deliberately cruel, or indeed, by the standards of their day, uninformed. Sir George Baker was president of the Royal College of Physicians, and highly regarded for his application of rational scientific method to medical investigation. He had made his reputation by proving that ‘the endemic colic of his native Devonshire’ had been caused by the contamination of cider with lead.73 For all his fashionable manner and titanic self-regard, Richard Warren too was a serious physician who would not have risen to the top of his profession without significant medical skill. They were unable either to diagnose or treat the king’s illness not because they were ignorant or wilful, but because it was probably caused by a physiological condition unknown – and indeed unknowable – to them.

It was not until the 1930s that porphyria was eventually identified as an illness. It is a metabolic disorder caused by a genetic malfunction that alters the body’s chemistry, resulting in the overproduction of toxins which impact severely on the operation of the nervous system. Porphyrins are the purple-red pigments that give blood its colour. When too many of them are produced, they effectively poison the patient, causing pain and weakness in the limbs, impeding the automatic activities of digestive and respiratory functions, and sometimes affecting the brain, interfering with vision and producing sleeplessness, excitement and confusion.

In 1969, Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, a mother and son team, both psychiatrists with an interest in the history of mental illness, first linked the disease – which they termed ‘acute intermittent porphyria’ – to George III’s malady. Their highly influential book George III and the Mad-Business swept away years of conflicting interpretations of what ailed the king, replacing them with a diagnosis still accepted by many historians as the most convincing explanation. They identified a number of the king’s symptoms, particularly his discoloured, purple-hued urine, as indications that he was suffering from porphyria. Noting that it was an inherited disorder, they examined the medical histories of several of George’s ancestors, including Mary Queen of Scots, her son James I and grandson Henry, Prince of Wales, who died young, and concluded that they too had been affected by the condition. They speculated on whether some of the king’s more immediate relatives, including his youngest sister Caroline, might also have died from it.

However, more recent research has questioned many of their findings, arguing that ‘the porphyria diagnosis was based on weak foundations, bolstered by indiscriminate aggregation of symptoms and suppression of contrary indicators’. In a scholarly article written in 2010, T. J. Peters and D. Wilkinson conclude that ‘it remains very unlikely that the king was suffering from porphyria’. Peters and Wilkinson dispute many of the connections made by Macalpine and Hunter between the symptoms presented by the king and porphyria. They suggest that the hoarseness from which he suffered was more likely to be caused by incessant talking than by the disease, as loss of voice in a porphyric case indicated that the condition was so advanced and severe that, in the eighteenth century, it would ‘almost certainly be a prelude to death’. They argue that the lameness and limb pains from which the king suffered were spasmodic, and at other times he was capable of great strength and energy. They even dispute the well-known linkage between the discoloured urine produced by the king and the diagnosis, claiming that the relatively few examples cited by Macalpine and Hunter of this occurrence were subject to other interpretations, and that there were simply not enough of them to confirm a conclusion. The urine of a genuinely porphyric patient would have been noticeably and more consistently discoloured, evident to all the doctors treating the king. In rejecting the diagnosis of porphyria, Peters and Wilkinson were initially cautious about offering an alternative explanation: ‘It appears very unlikely that the king was suffering from porphyria, and therefore the causes of his “madness” remain an unsolved mystery.’74

In a further article, Timothy Peters and co-author Allan Beveridge moved towards a different interpretation of the illness. Examining some of the early material collected by Sir George Baker, they concluded that the king had probably suffered initially from ‘recurrent episodes of obstructive jaundice’.75 This may have triggered some of his initial agitation, but for Peters and Beveridge, George’s later behaviour is best understood as primarily a mental condition. They attribute it to late-onset ‘bipolar disorder with recurrent manic episodes’, arguing that the king’s successive bouts of illness were often linked to periods of extreme stress in his public life.76 In this reading, the ‘royal malady’ was indeed, as was widely maintained at the time, a psychiatric rather than physiological disorder.

If, even now, there is such disagreement about the causes of the king’s condition, it is hardly surprising that George’s doctors were baffled and confused by his wildly fluctuating state. If the disease was porphyria, they could have done very little to control it. It still has no cure, and is treated by careful management of lifestyle; significantly, avoidance of stress is seen as an important contributor to the wellbeing of patients. In the late eighteenth century, there was nothing that could have been done for the king, except perhaps to leave him alone and hope for spontaneous recovery, as the severity of the attack receded. If his illness was a recurring psychiatric disorder, given the state of contemporary understanding of mental health, a do-nothing approach might also have been the best prescription for George’s care. Instead, as they sought to make sense of a sickness that seemed to respond to none of their remedies, the king’s doctors subjected him to months of painful and humiliating treatment that could deliver no effective result.

At Windsor, the Prince of Wales was now in charge. ‘Nothing was done but by his orders,’ noted Fanny Burney mournfully. Almost his first action was to place the house under a kind of informal exclusion zone. To avoid the spread of damaging speculation and gossip, he directed that no one was to be allowed entry who was not already in residence. No exceptions were made. Even Lady Harcourt, one of George and Charlotte’s oldest and most trusted friends, was denied admission. When Leonard Smelt, another of the king’s inner circle and once the prince’s tutor, was also turned away, he was so angry that he went straight back home to Yorkshire. ‘From this time commenced a total banishment from all intercourse out of the house,’ recorded Fanny, ‘and an unremitting confinement within its walls.’77 She herself was one of the confined, and barely went outdoors.

Kept away from his family, and denied the opportunity to see his friends, George’s world too had become much smaller since 5 November. The doctors visited regularly, but more as perplexed observers than to offer coherent advice. The daily management of the king was left in the hands of his pages and his equerries: Mr Digby, Colonel Goldsworthy, General Harcourt (the brother-in-law of Lady Harcourt) and the soldier and former MP Robert Fulke Greville.

Greville, unusually for a man entirely free of literary pretension, kept a detailed diary during the gruelling months of his attendance on the king. He spent more time with him than anyone else during the worst of his disorder, and his journal consistently provides the most illuminating insights into George’s shifting state of mind and body. Greville was a straightforward, unpretentious character of the kind the king liked best. He was an aristocrat, the third son of the Earl of Warwick (in her journals, Fanny Burney called him ‘Colonel Wellbred’). He was passionately fond of horses and riding and, like the king, took an informed interest in agriculture. He probably would have described himself – approvingly – as a simple man, but his diary reveals a thoughtful, independent and subtle mind. He knew the king better than any of the medical attendants now around him, and consequently understood how profound had been the change in the very essence of his personality. He was often sceptical of the value of the treatment he saw George endure, but appreciated more than most how wild and unmanageable he could be, and how necessary it was to take some measures to control him. Like everyone else, he was puzzled by the vertiginous speed of the king’s decline, and by the extreme swings in his mood; but even in the blackest moments, he never lost a sense of affection for a man whom, in happier times, he had clearly liked, and who had clearly liked him.

In its very first pages, Greville’s diary captures with stark clarity just how disturbed the king had become. He slept very badly, rarely more than two or three hours at a time, and never stopped talking. He had occasional moments of clarity, but these were inevitably succeeded by acute confusion. ‘I saw him this night sit up and eat his posset, and afterwards take his draught,’ he wrote on 11 November. ‘The former he ate well, and seemed as composed as ever, but the ramblings continued and were more wild than ever, amounting, alas, to an almost total suspension of reason – No sleep tonight – The talking incessant throughout.’78 On the 12th, the king was quiet in the morning, but by eleven o’clock, ‘he became more loud and his voice more exerted than I had ever heard it, and he became much agitated and the subjects changed. He now talked much of Eton College, of the boys rowing, etc., but everything he mentioned was with great hurry and exertion.’ This lasted for two hours, at the end of which, ‘in a violent perspiration, he called to have the windows opened and complained of burning’.79

Later in the day, lying on his bed, he seems to have suffered convulsions: ‘HM had a violent struggle, jerking very strongly with his arms and legs, but made no attempt to rise.’ Afterwards, Greville noticed he was almost himself for a while, ‘asking if he might have clean linen … and on one of his pages offering to assist him in putting on his flannel waistcoat, he said, “No, sir, I can do that myself when I have the use of my own hands.”’80

On the 13th, encouraged by such episodes of lucidity, even the cautious Greville began to wonder if the king was indeed improving. ‘He awoke with more composure and recollection than he had obtained since his illness and remained for a longer time so. He drank his tea and ate his bread and butter with appetite – he knew everybody and conversed rationally with all. He arranged his watches and seemed more cheerful and more like himself, and we all entertained hopes of much good and amendment.’ But as the night came on, his delirium returned. The king woke at two in the morning, ‘and alas, at waking, his ramblings returned, and dampened our eager hopes’.81

Even the slenderest grounds for optimism were earnestly seized on by Fanny Burney when they filtered back to her apartments at the other end of the house. When yet another doctor was added to the ‘medical tribe’ in attendance, Fanny lost no time in buttonholing him. The new man, Sir Lucas Pepys, was what Fanny called ‘a hoper’. He gave her ‘such unequivocal assurances of the king’s recovery’ that she ran immediately to the queen’s rooms to pass on the good news. She found few takers for her encouraging information. ‘I waited in the passage where I met Lady Charlotte Finch, and tried what I could to instil in her mind the hopes I entertained; this however, was not possible; a general despondency prevailed throughout the house, and Lady Charlotte was infected with it very deeply.’ When at last she saw the queen, she could do nothing to lighten her mood. Her positive account ‘was received most meekly by the most patient of sorrowers’.82

