‘Never did schoolboys enjoy tneir holidays equal to what we have done,’ wrote the Queen after the July 1788 visit to Cheltenham. ‘The King went there without any guards,’ which pleased the local people. ‘At various times have they thrown out that he was better guarded without troops walking among his subjects whose hearts were ready to defend him …’
Lord Fauconberg’s house, with a charming view of the Malvern Hills, had so few rooms that, even with only a skeleton staff accompanying the King and Queen and their elder daughters, Miss Planta had to take her tea with Miss Burney on a landing. All arrangements were rustic. When Miss Burney, plagued by illness, consulted an apothecary brought in to dose the Princess Royal for influenza, he thought mightily before suggesting a saline draught. On a visit days later to Worcester the Princess Royal divided the orgeat she had been given for her own influenza, and put half by Miss Burney’s bed.
The royal family strolled ‘on the walks’, and bought fairings and novelties which they distributed among their ladies and sent home to the younger princesses. At first, such was the curiosity of the local inhabitants about their royal visitors, the crowd around Lord Fauconberg’s house was ‘one head’, as, on the way, every town had ‘seemed all face’. But the extravagances of the initial welcome died down, and there was little to do in the little spa once the invalids of the party had walked at six in the morning across a couple of fields and an orchard to the wells to take their daily dose.
The King informed Sir George Baker in London that his bilious complaint was lessening, and enquired what that daily dose should be. Baker wrote, ‘no one except the drinker can possibly determine it. It is in general experienced to be a weak purgative.’ Baker conceived that a pint drunk every morning would act on the bowels sufficiently, but if the King wished to drink more, he would not object unless sleepiness or headache followed. He did beg, however, that the King should not take strong exercise. Fatigue, when taking the waters, was counter-productive, as it heated the constitution.
The King heeded Sir George to the extent of not riding his usual thirty miles a day. Instead, he embarked with his wife and daughters on a series of exhausting days out. Having written ahead to the Prince of Wales’s former tutor Dr Hurd, now Bishop of Worcester, with warning of his intention to attend the Three Choirs Festival and visit the china manufactory there, the King with his womenfolk meanwhile surveyed the model jail and hospital at Gloucester, where an enormous crowd surrounded them. They travelled to Stroud, where they inspected every stage of the process for making jackets at a clothing manufactory. And they visited, in addition, various seats of the nobility. At Lord Coventry’s house, Croome Court, the princesses sat stiff on stools with no backs, provided for them at the specific request of Lord Harcourt. But the formality of the visit abated when some young farmers, having found their way into Lord Coventry’s cellar, clambered into the King’s coach and sat there, despite remonstrances from coachman and postilions. The King, it was known, had a great fondness for the ‘harmless sportings’ of country people, and no disciplinary action ensued.
One of the King’s preoccupations at Cheltenham was a promised visit from his second son Prince Frederick, Duke of York. The Duke was loath to leave Oadands, the house near Weybridge on which he had just taken a lease. But the King was determined, and at last the Duke relented. Elated, the King was next concerned to have his son near at hand, but there was literally not a room to spare in the Fauconberg house. The King solved that difficulty by buying a sturdy timber house that stood on the outskirts of the town, and having it dismantled and re-erected on Lord Fauconberg’s land. (He also caused a well to be dug in his host’s garden, averring the quality of the water there to be infinitely superior to that in the celebrated wells a few miles off.) Unfortunately, for all the King’s energy, the Duke stayed only one night, pressure of business forcing him to fly off again – in the direction of Newmarket races. For male companionship, the King instead took to raising his equerries from their beds at six in the morning with a holler.
The stay at Cheltenham was punctuated by the arrival of letters from Princess Mary and Princess Sophia at Kew, and even from Princess Amelia, who turned five there on 7 August. While the King and his daughters were taking the waters under Sir George Baker’s direction, the doctor had another patient at Kew. Princess Mary had developed a ‘tumour’ in her arm, and Mr Charles Hawkins – Caesar’s son and Pennell’s nephew, who had become the King’s Serjeant-Surgeon on his father’s death two years before – had to operate. Princess Sophia wrote to her father in French, to thank him for a ‘charmante’ present, and to add, ‘Amélie est enchantee de son joli cadeau … Le bras de ma chère Marie continue d’etre toujours le même et grâce à dieu elle ne souffre pas beaucoup.’