The queen was right to be cautious. On the 15th, George’s condition was worse again. Greville no longer believed he was getting any better, partly because the king now insisted he was fully restored to health. ‘He has spoke much of his recovery, observing (poor man) that he has been very ill, but that he is well now, and says that he has been light-headed.’ But his behaviour contradicted his words. He spent the day issuing hollow and confusing orders, in a parody of his usual regal role, telling Colonel Goldsworthy ‘to go to Eton to order the boys a holiday on account of his recovery – To prepare the queen for the firing of the guns at twelve o’clock on the same occasion, and ordering the Dettingen Te Deum to be sung in church, etc., etc.’83 Later in the evening, ‘sensible (without prompting) that he was talking very fast’, in an attempt to slow himself down, he decided to make use of the royal third person. ‘“The king did so” – “the king thinks so” – etc. This correction he thus explained, “I speak in the third person as I am getting into Mr Burke’s eloquence, saying too much on little things.”’84 General Harcourt told his wife that the king ‘spoke without ceasing from one o’clock this morning, and when Warren told him he ought not to do so, he said, “I know that as well as you, it is my complaint, cure me of that and I shall be well.”’85 By 18 November, his voice was rasping and he had developed ‘a catch in his throat’, but still his conversation rolled unstoppably on, ‘one subject succeeded by another before the one begun was finished’.86

Robert Greville observed that, despite all his difficulties, the king had not yet become an abject or broken figure. He was used to being obeyed, and did not easily surrender the ability to exert his will. ‘I think I foresee from late occurrences that HM will ere long give more trouble to his attendants than hitherto,’ wrote Greville gloomily. He thought a struggle for mastery was inevitable. ‘HM, from being somewhat recovered in bodily strength, believes himself to be almost well, and in consequence, now tries to command, and struggles hard for obedience.’ Even getting the king to take a bath turned into a process of negotiation: ‘he proposed terms if he took it’.87 He attempted to regulate every last detail of Greville’s dress and behaviour. ‘He has ordered how I shall be dressed and where stationed in my next watch – I am ordered to be in the room adjoining his own apartment, to be dressed in a plain coat and to be very neat.’ More ominously, ‘he has asked for the Master Key of the Queen’s Lodge and he battles hard and very often to prevail in having it delivered to him’.88

Attempts to shave the king proved equally difficult. The king insisted he would not be shaved; after much argument he finally consented, ‘but when half shaved, he refused to let the other half be finished, unless certain indulgences were granted’. More argument took place, during which the king ‘remained half shaved, a singular appearance as he had not been shaved for upwards of a fortnight’. Eventually the king was persuaded to allow one of his pages, Mrs Papendiek’s husband, to finish the job, though it took him ‘above two hours’.89 In this phase of his illness, as Greville knew better than anybody, managing the king was no easy task.

This was especially so when he was in the grip of the powerful delusions which clouded his mind. In a lucid spell, he described ‘some of the phantoms of his delusion during his delirium – Said he thought there had been a deluge – That he could see Hanover through Herschel’s telescope – That he had thought himself inspired, etc.’90 ‘Sometimes,’ noted Greville, ‘he doubted his own accuracy in what he was saying, and would ask me if such and such things had been so, as, said he, “I have been very much out of order.”’91 On other occasions, he was quietly melancholy. ‘In one of his soliloquies he said, “I hate nobody, why should anyone hate me?” Recollecting a little, he said, “I beg pardon, I do hate the Marquis of Buckingham.”’92 He could also be completely ungovernable, especially towards his doctors. He was said to have flung Sir George Baker’s wig in his face, thrown him on his back, ‘and told him he might star gaze’.93 When Warren once annoyed him, ‘the king advanced up to him and pushed him’. Greville and another equerry stepped in and rescued the doctor, leaving the king furious ‘and foaming with rage’.94

The king’s relations with his physicians now reached a new low. He told Greville that they ‘had been forced upon him, and dwelt on the treatment he had received from the doctors with much sensibility’. Greville attempted to pacify him, explaining that they were acting for his own good, his recovery was dependent on his remaining quiet and calm, ‘and that the trifles that had been withheld from him, and the occasional restraints he had experienced had been measures which had been adopted solely to this point, and they would cease in a very short time’.95

Behind Greville’s careful use of the word ‘restraints’ lurks a multitude of possible interpretations. The MP George Selwyn had heard that on 20 November Warren had been deputed ‘in some set of fine phrases to tell His Majesty that he is mad and must have a strait waistcoat’. None of the diarists close at hand – Fanny Burney, Lady Harcourt or Greville himself – mentions the king being placed in one at this point. This could arise from delicacy – nowhere in her extensive account of the king’s illness does Fanny use the words ‘madness’ or ‘insanity’ – but it is more likely that George had been subjected to the less symbolically significant process of ‘sheeting’ as a method of controlling his agitation. This involved the patient being ‘swaddled with fine linen’, their limbs confined and controlled. It was not likely to have increased the king’s goodwill towards his doctors, who were faced with an impossibly difficult task in attempting to subdue a man who was also their monarch. As Selwyn commented tartly, ‘If it should please God to restore His Majesty to his senses … I should not like to stand in the place of that man who has moved such an address to the Crown.’96

Greville certainly believed that the physicians were inhibited by the king’s status in their dealings with him: ‘They appear to shrink from responsibility, and to this time, have not established their authority, though pressed to by every attendant.’ The doctors had failed to take command. Without their leadership and guidance, the attendants were rudderless, subject to every changing order. ‘From those thus appointed,’ complained Greville, clearly stung by the equerries’ mounting sense of inadequacy into uncharacteristic forcefulness, ‘we should have plain and positive directions in an anxious and difficult charge. We ought not to be embarrassed by fluctuating decisions, nor puzzled with a multitude of directions from other quarters … All of us are desirous to do our best for the good and comfort of our dear king, but we must be plainly and properly directed in our course.’97

Nowhere was the disruptive effect of the ‘fluctuating decisions’ – so deprecated by Greville – so apparent as in the management of George’s desire to see his children. The king, who had been visited by none of his family since the terrible night of 5 November, told Greville that he wanted very much to see his daughters, ‘and desired I would look across the garden to the Lower Lodge to see if I could observe any of his children at the windows, expressing at the same time a great anxiety to see them and desired an attendant might be sent to them, to request that they might show themselves before the Lower Lodge, if only for a few minutes’. When the doctors were consulted, they advised against it. Greville thought the decision wrong, ‘but acquiescence to it rested not with me’.98

Then the doctors changed their minds. On 24 November, ‘they thought they would try what effect the letting him see his children in the garden would have’, wrote Mrs Harcourt, the general’s wife. ‘When he was told he was to do so, he at first seemed pleased, but as the time approached, he grew distressed and said – “No, I cannot bear it; no, let it be put off till evening, I shall be more able to see them then.”’ The doctors were told of the king’s sudden reluctance, but decided to let the experiment go ahead anyway. ‘So, instead of stopping the royal family, who were just going into the garden, they let them go on.’

What followed was a psychological disaster. ‘The king seemed to struggle with himself to bear it, but ran to open the windows, which were screwed down. They made a great bustle about his having appeared to wish to break the window to speak to his children,’ continued Mrs Harcourt; ‘surely if he did, nothing could be more natural.’ The king urged one of his gentlemen to ‘go down and beg them to come near; they did so, and he called to them all through the window’. The last time the princesses had seen their father he had been in a state of excited confusion. Now, if anything, he seemed worse – frantic and alarmed. ‘Poor souls, they were all so much affected, and Princess Elizabeth was so near fainting, that they were obliged to go in immediately, but I hope he did not see how much they were agitated; the Princess Royal was quite overcome, and so was Princess Mary; and in truth, they all seemed more dead than alive when they got in the house. Unluckily,’ added Mrs Harcourt, ‘the king had his nightcap and gown on, which, with his appearance being very pale, made a change in his appearance that could not fail to shock them.’99 She had no doubt who was to blame for the debacle. ‘I know not what the physicians mean by their conduct; they seem to be amusing themselves, as they would with any other singular character, and feel no more for him than they would a dog or a cat.’100

It was hard to find any relief from the oppressive atmosphere that hung so heavily on everyone at Windsor. On 25 November, Fanny met Robert Greville in a corridor. The two diarists ‘condoled on the state of things. I found him wholly destitute of all hope, and persuaded the malady was a seizure for life. How happy for me that I am made of more sanguine materials! I could not think as they think, and be able to wade through the labours of my office.’101 She acknowledged, sadly, that few shared her optimism. Lady Charlotte Finch ‘is no hoper; she sees nothing before us but despair and horror’. Even Colonel Digby ‘now leans to the darker side, though he avoids saying so’.102 All news was bad news. General Harcourt told his wife, ‘I fear we have gone from bad to worse. The whole of yesterday, and particularly in the evening, the king was more agitated and unmanageable than ever; so much so that it was not without difficulty that he could be controlled, and several of the gentlemen in attendance were more than once obliged to be called in.’103 On the same day, the king ‘gave one of his pages a sharp slap on the face, with a violence by no means usual to his natural dispositions’. He was profoundly sorry afterwards, and on going to bed, ‘called for the same page, took him by the hand, and asked his pardon twenty times’.104 Then, in the midst of all this unhappiness and despair, the Prince of Wales decided the time had come to move the king to Kew.

By 26 November, Sir Gilbert Elliot knew all about the prince’s plan. ‘He is, I believe, pretty sick of his long confinement at Windsor, and it is very natural that he should be so, for besides the scene before him, he has been under greater restraint in his behaviour and way of life than he has ever known since he was his own master.’105 It was said the doctors had agreed to it as they hoped, once returned nearer to London, to resume some of their regular practices there. In fact, the move was, on one level at least, designed to improve conditions for the king. At Kew, where the gardens were extensive and enclosed, he could take more exercise than was possible in the exposed terraces and parks of Windsor. But, as the prince himself explained to the king’s attendants, greater privacy would also permit the adoption of more punitive measures: ‘sad necessity … obliged the faculty to declare that they found that lenient measures increased the malady, and that they had determined among more coercive ones’.106

For some weeks, even those most sympathetic to the king’s predicament had been asking for the implementation of a firmer regime; at Kew, such a policy would be far less visible. Everyone knew there was little chance that George would go willingly. He was deeply attached to the life he had built for himself at Windsor, regarding the place as a symbol of everything he had striven to create over the years; a manifestation of both dynastic continuity and family stability. It was where he felt most rooted and at ease; it was, more than anywhere else, his home. Although he had been happy at Kew, it did not have for him the deeper meaning and resonance of Windsor. His extreme reluctance to be taken there also owed as much to the way the decision was made as to the destination itself. George had spent all his adult life in absolute charge of his personal destiny. It had been nearly thirty years since anyone had overruled or contradicted his wishes. Now, all his accustomed self-determination had been peremptorily removed. He was not consulted about his removal, and his known hostility to the idea was disregarded. There could have been no clearer demonstration of the degree to which power had deserted him. It was hardly surprising that the first coercive measures used against the king would be those employed to ensure that he went at all.

When Colonel Digby told Fanny Burney what was intended, her immediate response was that the king ‘will never consent to quit Windsor’, though she suspected that, in the end, the alliance between the doctors and the Prince of Wales would be too powerful to be resisted.107 The queen, too, was deeply apprehensive about the scheme. She knew the king did not want to go, and agreed to it only ‘with the extremest reluctance’.108 The prince had persuaded Pitt, the Lord Chancellor and the Cabinet that the move to Kew was a necessary one. Despite her misgivings, Charlotte did not resist what now seemed inevitable. It was unthinkable, however, that she would not accompany her husband. Mrs Harcourt, who wondered if she should not have shown a little more backbone, believed she would stand firm on that, at least. ‘I shall be surprised if she does not insist on going with him; if she suffers herself to be parted from him, he is lost forever, but at such an important moment I hope she will act with spirit.’109 When the prince did indeed suggest that his mother remain at Windsor while her husband went to Kew, the queen gathered up enough remnants of her dignity to refuse point-blank: ‘Prince of Wales, do it at your peril; where the king is, there shall I be.’110

On the day appointed for the move – 29 November – the queen’s courage faltered. ‘Her mind now quite misgave her about Kew; the king’s dislike was terrible to think of, and she could not foresee in what way it might end.’ The plan was that she and her daughters should leave Windsor first, ‘and then the king should be told that they were gone, which was the sole method they could devise to prevail with him to follow. He was then to be allured by the promise of seeing them at Kew.’111 The queen and the princesses did as they were ordered, although in tears and with a mounting sense of disquiet. Once at Kew, ‘the suspense with which the king was awaited [was] truly dreadful’. The queen had decided to return that night if he did not appear, and, as a result, no one was allowed to unpack. Meanwhile, back at Windsor, ‘in what confusion was the house! Princes, equerries, physicians, pages – all conferring, whispering, plotting and caballing how to get the king to set off.’112

Things went quite as badly on the journey as Greville had expected. ‘The king most stoutly objected to every hint for his removal, and would not get up.’113 In the face of his refusal to cooperate, it was eventually decided to send for the first minister. ‘Accordingly, Mr Pitt went in and, telling the king that it was a fine day, asked him if he would not get up and set off to Kew where the queen had gone.’ Just as Charlotte had feared, the king did not take this news well. ‘The king objected, and said the queen had gone without leave, and that she should return to supplicate his pardon.’ George was resistant to all inducements, attempting, as he always did, ‘to make terms’, agreeing to go only if he could travel in his own coach or with the Princess Royal. ‘Mr Pitt, baffled in his endeavours, left the apartment and the king continued in bed.’ When Greville and General Harcourt came to talk to him, ‘he became very angry, and hastily closed the bed-curtains and hid himself from us’. Later, he showed the equerries letters which they thought he had written to request a military force to rescue him. Finally, the physicians marched into his room in a phalanx, told him he must go and that ‘if he continued his refusal longer, he would be forced’. Eventually, he asked if Greville and General Harcourt would accompany him, and on their agreeing, ‘he rose and dressed’.114

Having at last got on their way, at Datchet Bridge on the Thames ‘twenty loyal tradesmen appeared. As the king’s carriage drove by them, they bowed respectfully and took a melancholy leave.’ Seeing them, the king ‘felt the greatest emotion’ which Greville had seen him display so far. ‘The “big tear” started in his eye, and putting his hand before his face, he said with much feeling, “These good people are too fond of me,” and then added with an affecting sensibility, “Why am I taken from the place I like best in the world?”’ When they passed through Brentford, ‘a drunken man halloed out as the carriage passed. The king mistook this, and thinking the shout was intended against him, said that they often hissed him as he passed this town.’115 Soon the gates of Kew appeared; once inside, the king was not to be seen again for four months.

*

If George’s condition had been bad at Windsor, at Kew it soon became far worse. During his confinement there, the extremity of the king’s behaviour exposed all the fracture lines in his family that decorum, discipline and distance usually concealed. Without the iron certainty of his will, the centre did not – perhaps could not – hold. Relations between mother and son, husband and wife, daughters and parents, all were subjected to excruciating and unprecedented strain; and none of them, including the king himself, ended the period quite as they had begun it.

The king’s arrival at Kew was even more disturbing than his departure from Windsor. He left his carriage with his usual dignity, but on entering the house, ‘making a run, he attempted to go into the suite of apartments on the left. His intentions were baffled on finding the door locked, and he evidently showed much disappointment. He had expected to find the queen and his family at dinner in those apartments.’116 Instead he was ushered into a series of rooms on the right. The king considered, with some justification, he had been tricked. He had been told that if he went to Kew, he would see his family, but they were no more visible here than they had been at Windsor. He blamed the queen, declaring that she had betrayed him. Perhaps as a result, Greville thought the king had become, if possible, even more manic in his behaviour. ‘He told us that though a bed had been prepared for him, he would not go to bed, and dwelt on his firm intention to tire out his attendants. He remarked that he was very strong and active, and in proof of this, he danced and hopped with more agility than I suspected could have been in him.’ Greville could hardly bear to watch. ‘The light of such an exhibition in our dear king, and so much unlike himself, affected me most painfully.’117

On 1 December, he was no better. Greville also noticed a new and worrying addition to the king’s repertoire of problems. ‘In his conversation, oaths, which had never yet been heard from his lips, now for the first time were blended not infrequently with indecencies.’118 On the following day, he descended to a new depth of misery. ‘So much was he depressed in thought, that he even gave hints of being tired of his existence, and actually entreated his pages to despatch him.’ There was still the occasional lucid interval. ‘When more composed, the king resorted to an occupation not uninteresting to him in settled days. He drew plans of the house, and sketched alterations in it; this he did with tolerable accuracy.’ In moments like this, Greville was sure the king was aware of his situation. ‘An observation dropped from him this morning, which marked the sense he had of his misfortune pretty strongly. Having drawn a line pretty firmly and straight, he approved, by saying to a page, “Pretty well for a man who is mad.”’ But later in the same day, ‘he was mischievously jocose, and at which time, burnt two wigs belonging to his pages. At another, he was childishly playful, begging romps and making his pages wheel him around the room.’ All talk of lasting ‘amendment’ had long disappeared.119

Elsewhere in the house, silent misery prevailed. The queen, princesses and their attendants were established in a suite on the first floor, where Princess Augusta camped out on a small bed placed in her mother’s room. Clearly Charlotte was still terrified of being ‘broken in upon’ again. The other princesses and their much-reduced household were distributed along a maze of dark passages, their names chalked on the doors by the Prince of Wales, who had personally allocated everyone’s rooms. They were not immediately above the king – everything there had been shut up lest he ‘be tantalised by footsteps overhead’ – but near enough to be aware of what went on downstairs. On the first night at Kew, Fanny Burney could not sleep. ‘I thought I heard the poor king … his indignant disappointment haunts me. The queen too was very angry at having had promises made in her name which could not be kept.’120 Like her husband, Charlotte ‘had passed a wretched night and already lamented leaving Windsor’.

The house itself was extremely uncomfortable. It was rarely used as a winter residence, and was cold, draughty and not very clean. ‘The parlours were without fires and washing,’ noted Fanny as she crept along the frozen corridors. Colonel Digby ordered carpets to be installed in the princesses’ rooms, at his own expense, so cheerless did their surroundings appear. Without Digby’s initiative, nothing would have been done. ‘So miserable is the house at present that no general orders to the proper people are ever given or thought about … everyone is absorbed in the calamity.’ Digby also planned to supply the princesses ‘with sandbags for windows and doors, which he intended to bring and place himself. The wind which blew against these lovely princesses, he declared, was enough to destroy them.’121

The queen’s spirits, low enough already, can hardly have been improved by such oppressively spartan conditions. As her husband grew worse, she knew a decision had to be made about his treatment, which she could neither avoid nor devolve to anyone else. Fanny wrote that ‘The length of the malady so uncertain, the steps which now seemed requisite so shocking; for new advice, and such as only suited disorders that physicians in general relinquish, was now proposed, and compliance or refusal were almost equally tremendous.’122 Hidden in Fanny’s deliberately elusive prose is a reluctant acknowledgement that the king’s illness was now considered by all those around him to be madness – and that the summoning of specialist help could not much longer be avoided.

It came in the form of seventy-year-old Francis Willis, a clergyman who had qualified as a physician, together with his sons John, Thomas and Robert Darling Willis. Early in his medical career, Francis had decided to devote himself to the treatment of madness and, with the help of his sons, established a highly regarded private asylum at Greatford in his native Lincolnshire. He had treated Lady Harcourt’s mother, and it was probably on her recommendation that he was invited to attend the king. Almost from the moment they arrived, the Willises and their methods created controversy. Dr Willis ‘is considered by some as not much better than a mountebank,’ sniffed Lord Sheffield, ‘and not far different from those who are confined in his house. That such a man should be called in … has caused some jealousy; but the opinions of the physicians are not much respected.’123

Certainly Francis Willis did not inspire much regard among ‘the medical tribe’ already established around the king. He was an unpolished, unsophisticated man, with no experience of courts. Unlike the other doctors, he was not a member of the Royal College of Physicians. Warren declared that he did not consider him ‘in the light of a physician’ at all, although he quickly delegated to Willis the difficult and exhausting task of the daily management of the king. ‘I took the liberty of speaking to him with some degree of authority,’ Warren admitted; he clearly thought of Willis as a man of little intellectual or professional expertise, to be kept totally under his command. When, in response to the clamour for information about the king’s state, regular medical bulletins were at last issued by the physicians, Warren ensured that Willis was not allowed to sign them until instructed by the Lord Chancellor to let him add his name to the others. Teased and patronised by everyone around him, including his patient, Willis was an outsider, never treated as a medical or a social equal by those compelled to act as his colleagues. None of this seems to have mattered much to him. He was sure that he could cure the king where everyone else had failed, and it was this unshakeable certainty that kept him buoyant in the face of all disappointments.