Princess Mary wrote, too, describing her sufferings from her arm, or rather from the ‘part swelled up to my shoulder’. ‘How happy I was when I awoke to receive your kind letter and the beautiful present you were so good to send me. Amelia was so delighted to hear there was something for her,’ she continued, ‘that she came upon my bed to receive it, and means to wear it today.’
Princess Amelia made a sprawling attempt at a signature to a letter to her father this same day, which an attendant – probably Miss Gouldsworthy – acting as scribe and coach for the flood of information she had to give, wrote for her. ‘My dear Papa,’ the letter ran, ‘I am very much obliged to you for the very pretty belt, and I am to wear it today when I dress. Pray give my duty to Mama, I hope you are quite well after the waters. Pray give my love to my sisters, and I hope when they come back that they will be very well. Minny [Princess Mary] feels pain when she puts on [the] poultice, I always do hold her hand … Pray tell Augusta and Elizabeth, I intend to write to them very soon, so I do to Princess Royal. Lady Ely and Mrs Bonfoy come today. My dear Papa I am your affectionate daughter Amelia.’
Sophia wrote again, in English this time. ‘My dear Papa, I am very much obliged to you for the charming letter you was so good as to write me, and for the charming descriptions it contains.’ (The royal party was now at Worcester staying with Bishop Hurd for the choral festival.) She was very happy to hear that one Lady Reid had made acquaintance with General Gouldsworthy – Gouly’s brother and the King’s equerry – and she expected ‘to hear in a short time that he is gone to make her a visit’. Gouly desired her to send her duty to him ‘and is very much flattered at your remembrance of her’. But the burden of Sophia’s letter was excitement. Princess Mary still being hors de combat following her operation, the younger sister had received permission to attend one of the children’s balls that were held in private houses, at which boys and girls practised their dance steps in for-giving company. ‘I am very much obliged to you, my dear Papa, for letting me go to the ball and my dear Mary is so good as to say that she is very glad I am. Mr Hawkins has given her leave to come down stairs which you may suppose makes me very happy.’
Unfortunately, this promising letter alone survives from the Princess’s progress into adolescence. Princess Sophia, favourite charge of many of her governesses and attendants, a girl who stirred an elderly Lord Melbourne to speak of her charms in youth – ‘he always thought Princess Sophia, when young, though very pretty, very like a gypsy’, he said – can only be glimpsed through the eyes of others until November 1790, when, at the age of thirteen, she writes a small and somewhat secretive hand.
Princess Mary wrote two days later from Kew to thank her father for another letter. ‘Indeed I do not see anything extraordinary in my behaviour in being glad that Sophia should go to the ball,’ the elder sister wrote priggishly, ‘for I think it is only what I ought to have done.’ It was Princess Amelia’s fifth birthday that day and, although she missed her parents, Mary told them, the little girl was ‘vastly pleased’ with the presents they sent, and ‘laughed exceedingly’ at the nutmeg grater in the shape of a wooden shoe the King sent – surely a souvenir of the Cheltenham ‘walks’.
The royal sisters and parents were reunited at Kew in mid-August, and the yearly round began again with a ball at Windsor on the 29th for the Duke of York, and a drawing room in London two days later, new clothes for the King and Queen’s wedding anniversary on 8 September, and new clothes again on the 22nd, for Coronation Day. Princess Augusta promised, in a letter she wrote to her brother Augustus, a long account of ‘that most blessed of spots, Cheltenham’ in her next. But this letter was dedicated to her regret on hearing he had been so ill, and her relief at knowing that he was recovered.
I hope, my dearest, that you will take proper care of yourself… And that you will not be displeased with me when I ask you if you take exercise enough. For you know how much you used to be out in the air when you was in dear old England. I thought that phrase of ‘old England’ would make you laugh and that is, added to air and exercise, what I shall next recommend by way of a restorative. A little mirth, even in an illness, makes one feel better, and I am very sure that, if I was with you two or three days talking over old stories and telling you several new ones that have passed since you are gone, that you would soon pick up your good looks and spirits.