The queen had initially been very reluctant to agree to the summoning of Willis, as it was ‘a measure which seemed to fix the nature of the king’s attack in the face of the world; but necessity and strong advice had prevailed over her repugnance’.124 George shared his wife’s sense of shame, telling one of his pages that, ‘as Dr Willis was now come, he could never more show his face again in this country and that he would leave it forever and retire to Hanover’. His first meeting with Willis, on 5 December, had not gone well. Although George received him ‘with composure … and seemed very anxious to state to him that he had been ill but was now quite well again’, his dislike of doctors soon triumphed over his initial politeness. He observed that Willis’s dress ‘bespeaks you of the Church, do you belong to it?’ Willis said that he ‘did formerly, but lately I have attended chiefly to physic’. ‘I am sorry for it,’ answered the king, ‘for you have quitted a profession I have always loved, and you have embraced one I most heartily detest. Alter your line of life, ask what preferment you want and make me your friend. I recommend you Worcester.’125 Willis had gamely attempted to defend himself. ‘Sir, our saviour himself went about healing the sick.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ replied the king, ‘but he had not £700 a year for it.’126

In the evening of his first day at Kew, Willis returned to the king’s room and demonstrated the techniques he was to employ in treating his patient. He later explained to Greville that ‘he “broke in” patients, “like horses in a manège”, as his expression was’.127 Like his colleagues, Willis believed that the king would only improve when he was able to control himself and act calmly; but Willis was convinced measured behaviour did not just emerge from within – it could be imposed from without. A patient could be compelled into calmness by the authority of another – especially if that other was himself. Willis took pride in his ability to quell all forms of dissension by the sheer force of his gaze. For all his apparent simplicity, he was not easily intimidated. When he was examined by a parliamentary committee investigating the king’s condition, he made short work of the celebrated politician and fiery orator Edmund Burke – by any standards no flinching spirit. Willis told Lady Harcourt that Burke had asked him ‘what methods he used to subdue the king when he was outrageous. Willis answered, “I do it by my eye”, and at the same time, darted such a look at his antagonist as made him shrink into himself and stopped his questions for that time.’128

The king began their meeting with ‘much inconsistency and too much eagerness. He again launched out in strong invective against his physicians, and abused the profession.’ Willis was unperturbed, raising his voice when the king raised his, never wavering or retreating. ‘The king became violently enraged, rushed in great agitation against Dr Willis, with both hands, intending to push him away but not to strike him.’ Unmoved, Willis told him ‘he must control himself, or he would put him in a strait waistcoat. On this hint, Dr Willis went out of the room and returned with one in his hand … It was in a paper and he held it directly under his arm. The king eyed it attentively, and, alarmed at the doctor’s firmness of voice and procedure, began to submit. He promised to go to bed, and with difficulty, went to the next apartment and undressed.’ For Greville, this was the moment he had long hoped for. ‘It was immediately necessary to have this struggle. He seized the opportunity with judgement and conducted himself throughout the interview with wonderful management and force.’ For the first time, Greville allowed himself a glimpse of hope: ‘This seems to have been the first solid step leading to permanent recovery that has taken place as yet.’129

Although in reality the king’s condition continued pretty much unchanged, Willis introduced order, direction and, above all, a glint of optimism into the darkness that prevailed at Kew. ‘I have great hopes of His Majesty’s recovery,’ he maintained determinedly. Given the particular stresses to which the king’s situation exposed him, he was reluctant to predict precisely when this might occur, but that it would eventually take place, he had no doubt. Willis’s indefatigable conviction gave encouragement where there had been none before, and he was treated like a hero by the king’s friends. Fanny Burney thought him ‘a man in ten thousand: open, honest, dauntless, light-hearted, innocent and high-minded’. The queen was equally impressed. She quickly came to regard Willis, whose arrival she had so dreaded, as an unlikely ally in her ordeal. She was, she said, ‘very much dissatisfied with Sir George Baker and Dr Warren, and very well satisfied … with Dr Willis’, whom she wished ‘could be left to care for the king without the interference of the other physicians’.130 However, the queen’s increasing reliance on Dr Willis was to usher in a host of fresh complications.

The king had been unable to attend to any public business for over a month by this time, and whatever small improvements ‘hopers’ like Willis and Fanny Burney discerned, it was impossible to imagine him doing so in the immediate future. This situation could not be allowed to continue indefinitely. George’s role in the political process was far from nominal. His assent was required for all legislation, and the absence of the king meant that there was a vacuum – and potentially a very destabilising one – at the heart of politics. Although the government was chosen from and depended on the support of an active, engaged political class that was extremely protective of its role, a stable administration was all but impossible without the approval of the king. A substantial number of office holders sitting in the House of Commons were heavily dependent on the Crown for their income, and their support could be marshalled to come to its aid when necessary. Harnessing the power of these ‘placemen’ gave the king considerable weight in Parliament, when he chose to use it: as has been seen, George had deployed them to dispatch at least one administration he disliked. The role of the monarch in the business of government was a real and vital one; indeed, it was impossible to imagine the culture of contemporary politics without it.

There was a possible solution, of course – although it was one the king’s friends could hardly bear to contemplate. It was not until the end of November that Fanny Burney could bring herself even to mention the term ‘regency’, a word she admitted ‘I have not yet been able to articulate’.131 The Prince of Wales had had no such qualms, having compiled the first list of ministers he intended to place in office as early as 10 November.132 He was not alone in seeing a regency as inevitable. It was the obvious implication of the memorandum on the king’s health that Pitt had drawn up on 8 November, and his Cabinet colleague Lord Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor, was said to have declared on the 12th that ‘there must be a regent, and that regent is the Prince of Wales’.133

However, as everyone knew, if the prince did come into power, he would not retain any of his father’s ministers; Pitt’s name certainly did not feature on any of the lists that occupied the prince in his speculative spare moments. It had been one of the many causes of friction between father and son that the prince had thrown in his lot with men whom the king disliked, both for their morals and their Whiggish politics. Like every other Hanoverian Prince of Wales before him, he had added opposition politics to the heady mix of provocation designed to outrage his father. If the prince became regent, a change of administration would inevitably follow.

Faced with the prospect of political obliteration, Pitt played for time. There was little else he could do, as events seemed to be moving irrevocably in the prince’s favour. Charles Fox, who had been travelling in Italy and was unaware of the king’s illness until a messenger turned up in Bologna begging him to return, arrived back in London after an exhausting nine-day journey across Europe. Alongside Richard Sheridan and the Duke of Devonshire, he met the prince on 26 November and began to plan for their transition into government. Meanwhile, Pitt had Parliament adjourned in order that precedents for the establishment of a regency might be investigated. He also arranged to have the physicians interviewed by the Privy Council, to try to establish more clearly the king’s current condition. From Pitt’s perspective, the meeting, which took place on 3 December, was hardly encouraging. The doctors agreed that the king was ‘at present totally incapable of attending to public business’. They thought it not impossible that he might, at some later stage, recover, but they could not say when this might happen. During the proceedings, Warren was reprimanded for ‘mentioning the word insane; and when he was advised not to, and another expression was dictated to him, he answered it was the same thing’.134 Supporters of the prince – and Warren was his physician before he was engaged to be the king’s – were keen to stress the seriousness of his condition, whilst Pitt’s followers and the king’s friends found themselves compelled into optimism. Willis, with his bullish assessment of the likelihood of the king’s recovery, soon found himself, not unwillingly, pressed into the political service of Pitt. The war between the politicians was fought by proxy amongst the king’s physicians, and with just as much venom and guile. The sickroom at Kew was soon as highly politicised as the chamber of the House of Commons.

A powerful combination of diffidence, depression and the deeply ingrained instinct of a lifetime impelled the queen to do all she could to avoid being sucked into this volatile brew of argument. Shortly after the king had been moved to Kew, the Lord Chancellor had asked her to take nominal responsibility for the king’s person. Fearing the consequences of such an ill-defined obligation, and desperate to obey the king’s much-repeated directive never to involve herself in domestic politics, she had refused to accept the task. But as the prospect of a regency grew ever more real, she was forced into more direct action by what seemed to her the manipulation of the king’s illness for political advantage. Yet, in attempting to defend the interests of her husband, she found herself opposed to those of her son. The result was a rift between Charlotte and her eldest child which would take years to heal, and was, perhaps, never entirely forgotten nor forgiven by either of them.