Princess Royal’s letter to poor asthmatic Augustus was, if sincere, decidedly more sombre:
perhaps this very illness … is a great blessing, since it has confirmed all the good principles that have been instilled into you, and made you see the comfort that religion fills the soul with, when we have reason to believe that all other comfort will soon be withdrawn from us. Indeed, my dear brother, every day convinces me more and more of the truth and comforts of religion. For never does anything vex or really afflict me that, if I have recourse to prayer, I do not instantly feel relieved, being convinced that my father, which is in heaven, knows what is best for me and only afflicts me for wise purposes.
Recommending her dear Augustus, with his ‘serious turn of mind’, to read ‘a German book, that I am very fond of, which is Haller’s letters to his daughter’, the Princess turned to news of a concert, which was to be held at the Castle on her birthday. ‘We were to have had a great entertainment, as Mrs Siddons was to have read a comedy, but alas she has leave of absence from the managers, and is some hundred miles from London for a month. Therefore it would have been quite cruel to have sent for her.’ The Princess Royal would ‘at least try to keep awake during that evening, which will indeed be something new for me to do at harmony. I am afraid that you will not have a very great opinion of me from this confession, as in general a love of music to distraction runs through our family, of which I alone am deprived. Pray, my dear Augustus, do not love me less for my want of ear, and consider that music is almost the only thing that we differ about. In drawing we are both artists and I hope by the next messenger to send you a proof that I have not lost my time since my return from Cheltenham.’
Princess Elizabeth joined in the correspondence, rather rushed: ‘You have not heard as yet, I suppose, that Lord Carmarthen is going to be married to Miss Anguish – everybody gives her the best of characters. Mrs Fox [Lady Charlotte Finch’s niece and the princesses’ friend] was brought to bed last Saturday of a daughter. Lady Louisa Clayton [Lady Charlotte’s sister] was with her at Plymouth. Now my dear, Adieu, believe me affectionately yrs Eliza. My best love to Ernest and Adolphus I will write soon to both of them.’
Although the Queen was in playful mood on her eldest daughter’s birthday, instructing Miss Burney to ‘bring down the two “Michaelmas geese”’ – Miss Gouldsworthy’s birthday falling on the 29th as well as the Princess Royal’s – the evening concert was a lugubrious affair, lasting from eight until midnight with an interval for tea. Fischer the oboist played once; the rest of the performance, according to Lord Ailesbury the Queen’s Chamberlain, was ‘very indifferent, particularly the Windsor singers’. But the King was cheerful, ‘and continued to talk with satisfaction of his Worcestershire tour, and to think that Cheltenham had been of use to him’.
The Princess Royal was happy with her birthday presents, which she described to her brother Augustus: ‘Mama gave me a beautiful watch and chain of green enamel set with pearls. Prince of Wales a diamond hoop ring, and Frederick a blue enamel ring with a large diamond in the middle and set round with smaller ones.’ But she was less satisfied on another topic. One by one, her friends, and even the ladies who had attended her and her sisters, were marrying and having children. Mary Hamilton had married Mr Dickenson. Lady Caroline Waldegrave was now affianced to Lord Cardigan, while she, the Princess Royal, had only dancing partners – and those chosen for her by Lord Ailesbury. When the ball was over she accompanied her parents back to the Upper Lodge, at the age of twenty-two nowhere nearer her objective of ‘settling’.
The next princess due to celebrate a birthday was Sophia, who would be eleven on 3 November. But between the Princess Royal’s birthday concert and that day, the dull regularity of the royal family’s routine was to be overturned. Sophia’s birthday – and still more her sister Augusta’s birthday on the 8th – would be days for anxiety and fear rather than celebration, and the close harmony which ruled the King and Queen’s lives together shattered. Nor would the princesses’ relationships with their parents ever be the same again.
It began in the week of 16 October 1788. The King, aged fifty, complained of a rash on his arm, and showed it to his daughter Elizabeth, who told Lady Harcourt that ‘it looked very red and in great weals, as if it had been scourged with cords.’ The Princess advised her father to take care, but he proceeded with his normal punishing routine. On the Wednesday, he took only a cup of coffee and dry biscuit for breakfast, as it was a levee day, and, after having no dinner, ate only pears at supper at the Hanoverian Minister’s. The following morning, Thursday, he walked around Kew and Richmond gardens in the morning dew, then failed to change his stockings, only pulling off his wet boots before driving into town with the Queen and princesses. He was afraid he would make them late, for dressing for the drawing room.