At the beginning of December, Pitt revealed his proposals for filling the political vacuum with a plan of staggering boldness aimed to stop the opposition in their tracks. Its provisions would also sour even further relations between the queen and her eldest son. Pitt argued that, as the doctors agreed that the king might at some stage recover, his authority should be considered not as terminated, but merely ‘interrupted’. In such delicate circumstances, the appointment of a regent could not be a simple matter of succession. The hereditary principle was, in this unprecedented case, subordinate to the will of the people: Parliament would decide on the most appropriate person to take up the office. Even more provocatively, Pitt added that Parliament would also determine the nature and extent of a regent’s powers, subjecting the issue to debate in both Houses. This was an audacious and brilliant move, transforming at a stroke the fortunes of Pitt’s party. It forced Fox, who had built his career on a defence of British liberty against the encroachments of the Crown, into arguing in favour of the prince’s entitlement to exercise his hereditary right without the interference of or curb by Parliament, a position that was as uncomfortable for him intellectually as it was politically. The widespread unpopularity of the Prince of Wales did nothing to help the beleaguered Fox. The possibility of his accession to power was greeted with no enthusiasm beyond the circle of his political intimates. His reputation as a spendthrift and a reprobate impressed the serious men of the City no more than they did his father. ‘The stocks are already fallen 2 per cent,’ wrote one observer, ‘and the alarms of the people of London are very little flattering to the prince.’135

When Pitt’s proposals were debated by the Commons on 10 December, they were passed by 286 votes to 204. A few weeks later, Pitt sent the prince the terms on which the regency would, if circumstances did not change, be offered to him. He was to have no power to bestow titles on anyone except members of the royal family; he was not to be allowed to sell or make use of any of the king’s personal property; and he was to have no power to grant any other offices or pensions. By denying him the lifeblood of eighteenth-century politics – the exercise of patronage – Pitt sought to tie the prince’s hands as tightly as he could. ‘It was clear that they intended to put the strait waistcoat on the Prince of Wales,’ wrote one onlooker, wryly.136

The prince told the Duke of Devonshire that he must crush Pitt or Pitt would crush him, adding ominously that he thought ‘the queen had been playing a very underhand part’. Opposition politicians were convinced that Pitt’s political boldness was rooted in his certainty that if the prince refused the regency in the restricted form on offer, the queen would be persuaded to take it. Lady Elizabeth Foster, a passionate advocate of the prince’s cause, had heard as early as 5 December that Pitt meant to offer the queen at least a share in the regency. Some weeks later, Gilbert Elliot was even more convinced of Charlotte’s duplicity: ‘She is playing the devil, and has been all this time at the bottom of the cabals and intrigues against the prince.’ Significantly, he identified Willis – whom he described as ‘a quack’ – as a key player in such schemes. ‘One principal engine of the intriguers is the opinion that they contrive to maintain in public that the king’s recovery is to be expected with certainty, and very speedily. Dr Willis was brought about the king for that purpose, the other physicians not being sufficiently subservient.’ He too had no doubt that if the prince felt himself unable to accept the regency, the queen ‘was ready to accept it’.137 It became an article of faith amongst the prince’s friends that the position and power that should have been his by right had been deliberately and calculatedly denied him by the machinations of his mother.

It certainly suited Pitt for his opponents to believe that he had another royal card up his sleeve, as it were, ready to play if the prince proved recalcitrant. Even William Grenville, his astute colleague, thought it possible that Charlotte might be induced to take the job, though it seems unlikely that the queen ever seriously considered the possibility. Her deep-seated fear of incurring the king’s displeasure by any act of self-assertion was probably enough to have prevented her; and worn down by anxiety and depression, she was unlikely to have chosen this moment to reverse the emotional subservience instilled over a lifetime. Yet, for all her accustomed timidity, she was prepared to adopt a more bullish stance in defence of what she identified as the king’s interests. It is certainly true that during December she emerged a little from her seclusion to play a pivotal part in the war between the physicians that had begun with Willis’s arrival on the 5th.

Most of the battles took place over the bulletins on the state of the king’s health which the physicians issued jointly each day. As the only form of regular official information on his condition available to the public, they were extremely sensitive documents, made more so by the prevailing belief that madness was a shameful condition to be concealed and hidden from view wherever possible. The queen strove hard to ensure that the bulletins contained as little as possible that could embarrass or humiliate the king. She was deeply distressed at the inclusion of the words ‘much disturbed’ in one of the reports, and succeeded in having them altered. As the crisis over the regency continued, the official description of the king’s condition took on even greater significance. On 16 December, for example, the king had had six hours’ sleep during the night, far more than usual, and potentially an encouraging sign. Willis accordingly argued the bulletin should state that he had had a very good night. But his colleagues disagreed, arguing that the hours of sleep had not in fact been consecutive, but ‘composed of three different sleeps’. Willis refused to retreat and ‘would only sign to a very good night’. The other physicians remonstrated and complained, but Willis was adamant; in the face of his immovability, his colleagues backed down.

Dr Warren – who, significantly, was not present on that occasion – was made of sterner stuff. Throughout December and January, Warren opposed all efforts by Willis to turn the bulletins into what he considered unrealistically upbeat assessments of the king’s state. In doing so, he saw himself as defending the interests of the Prince of Wales, his patron. If the queen had come to rely entirely upon Willis, her son invested his faith just as explicitly in Warren’s judgement. These simmering grievances came to a head early in January, when the determined optimism of Willis and the queen clashed directly with Warren’s refusal to endorse it. On the morning of the 2nd, Warren and the other doctors compiled their bulletin, which was sent to the queen for inspection. She returned it immediately. It did not, she felt, adequately reflect the many lucid intervals that the king had enjoyed. Greville, who was present, ‘found that she had wished an alteration and that the physicians would insert “that the king continued mending”’. This Warren refused to do. In his opinion, episodes of occasional lucidity were not the same as steady, progressive recovery. ‘On being further pressed, Dr Warren said that he had often, in such cases, heard many sensible remarks made by a patient, but these did not prove that the person was well, but improper remarks always were decisive, and proved that the person was still deranged.’138

When the queen heard that Warren was still refusing to agree to the inclusion of the disputed words, she sent for him, clearly intending to have it out with him herself. Gilbert Elliot, who probably heard the story direct from Warren, reported that he found her ‘white with rage’. Lady Harcourt, who was also present during the interview, recalled that when Warren was asked to explain why he would not sign the contested bulletin, he repeated the argument he had used with Willis. ‘If a man was perfectly reasonable for 23 hours and deranged during the other hour of the 24, then he considered him in the same light as if he had no lucid intervals.’139 He added in support of his opinion ‘that the king had cried very much’. ‘If you call that being disturbed,’ said the queen, ‘then the whole house is disturbed.’140

Warren was undeterred, arguing that anyone who had heard the king’s conversation that day could have no doubt of his true state. When the queen demanded to know what he had said, Warren refused to repeat it, ‘on the grounds of the impossibility of relating such discourse to her’.141 He said she might speak to another of the physicians, who had been there when the crucial words were uttered. When the doctor arrived to be interrogated, Warren set the tone for what followed by observing: ‘I believe you will not think it proper to repeat to these ladies what the king said.’ ‘Certainly not,’ agreed the doctor.142 Charlotte must eventually have discovered exactly what her husband had said. Certainly his alleged comments were soon common currency amongst the social and political elite. Lady Elizabeth Foster heard that, referring to Willis, the king had ‘wondered the queen would allow that ugly, fumbling old fellow to go to bed with her’.143 The realisation that these hurtful words had, as one writer put it, ‘amused the town much’ can only have added to Charlotte’s distress. The knowledge that Warren had witnessed these humiliations – and the suspicion that he had discussed them with his Whig friends – did not dispose the queen in his favour. ‘I should be glad never to see him again,’ wrote Lady Harcourt, ‘and the queen has told me she never will.’144 For ever after, he remained fixed in Charlotte’s personal demonology as ‘that black spirit Dr Warren’.145

In the midst of such contradictory reports, it was hard to know what to believe about the king’s true state. Greville, who saw more of him than almost anyone else and was unencumbered by political prejudice or family relationship, did not think him much improved. In fact, though no supporter of the prince, like Warren he thought that Willis often allowed his loyalties to sway his judgement. A few days before the row with the queen, he had noted that ‘Dr Willis gave to Mr Pitt this night the most flattering accounts, assuring the minister that His Majesty was … so well that he was sure he was at that moment as capable of transacting any business of state as ever he had been in his life.’ Greville, who was far too much the gentleman to accuse anyone of lying, confined himself to the observation that ‘I was not a little surprised at Dr Willis’s hazarding thus, and un-pressed, such very strong assertions.’146 He had long suspected that Willis was as much driven by politics as Warren. On 19 December, he wrote that Willis was ‘unguarded and imprudent’ for a man in such a conspicuous and responsible situation. Not only did he lean ‘strongly to a political party’, he also did ‘not appear to confine his politics to the approbation of present measures or to the admiration of Mr Pitt, but he attacks Mr Fox and the Opposition with as much zeal as any partisan I know’. Greville was increasingly disillusioned, writing morosely in his diary that ‘less triumph on short successes and more check on the eagerness of politics are the two most desirable essentials wanting’.147 Neither was much in evidence at Kew during December and January.

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The king had probably been at his worst around mid-December 1788, when any beneficial effects delivered by the quinine and opiates originally prescribed by Willis had worn off. The physicians continued to dose him with emetics, which made him vomit, and with castor oil in an attempt to move his costive bowels. As none of this had any effect on his behaviour, except perhaps to render him increasingly agitated, the strait waistcoat was brought into ever more frequent use. Even Greville, who had once been in favour of a firmer regime, was horrified by what he witnessed. Arriving at the king’s rooms at noon on 20 December, he discovered that ‘recourse to the strait waistcoat’ had been necessary during the night and that the king was still to be found ‘in the same melancholy situation … His legs were tied, and he was secured across the breast.’148 Willis recorded that, whilst pinioned to his bed, throughout the night the king had called despairingly on his five-year-old favourite daughter Amelia to help him. ‘Oh Emily, why won’t you save your father? Why must a king lie in this damned confined condition?’149 The king was kept ‘under coercion’ till two in the afternoon, noted Greville, but became ‘agitated and disturbed’ again later in the evening. ‘He was checked at this time by Dr Willis, who recommended him to be more calm or that he would certainly talk himself into a strait jacket.’150

On 23 December, he was given a couch to rest his blistered legs upon, ‘but was too riotously inclined to stay long on it’, and was again tied down. Once confined, Greville noted that he was not violent, and ‘as he lay stretched on his bed, he sang’. On Christmas Day, he was again ‘very troublesome and turbulent’. Greville heard that ‘among his extravagances of the moment, he had at this time … taken off his nightcap, and got a pillowcase round his head and the pillow in bed with him, which he called Prince Octavius, who he said was to be new born this day’.151 There were occasional episodes of calmness. On the 26th, he managed to play backgammon with Dr Willis, ‘very much in his usual style’. To the watching Greville, ‘it appeared … singular that he should play the game with tolerable correctness … and yet at the same time, his conversation should continue so wrong and incorrect’.152 Greville was concerned by the frequent ‘indecency and incorrectness’ of the king’s speech. Its continuance, even in his quieter phases, only confirmed his opinion of the grim reality of George’s true condition. The king’s health was, he believed, ‘in a more precarious state than it has yet been since the attacks commenced’.153

Given the king’s volatile condition, it seems extraordinary that two weeks earlier, Willis had agreed to George’s repeated request to see the queen and their youngest daughter. Only her faith in Willis’s judgement could have persuaded the apprehensive Charlotte to meet her husband again for the first time since the traumatising events of early November. Lady Harcourt’s account of what happened when the meeting took place on Saturday the 13th was tellingly brief. ‘The scene was a most affecting one; he showed strong marks of tenderness, he parted from them with the greatest reluctance.’154 From within the heart of the opposition camp, Lady Elizabeth Foster recounted a fuller version of events. She too had heard that the scene between the king and queen was ‘most affecting. He kissed her hand passionately and said he held what was dearest to him in the world. The queen pressed his hand but could not speak. The king let the queen go, on Willis saying he had promised to do so – he pressed the Princess Amelia in his arms, who cried very much and was frightened.’155 Gilbert Elliot’s version was much bleaker. He had been told that as soon as the king’s youngest daughter was within his reach, ‘he caught her up in arms and swore that no power on earth should ever separate them again. The girl was terrified, and so were the bystanders; and they could not get the child away until they promised to bring the queen. She was brought accordingly, and the king behaved in exactly the same way – catching fast hold of her, and swearing that nothing should ever part them again. The king fell into fits and they were obliged to separate them by main force.’156

There seems little doubt that, whichever of the accounts was true, the meeting with her father was distressing for Amelia. She had not seen him since his arrival at Windsor at the end of October, when he had collapsed into hysterics upon climbing out of the carriage to meet her and three of his younger daughters. At best, he must have appeared to her as a much-diminished figure: thin, uncertain, with none of the authority he had always displayed so confidently in her presence. At worst, he was violent, angry and uncontrolled.

For her mother, however, the meeting was, if possible, even more troubling. Charlotte’s response to it was not recorded by any of the diarists, perhaps because she chose not to reveal her feelings publicly; but her husband was unable to act with similar discretion. As the king’s every action was witnessed by others, it was soon apparent how disturbing he had found her visit. During the night that followed, even Lady Harcourt conceded he had been ‘extremely turbulent, as much as any night since his illness’.157 Significantly, when Greville returned from a short break away from attendance, he found a new obsession preoccupying the king, one which seems to have been provoked by his brief meeting with his wife.

On 18 December, George spoke for the first time ‘of a Windsor Castle duchess’. A few days later Greville observed that ‘the queen was now in no favour’. Since the clear onset of the king’s illness in October, Charlotte had been threatened, abused and isolated. She had been drawn into party politics in a way that frightened and worried her. Her sons had allied themselves with the king’s professed opponents and schemed, as she saw it, to remove him from power. She had sought at every turn to do the best she could to protect his interests and promote his welfare in the face of a terrifying malady that no one could either diagnose or cure. Now she was to undergo what was surely her greatest trial – a public humiliation of the most wounding kind, as her husband declared that he did not and had never loved her; that he preferred another and would marry her if he could.

‘In his more disturbed hours,’ Greville confided to his diary, ‘the king has for some time spoke much of Lady Pembroke.’ Elizabeth Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, was one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting and a close friend of the royal family. She had endured a difficult marriage to a serially unfaithful husband, and was nearly fifty – the same age as the king – at the time of his illness. In his clearer moments, George suspected that he had spoken about her in an unguarded manner, using phrases of which he would normally be ashamed. On 27 December, Greville noted that ‘he had said very feelingly to one of his pages that he hoped no one knew what wrong ideas he had, and what wrong things he had said respecting her. He observed … that in his delirium he must have said many very improper things and that much must have escaped him then which ought not to, and that he must try and find out what had slipped from him.’158

For all his good intentions, his behaviour, once his grasp on reality given way, was very different. The next day, Greville was surprised to meet Willis as the doctor made his way upstairs to invite the queen to visit her husband. Greville doubted this was a good idea, but Willis was adamant it would do no harm. On his assuring an anxious Charlotte that ‘he was sure HM would receive her well’, she was eventually persuaded to come down. The visit was planned to last no more than a quarter of an hour, and on these terms, the queen went in, accompanied by Willis. Greville and the others standing outside in the anteroom could hear the king’s voice, ‘but without hearing his conversation – and at times he appeared to us to be crying’. The meeting lasted nearly an hour, and was brought to an end only when two of Willis’s men went into the room, ‘and the queen was released, not quite without difficulty’. Willis later insisted to Greville that ‘the king received the queen with much kindness. He sat down by her while he spoke to her and often kissed her hand and he cried very frequently.’ Greville was sceptical, noting that most of what passed ‘was in German, not a word of which does Dr Willis understand’. He watched with sympathy Charlotte’s valiant attempt to make a dignified exit from what had clearly been a difficult encounter. ‘It was painful to see the poor queen coming out of the king’s apartment unattended, through the anteroom where there were many attendants. As she passed, Her Majesty seemed to make an effort to look up and by her countenance show us that she was not overcome.’ She needed all of her courage to do so. The king soon eagerly recounted his own version of what had been said to his doctors and attendants. ‘It was such as was improper for her to have heard,’ wrote Greville sadly. ‘In substance, it was that he did not like her, that he preferred another, that she was mad and had been so these three years, that he would not on any account admit her to his bed till the year 1793 for reasons he then improperly explained and such-like extravagant and wild conversation.’159

It is hard to know exactly what triggered the king’s impassioned declaration of dislike for his wife. It was true he blamed the queen for many of the most painful aspects of his situation. He believed she had been complicit in the plot to bring him to Kew, and still resented her leaving Windsor without his permission. He was convinced, with some justification, that the pre-eminence of Willis, and the free hand he enjoyed in placing him under painful and humiliating restraint, was due to Charlotte’s unwavering support of the physician. Greville thought she did not know much of what was done to the king in the name of treatment; but knowledge of her ignorance would probably not have lessened her husband’s anger against her. Most woundingly, George considered she had deserted him, left him to suffer alone when she should have been loyally at his side. His isolation from his family weighed heavily upon him; by the end of December, he had seen his wife only twice in eight weeks.

Whatever the causes, he continued to rail against the queen in terms increasingly bitter and forceful. He pulled off the wall a painting by Zoffany she had commissioned for him. When in January she sent him ‘a fine bunch of grapes from the hothouse’, the king’s first question on receiving them was to enquire who they were from. ‘He was told by the queen. He asked what queen, and if it was Queen Esther who had sent them.’ Esther was his name for Lady Pembroke, whom he now described as his true wife. ‘The page answered that it was Her Majesty the Queen, upon which he said that he would not receive them and ordered them away.’ Although he later relented and ate the grapes, ‘he talked much of Lady Pembroke as usual – much against the queen – and dwelt on a great variety of subjects with great inconsistency and incoherence’.160

Greville thought his antipathy towards Charlotte proved how far he still remained away from recovery. ‘Since this illness has been upon him, he has in general spoke unkindly of the queen, and nothing proves him less like himself than this. He said this evening that he never liked her, that she had a bad temper and that all her children were afraid of her.’161 Greville was sure that ‘when such expressions are let loose, he knows not what he says’, but it is impossible not to consider that the campaign of insult and rejection directed by George against Charlotte represented something more than random, delirious ravings. Could the voicing of thoughts usually so strictly and determinedly policed suggest a deeply suppressed resentment against the narrowness of his emotional experience? No one was more committed than the king to the principle that by doing his duty he had obliterated at a stroke all his other desires. Since he renounced Sarah Lennox in his early twenties, he had never allowed himself to consider the possibility that he might have acted differently, that he might have had other women besides his wife. Significantly, in the last days of his illness he confessed to the Lord Chancellor that he had been thinking a great deal of ‘an attachment he had had in his youth’. Thurlow advised him that it was far too late, at the age of fifty, to be thinking about such things, and the king never mentioned it again. But perhaps his tirades against Charlotte were an expression of his unacknowledged frustration with the consequences of choices he had made when very young and had never reneged upon in twenty-seven years of meticulously faithful marriage.

On 12 January, he told Greville that he was planning to visit Lady Pembroke, and had ‘filled his pockets strangely, with two or three pairs of stockings, a couple of nightcaps and a pair of drawers’.162 When he played cards with Willis he referred to her as the Queen of Hearts and declared, ‘Oh, if the queen should fall to the king.’ On the back of his cards he wrote: ‘Oh dear Eliza ever love thy prince, who had rather suffer death than leave thee.’ He sang love songs which Greville was sure referred ‘to the history of Eliza’.