That night at Kew he became very ill. At 1 a.m. the Queen ran out of her apartments, ‘in great alarm, in her shift, or with very little clothes’. As the pages attempted to ‘retire’, she ordered them to go for Mr David Dundas, apothecary at Richmond. He came forty minutes later and revived the King, who in turn sent for Sir George Baker. His note, inscribed ‘7.25 a.m.’, informed Baker that he had had a-‘spasmodic bilious attack.’ The King was suffering acute pain in the pit of his stomach, which was shooting from side to side and into his back, making breathing difficult. He told his doctor that ‘of late he had been much tormented in the night by a cramp in the muscles of his legs, and that he had suffered much from the rheumatism, which … made him lame.’
The King did not get better quickly. In fact, his legs swelled after he took the senna that Sir George prescribed. The royal family’s return to Windsor was delayed, as he was still feverish. And indeed it was not till the morning of 21 October that the King, although he had had a bad night’s rest, wrote that he felt able to see Mr Pitt, his Prime Minister. With amazement, Pitt received a private note from Sir George Baker, saying that the King was in a state ‘nearly bordering on delirium.’ William Grenville, a member of Pitt’s Cabinet, wrote equally confidentially to his brother the Marquis of Buckingham on 23 October 1788: ‘a part of the K’s disorder is an agitation and flurry of spirits which hardly gives him any rest’. And at Kew itself Princess Augusta was employed by the Queen on the 23rd, in extreme secrecy, to beg Sir George not to permit the King to leave Kew and attend his normal round in London until he was fully recovered: ‘Mama desires you would express it not as hers but as a wish of your own.’
The King meanwhile wrote to his son Augustus on the 24th, informing him that the spasm in his stomach that he had suffered on the 16th, ‘with the consequences of removing it’, had left him too ill to write earlier, but he was going to St James’s that day, to show he was not as ill as some had believed – though he added that he would ‘certainly have for the rest of my life a flannel clothing next to my skin.’ He was more concerned about Augustus’s poor health at Gottingen than his own, and with preparations to send his son south to the milder climate of Nice for the winter.
At the levee that day at St James’s, which the King did indeed attend, his swollen legs, wrapped in flannel, appalled more people than his presence reassured. Prime Minister Pitt noted what the King himself named his ‘bodily stiffness.’ Two days later, William Grenville thought the King’s appearance at the levee ‘an effort beyond his strength, but made with a view to putting an end to the stories that were circulated with much industry. He has, however, considerably weakened himself by it …’ And Grenville hinted that ‘The present situation is sufficiently embarrassing; but if it turns out ill, all sense of personal inconvenience, mortification, or disappointment, will, I fear, be lost in considerations of infinitely greater moment.’ But a veil of silence had fallen over the King’s health. Following the levee he had travelled to Windsor where he spent the anniversary of his accession, 25 October, generally a joyful occasion, with his family. Unfortunately, the King was not at all well. When his coach drew up at the door of the Queen’s Lodge and the King saw his four younger daughters waiting there, he had a hysteric fit. Later, Miss Burney saw him by chance, and he spoke with ‘a rapidity, a hoarseness of voice, a volubility, an earnestness – a vehemence …’ She wrote: ‘it startled me inexpressibly.’
The King seemed to have lost all power over himself. At Sunday Matins in St George’s Chapel, he started up, as the sermon was to begin, ‘embraced the Queen and Princesses, and then burst into tears’. He said to Princess Elizabeth,’ “You know what it is to be nervous but was you ever so bad as this?” With great presence of mind, she answered, “Yes”,’ and he became calmer. The scene took place in the royal pew close to the altar, so no one else witnessed it. But the King was undoubtedly very ill, of which he was aware. Once back at Windsor he had said to his equerry General Gouldsworthy, ‘I return to you a poor old man, weak in body and in mind.’ And during these days, sitting in a chaise with the Queen, he listened to her stating her belief that God did not try his servants beyond their capacity. ‘Then you are prepared for the worst,’ he said, with a hand encircling her waist.