On the 16th, Greville arrived in the middle of the morning at the king’s apartments. It had been a difficult night, with the king ‘very angry and abusive to those with him, and at whom he was swearing much’.163 ‘The violence was not abated’ at eleven o’clock, when Greville took a short break. When he returned, he was astonished to discover ‘that the queen and two of the princesses were actually with the king in his apartment. Never was information more unexpected than this was to me at this time.’ Greville knew that ‘both in the early as well as in the latter part of the morning he had been speaking improperly of the queen’, and he dreaded to think what had occurred in his absence. The king, Greville discovered, had received a letter from his son Adolphus and had asked that the queen and his daughters be allowed to read it with him. ‘Upon this, Willis agreed to the suggestion and the interview took place.’ Just as he had on the occasion of the queen’s disastrous last visit, Willis maintained ‘that the king had behaved with the greatest propriety and affection to the whole party and that the queen had, by the king’s desire, played a game at piquet’. ‘I was not doomed to be long cheered by this welcome report,’ wrote Greville resignedly. The king had gleefully explained to one of his pages what had really happened. ‘He told him that the queen had consented that Lady Pembroke should come to him, and that this he had promised before his daughters.’ The queen’s humiliation was now complete. Her husband had repudiated her in front of her children. A few hours later, George asked Greville to find a book for him. ‘He desired me to go and look for Paley’s Philosophy, in which I should find, he told me, that though the law said that a man might have but one wife, yet that Nature allowed more.’164

The female diarists made no comment about the king’s outspoken and lacerating attacks on his wife. Fanny Burney simply noted on 10 January: ‘my poor royal mistress now droops’.165 On the 15th, Lady Harcourt wrote that the queen ‘has been very low and very far from well’, and thought her so ill that she begged her to seek medical advice, to no avail.166 Despite all she had to bear, Charlotte did not buckle. ‘She has a strong mind and a strong judgement,’ commented Lord Harcourt approvingly; and she did not shrink from continuing to perform what she thought was her duty. It was on her official birthday, 18 January, that the king insisted on seeing her, with three of the princesses – but, as Fanny Burney laconically observed, ‘it was not a good day’.167 Even the ever-hopeful Willis admitted that throughout the morning, ‘the king was never more disturbed in his life’. By evening, when the queen and her daughters arrived, he was a little calmer, although his behaviour was still excited. In a cruel echo of the musical evenings that had occupied much of the family’s time when he was well, ‘the king proposed catch singing. The queen, Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth were pressed to take part, and Dr Willis was obliged to join in.’168

As the king’s behaviour continued to be so unpredictable, on 24 January Willis found it expedient to introduce a new form of coercion, ‘a chair fixed to the floor that cannot be thrown down. When shown it,’ Greville reported, ‘the king eyed it with some degree of apprehension.’ The next day, he showed off the contraption, ‘which he called his Coronation Chair’, to one of the doctors. The King of Spain, George said, had been mad but kept his state; ‘only in England could a king be confined in a strait waistcoat’. On the 28th, Willis had him placed in it ‘and gave him a severe lecture on his improper conversation, Eliza, etc.’.169 When the king became ‘loud and impatient under this lecture, Dr Willis ordered a handkerchief to be held before his mouth’ until he became quiet.

By the end of January, with the king having been ill for more than three months, it seemed as though the queen was finally broken. Her eyes were inflamed, wrote Lady Harcourt, and she spent her days in a darkened room. ‘She is very low, very thin and eats nothing.’170 The princesses were all worried about her. But just as she seemed about to give up, out of nowhere the first signs appeared that the king might at last have begun to recover. Both his vision and his powers of concentration improved enough for him to be able to read again. ‘Shakespeare is what he generally prefers,’ stated Lady Harcourt, ‘and he particularly likes to read King Lear.’ On one of their visits, he told his daughters that although the experience of his illness meant he had some things in common with Lear, ‘in other respects he was not like him, for he had no Goneril, nor Regan, but three Cordelias. Judge how this affected them all.’171

He had also started to draw again, applying himself to calmly making meticulous architectural plans of buildings, which had been one of his favourite occupations when well. Encouraged by these indications, Charlotte was persuaded to see him again. On 31 January, she brought twelve-year-old Princess Mary to visit her father. Mother and daughter played cards together, whilst the king read aloud to them from the Life of Handel. ‘He then sung parts of some of the choruses, and commented upon their different advantages of composition. He became afterwards jocose,’ noted Greville, and at that point ‘it was thought proper to end this visit.’172 He was still, Greville thought, subject ‘to flight and hurry’, but ‘on the whole he behaved as well as he has done at any time since his illness to the queen’. The next night, Charlotte took their daughter Sophia to see him; a few days later, Augusta came too. Greville believed these were some of the best days the king had enjoyed since his arrival at Kew.

On 2 February, Fanny Burney met him by accident as she walked in Kew Gardens. Catching sight of the king and his party in the distance, she ‘ran off with all my might!’ but the king pursued her, ‘loudly and hoarsely calling after me “Miss Burney, Miss Burney!”’ At first, not knowing ‘in what state he might be’, she continued to run away, until Dr Willis called out that it hurt the king to run. She came to a reluctant halt and ‘forced myself forward to meet him’, thinking this by far ‘the greatest act of personal courage I ever made’. When they spoke, she was surprised to find him so much improved. In his face she saw ‘all his wonted benignity of countenance, though still something of wildness in his eyes’. She was very shocked when ‘he put both his hands round my two shoulders’ and kissed her cheek. ‘Involuntarily, I thought he meant to crush me’; but gradually she realised his intentions were friendly. ‘What a conversation followed! What did he not say!’ The king commiserated with Fanny on her difficulties with Mrs Schwellenberg, insisting she ignore the old woman’s bullying and consider him a friend and protector. He talked about her father, about Handel, about Mrs Delany and, most uncharacteristically, about politics, declaring ‘he was very much dissatisfied with his state officers and that he meant to form an entire new establishment’. Fanny could not deny that his manner was both intense and indiscreet, ‘but upon the whole how inexpressibly thankful I was to see him so nearly himself – so little removed from recovery’.173

The king’s behaviour continued to fluctuate wildly. On the 3rd, Greville overheard ‘very high words’ between Willis and the king which he discovered arose from ‘his having spoke improperly of the queen and having refused to see her’. Nevertheless, Charlotte arrived in her husband’s apartments as arranged, this time accompanied by the Princesses Augusta and Elizabeth. They found their father ‘high in spirits’ and talking incessantly. ‘Piquet was attempted but did not go very smoothly. Afterwards, HM proposed singing … The king on this occasion himself joined in heartily in “Rule Britannia” and “Come Cheer Up My Lads”.’174

The following day, the visitors were the queen and Princesses Mary and Sophia. Their father ‘behaved with more calmness and propriety than he had on the preceding night’.175 Lady Harcourt found the queen that evening ‘more delighted than I have ever seen her after any of her visits … Twice she believed he was going to say something wrong, but he put his hand upon his mouth said “Hush”, and then in a moment spoke properly … Our spirits and hopes are very much revived.’176 Two days later (‘a day of indulgence’) the king was allowed to use a knife and fork and to shave himself, which he did very carefully, shaving his head as well as his face, to prepare himself for wearing a wig again.177

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In the world beyond Kew, the political process had ground steadily onwards. Pitt’s delaying tactics had been very effective; but for all his political dexterity, he was aware that for him, and for his administration, time was running out. On 30 December, advised by Fox, the Prince of Wales had stated his intention to accept the regency even in its restricted form. Much of January had been spent in further interrogation of the physicians, instigated by the opposition, who still hoped to engineer a declaration of the continuing seriousness of the king’s state. The Regency Bill was finally published on 6 February.

The parliamentary process duly began, but Fox had left it all too late. In the second week of February, the king’s health began to improve with a speed no one could have predicted. His constipation was finally cured, and even his familiar patterns of speech returned. An evening spent with his wife and Princess Amelia passed off, Greville noted, extremely well, the king serenading his family on his flute as they arrived in his apartments. Willis was overjoyed, telling Greville how good it was ‘to hear the king repeat his usual singular expression (so usual to him on all occasions formerly) of “What! What! What!”’, which he had heard the previous day. Everyone had noticed the absence of the king’s familiar verbal tic during his illness, and though even the loyal Greville could hardly regard it as ‘a grace in language’, he too was glad to hear it again, ‘as it may be presumed a forerunner of returning reason and as such should be hailed with welcome’.178

Even the sceptical Dr Warren was impressed by the obvious improvement, telling Greville on the 11th that he had just come from the king and that ‘not the least impropriety had escaped him during the interview’. Greville, who seems always to have harboured a well-concealed sympathy for Warren, thought his attitude more generous than that of Willis, who was ‘sneeringly triumphant on the excellent bulletin of the day’.179 Nothing now could deflate the buoyant sense of hope that had at last taken hold at Kew. ‘The old doctor is jumping around the house and cannot command his joy,’ Lady Harcourt told her husband, ‘we are all in high spirits.’ The queen too dared to display a little cheerfulness: ‘Oh, I never saw the king so well since his illness began, as he is this evening.’ This, Lady Harcourt enthused, ‘was the queen’s joyous exclamation as she entered the room after her visit last night, to which she added, “There has not been a look or a word unlike himself.” The princesses spoke of him in the same manner.’180

On the 12th, the Regency Bill passed the Commons, although it appeared increasingly redundant day by day. The following week the king was well enough to see the Lord Chancellor, who, in the course of a lengthy interview, found him ‘rational and collected’. He spoke of ‘foreign politics in a hurried sort of way’, but not, Thurlow thought, with sufficient agitation to suggest he was still ill. As a result, the Lord Chancellor made a very significant decision. Two days later, as the Regency Bill was about to begin its final reading in the Lords, Thurlow brought proceedings to a halt, declaring the king’s recovery made them ‘wholly unnecessary’.181 This effectively put an end to his long confinement.

George’s doctors could not explain the sudden improvement in his condition, any more than they could account for its mysterious onset. If his complaint was porphyria, his return to better health marked the end of a particularly severe episode of the disease, but it did not mean that he was cured. If the problem was purely psychological, his recovery signified his emergence from a prolonged manic phase; that too, however, offered no guarantee that it would not recur. With either diagnosis, George’s improvement would be best understood as the regressive phase of a deep underlying condition, rather than permanent freedom from sickness. For now, his subjects, with a mix of puzzlement and relief, concentrated only on the good news – especially as the speed of his improvement seemed to accelerate every day.

On 19 February, for the first time since his arrival at Kew, the king left his rooms of his own accord, and went upstairs to take tea with his wife and daughters. Princess Augusta wrote to Miss Goldsworthy that he had stayed two hours with them. ‘I am so happy that I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw him; he was so exactly what you and all our friends could wish.’182 On the 24th, he met his first minister for the first time since Pitt had attempted to persuade him to leave Windsor for Kew. Perhaps neither of them had expected to see each other again, at least not as king and minister. Pitt observed that the king ‘spoke of his disorder as a thing of the past, which had left no other impression on his mind other than that of gratitude and a sense of what he owed to those who had stood by him’.183 On the 25th, the physicians’ bulletin declared the king entirely free from complaint. The following day, in his first public act since November, George put an end to the issuing of bulletins. His illness was now officially over.

In practice and in private, however, the king’s recovery was altogether more gradual. He was still being regularly dosed with a tartar emetic, thus preventing, so Willis believed, the accumulation of any remaining malign humours. The metallic-tasting substance was put in his food and drink, in his milk and even in his bread and butter. It was hardly surprising that George did not yet feel ready to resume his duties fully. He told Greville ‘it was his wish to keep quiet, as things were going on so well, and he was recovering so fast’. He knew, he said, that ‘I have no child’s play before me.’184 The king was as good as his word. In his first letter to Pitt since October, he laid out his plans for a complete alteration in behaviour that he believed was vital to preserve his health: ‘I must decline entering into a pressure of business, and indeed, for the rest of my days, shall expect others to fulfil the duties of their employments and only keep that superintending eye which can be effected without labour or fatigue.’185

Gradually, George began to show himself outside the apartment in which he had been confined for so long. He met Colonel Digby in the library, and greeted him affably, even demonstratively. ‘He quitted his papers, leaned himself back, extending his arms, and came forward with great glee, and said, “Ah Digby!” and took me by the hand and kissed me.’186 By the third week of February, the king had seen his watchmaker, his astronomer, and the gardener who looked after his exotic plants, from whom he was horrified to hear that all the labourers at Kew had been laid off during his illness and had not been paid. And there remained one interview that promised to be far less pleasant, but which could not much longer be delayed. At some point, he would have to meet his eldest sons.

*

The Prince of Wales and Frederick, Duke of York, had been attempting fruitlessly to see their father for some time. They had ‘gone repeatedly to Kew’, wrote Gilbert Elliot, ‘desiring to see the king; but were constantly refused on one pretence or another, although the Chancellor and many other strangers were admitted’.187 Finally the prince wrote to the queen demanding that he and his brother be given access to their father, or supplied with documents from the physicians explaining why this was impossible. Faced with such a direct challenge, the queen capitulated and a meeting was arranged for 23 February. Willis said that ‘he was not anxious, having prepared the king’s mind’. He had told him ‘of the intended regency, and what day it was finally to have been passed’. The king maintained that he was satisfied and was ready to bear anything ‘vexatious’ that he might now need to be told; but his political instincts had not entirely deserted him – in the same conversation, he told Willis that he fully understood how difficult ‘had been the struggle’ and added ‘had they crushed you, Doctor, they would have crushed me – we must have fallen together’.188

Almost the first question the king asked, on emerging from his confusion, had been about the conduct of the princes – ‘what his sons had done’ – but he had ‘acquiesced in the propriety of not dwelling on such subjects at present’. As he recovered, the full extent of their actions was revealed to him only gradually; Charlotte once hurried him out of a room to prevent him seeing the newspapers and pamphlets that covered her tables.189 Yet he could not have been unaware of the queen’s bitter, pent-up anger towards both her eldest sons, nor have been totally ignorant of its cause. He had probably not yet heard some of the worst gossip about their behaviour, but as such stories were avidly exchanged around the court, it would have been surprising if none of the rumours had reached his ears. Although they had demanded the meeting, it seems unlikely that the princes looked forward to it with anything but apprehension. Perhaps it was a combination of fear and shame that made them, in defiance of all etiquette and decent consideration, arrive over two hours late for it.

The king had tried hard to compose himself ahead of what he knew would be a difficult encounter: ‘he made a pause, and after being silent for a few seconds, he took his handkerchief from his pocket, and wiping his eyes with it, said, “it was a maxim of his ancestors of the House of Brunswick never to shed a tear”’.190 Mrs Harcourt heard that whatever had been the king’s intentions, weeping was certainly in evidence once he was face to face with his sons. ‘He caught the princes in his arms with great affection. Both shed tears. He said he always loved them, and should always love them.’ Somewhat unconvincingly, the Prince of Wales declared it ‘the happiest day of his life’. The king, however, was careful not to venture into sensitive territories, and made no mention of any specific actions taken during his enforced absence from public life. The prince confirmed the tactful blandness of the meeting, telling Greville that their talk had been general. The brothers stayed only half an hour; Mrs Harcourt thought ‘they were evidently surprised at the king’s perfect self-possession’.191 Other, more hostile observers thought they were not pleased by their father’s apparent recovery. ‘They went off,’ reported one commentator, ‘quite desperate … and endeavouring to drown their care, disappointment and internal chagrin in wine and dissipation.’192

Nothing illustrates quite so clearly the limitations of George and Charlotte’s earnest intentions to rewrite the pattern of Hanoverian family history as the behaviour of their eldest sons during the king’s illness. For all their efforts, the crisis revealed a family split along the fault lines of inheritance and succession, exactly as it had been for generations. George and Frederick were seen at their best during the onset of the king’s illness in October the previous year. Gilbert Elliot, admittedly a friendly witness, described the prince’s actions at that point as ‘exemplary’. The prince and his brother both visited Windsor to see their stricken father; the king himself acknowledged that his eldest son had wept on seeing him so ill.193 Frederick wrote regularly to his brother, sending bulletins on the king’s condition that suggest genuine concern for his welfare. Yet both seemed unable to resist the temptation of sharing the most distressing and intimate details of the king’s behaviour with their friends and political allies. ‘The prince and the duke came with this account,’ concluded the Duchess of Devonshire, having listed a catalogue of the king’s bizarre and violent actions, which opened with the declaration that ‘the king is as mad as ever’.194 Having helped feed the hunger for gossip and speculation, it was unsurprising that the princes soon became the targets of it themselves. Lurid stories circulated, asserting that the Prince of Wales had smuggled his friends into the king’s sickroom to hear his ravings, or that he had spied on him through a hole in the wall.195 The brothers were said to have regaled their drinking companions at Brooks’s club with anecdotes of their father’s illness, the prince making full use of his talent for mimicry to imitate his delirium. ‘If we were together,’ wrote William Grenville to one of his correspondents, ‘I could tell you some particulars of the Prince of Wales’s behaviour towards the king and queen within these few days that would make your blood run cold.’196

It seems undeniable that once the prospect of a regency loomed, the attitude of the princes towards their father did indeed shift. They veered away from solicitude and towards grasping a political prize that would, they believed, wipe out both their huge debts and their sense of powerlessness. Their ambition and self-interest trumped any emotional obligation they felt towards their father. But if both were on this occasion deficient in filial loyalty, that was perhaps a reflection of the king’s inability to show paternal warmth and affection towards his adult children. There may also have been an element of horrified gleefulness in the brothers’ response. For their entire lives, the king had been presented to his sons as the living embodiment of the high moral standards to which it was their duty to aspire. From their shared cradle, he had been held up to them, particularly by the queen, as a model of integrity against which they were to measure their own attempts to live a proper and useful existence. The sons’ defects, they were insistently assured, were all the more apparent when contrasted with the king’s peerless sense of duty and purpose. Having endured a lifetime of lectures on his virtues, it would have required the selflessness of saints not to have experienced some secret satisfaction when his much-vaunted self-control so publicly and spectacularly deserted him. Their father, it turned out, could swear, curse and fight like other men. Like his sons, he too lusted after women, some of them unsuitable, unavailable and inappropriate. Like his sons, he was also revealed to have ambivalent feelings about the queen. His moral superiority had once made him impregnable; his sickness revealed to his eldest sons a vulnerability in which they were neither sufficiently generous nor sympathetic enough to see anything but their own advantage.

Although the king was disappointed by the response of his eldest son to his troubles, he was probably not surprised. His expectations of the Prince of Wales were already low, and sank steadily by the year. In return, it seems unlikely that the prince felt much genuine or consistent affection for the king. A sentimental romantic, he liked the idea of loving his father; the actual practice of it he found almost impossible. George surely hoped for a better return from his much-loved second son. Frederick was the only one of the princes for whom he asked during his illness – with the exception of the dead Octavius. Yet even his favourite seemed to preserve an emotional distance from his suffering father. Whilst in Germany, Frederick had often acted as the king’s advocate, urging better behaviour on the Prince of Wales. Once back in England he had given up all attempts to act as his brother’s keeper, often outdoing him in excess, particularly at the gambling table. As his conduct became more dissolute, Frederick’s attitude towards his father hardened. Perhaps he was ashamed he had failed to live up to the king’s high opinion of him; perhaps, like his brother, he was seduced by the vision of a life no longer dominated by the long shadow of that difficult, disappointed man. Certainly Frederick responded very coolly to the king’s predicament, writing with calm dispassion to his brother Adolphus that their father was ‘a complete lunatic’.197 The king told Francis Willis that he would rather have been obliged ‘to his Frederick than to any other individual’ during his illness, but the possibility of throwing in his lot with his beleaguered parents never seems to have occurred to the Duke of York. His lifelong position as the best-loved son did nothing to stop him allying himself with the Prince of Wales when sides came to be taken. The bonds between the two eldest brothers were, in 1789 at least, stronger than those that linked York to the king.

It was some time before even the semblance of good relations between the princes and their parents was restored. Charlotte was widely reported to be more resentful than the king towards their sons. During the meeting on 23 February, whilst the king embraced the princes, Elliot described the queen’s behaviour as far less conciliatory. She was observed to be very angry, ‘walking to and fro in the room with a countenance and a manner of great dissatisfaction; and the king, every now and then went to her in a submissive and soothing sort of a tone’.198 In March, the situation deteriorated even further. Elliot heard that the Prince of Wales ‘had had a smart tussle with the queen, in which they came to strong and open displays of hostility’. In what was clearly a fraught exchange, all the repressed resentment of the last few months came pouring out. The prince told his mother that she had ‘connected herself with his enemies, and entered into plans for destroying and disgracing him and all her children and that she had countenanced misrepresentations of his behaviour to the king’. Stung into a rebuke, Charlotte ‘was violent, lost her temper, and the conversation ended, I believe, by her saying that she would not be the channel of anything that either he or the Duke of York had to say to the king, and that the king did not mind what either he or the Duke of York either did or said or thought’.199

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 would 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.