Sir George Baker reassured the Queen that the King was not as ill as he seemed. Bringing in the King’s favourite Windsor physician, Dr William Heberden, as his partner, Baker counselled putting a blister on the King’s head with his wig to be worn over it. But the princesses watched with horror as their father’s hold on his world crumbled. The meals at which he had been so punctual lay waiting for him now. The Queen was distracted. Yet no one dared to call a halt to the King’s activities. With mottled skin and swollen legs, rapid and hoarse in his speech, he became a frightening figure. He took his daughter Augusta and then the Princess Royal out in his carriage for airings, and told them quite unexpectedly of plans he was formulating for their more or less immediate marriages in Germany. He would take them to Hanover in the summer, he said, and make his Court there as gay as possible, attracting all the young princes of Germany. He regretted that he had not made matches for them as yet: he had been held back only by the ‘pain the idea of parting from them’ had caused him. He would be happy with such choices as they themselves should make, if they did not make mesalliances. The extent of their husbands’ territories was as nothing besides his wish for their happiness. And there was much more …
It was what the Princess Royal had wished for, but stated under these circumstances – and told rapidly, hoarsely, excitedly – these plans could only upset her and her sister. ‘Though there was nothing improper in what he said,’ wrote Lady Harcourt, ‘yet he spoke with a degree of eagerness and rapidity that was distressing to the Princesses.’ The Princess Royal came in from the airing on which she had heard of these plans for her future and gave the Queen what Fanny Burney took to be a good account of the episode. But the Princess spoke in German, which she was well aware Miss Burney did not know.
Officially the King’s illness was a rheumatic complaint and, in the doctors’ words, ‘it appears now as if everything has thrown itself upon his nerves, which has given him a very violent degree of agitation which nothing but rest and quiet will remove.’ But neither the royal family nor the household at Kew was convinced, and London was full of strange reports. Miss Burney at Windsor wrote on 3 November: ‘we are all here in a most uneasy state. The King is better and worse so frequently, and changes so daily, backwards and forwards, that everything is to be apprehended if his nerves are not quieted.’ The Queen burst into tears when Miss Burney was with her, but more often closeted herself with Gouly, to ask how her brother found the King. ‘Sometimes she walks up and down the room without uttering a word, but shaking her head frequently and in evident distress and irresolution.
‘The Queen is almost overpowered with some secret terror,’ Miss Burney wrote. The drawing room on the 4th was put off, ‘all the house uneasy and alarmed.’ The following day the King went out with the Princess Royal for another airing, ‘all smiling benignity’, but he badgered the postilions with contradictory orders and got in and out of the carriage twice. In conversation with Sir George Baker the King’s speech was ‘very unconnected and desultory.’ A man of rigorous punctuality, the King kept dinner waiting, deferred coffee and the evening concert till well past their appointed times, and did not go to bed before two in the morning. He spoke of going to Hanover when he got well. But would he ever get well?
The mounting anxiety at Windsor came to a head on the evening of the 5th. At dinner that night at the Queen’s Lodge, where the King and Queen and princesses were joined by the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, the King was in a terrible way. He had no longer the least command over either his body or his tongue. ‘His eyes’, the Queen later told Lady Harcourt, ‘she could compare to nothing but black-currant 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, he began again, while the foam ran out of his mouth.’
Somehow the awful meal was got through, while the King, speaking without stopping, praised the Duke of York and forgave the Prince of Wales. The company, according to Lady Harcourt, was ‘drowned in tears’. The King at one point – the conversation turning to murder – seized the Prince of Wales by the collar out of his chair and threw the corpulent young man across the room. The Queen, as soon as she could, left the table and made for her room where she fell into strong hysterics, Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave comforting her. While the King followed her there, the Prince of Wales in the eating room burst into tears and was only prevented – he believed – from fainting when Princess Elizabeth rubbed his temples ‘with Hungary water’. The King’s physical symptoms were now subsidiary to his symptoms of mental disturbance. Members of the royal family and of the royal household who gave accounts of this dreadful dinner spoke of the King’s ‘delirium’. Sir George Baker went further. The King was ‘under an entire alienation of mind’, he wrote in his diary.
While the household were still ignorant of the exact events in the eating room, the atmosphere throughout the Queen’s Lodge was highly charged. ‘A stillness the most uncommon reigned,’ wrote Fanny Burney.’… Nobody stirred; not a voice was heard; not a step, not a motion … there seemed a strangeness in the house most extraordinary.’ In the apartment where ladies of the household customarily dined and dispensed tea to those equerries not in waiting, all was mystery. No equerries came, and Miss Burney and Miss Planta sat without talking. The former was ‘shocked’ at she scarcely knew what; the latter ‘seemed to know too much for speech’. Confirmation that something was afoot came with news that the evening concert had been cancelled and the musicians ordered away, But when the Queen’s reader Mme de la Fite came from Princess Elizabeth they were no better informed. She had found the Princess ‘very miserable’ but unconfiding.
The royal family’s private drama had shifted to the King and Queen’s apartments. The King, on being told that the Queen was unwell, said he would take care of her himself, then insisted on removing her to the drawing room. Here he made a sort of bed out of one of the sofas for her to lie on, and then placed Princess Royal, Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth round it. With all the candles except two put out, the unhappy woman and her daughters were forced to remain in this funerary arrangement while the King talked fondly and deliriously on.
When the time came to retire for the night, the King eventually agreed to move into the dressing room next door to the bedroom he shared with the Queen, on being told that she was really ill. And ill indeed she was. From this evening on, the princesses saw their mother crushed, despairing and unwilling to take any sort of lead. For thirty years she had played the queen consort with all her might, bearing child after child, organizing childcare and education, managing household and Court life, dispensing charity and encouraging the arts. Now, with her husband ‘under an entire alienation of mind’, the Queen wilted.
While the princesses went to their rooms upstairs, the Queen sat upright in her bed, with Miss Gouldsworthy on a chair at her side, and listened to the King next door as he talked without stopping. Once he came into the room and pulled back the curtains to check, with a candle held to her face, that she was really there. ‘Gouly,’ he said, addressing his daughters’ governess of fifteen years, ‘… they said the King was ill, he was not ill; but now the Queen is ill, he is ill too.’ He stayed half an hour. In the morning the Queen was still trembling from the anticipation of another such visit, but still desperate to hear, through the door, what the King was saying and to judge his mental state. ‘I am nervous,’ the ‘poor exhausted voice’ cried out. ‘I am not ill, but I am nervous: if you would know what is the matter with me, I am nervous.’
What was the matter with the King? The question plagued the doctors – for now there were three. In the night, Sir George Baker, feeling unwell – or unable to attempt alone a diagnosis of such a portentous illness – sent for fashionable Sir Richard Warren, a favourite in the Whig households of London. He had no more special knowledge or experience of cases of mental illness than Sir George, but he was the Prince of Wales’s own physician. The King refused to see Warren when he arrived, and Warren had to base his diagnosis of the case on what he could glean by listening through the door. He pronounced 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.’
This statement overwhelmed the Prince of Wales as much as his mother and sisters. If his father was unfit to rule, as seemed the case, then the Prince or the Queen were the obvious candidates for regent. If the King died – and he seemed, leaving aside his mental impairment, all at once mortally weak and debilitated – then the Prince automatically became king. Leaving aside his filial feeling for the King – and the Prince was decidedly tenderhearted – he had reason to exult privately at the opportunities presented to him. Not the least of his concerns for the last few years had been the pressing need to clear his debts, or at least to receive a larger annual grant. Chief among the opponents to this project had been William Pitt. As regent – or as king – the Prince could at a stroke dismiss Pitt, call Charles James Fox and the Whigs into office, and name his sum. Although he was genuinely moved by his father’s plight, the Prince waited with growing excitement to see whether he would maintain his state of delirium, sink further, or recover. The doctors, deeply uncomfortable at the idea of diagnosing insanity or something resembling it in a monarch who might then recover, called in a third consultant, Dr Henry Revell Reynolds, to help them in their deliberations.
The Queen – the other obvious candidate for regent – wanted none of it. She had settled into a modest suite of rooms far removed from the anteroom where the King continued to babble. There she cried aloud, ‘What will become of me! What will become of me!’ (As Miss Burney, who said she could never forget ‘their desponding sound’, averred, the words ‘implied such complicated apprehensions’.) The Queen recommended leaving all arrangements to the Lord Chancellor. The question of a regency she appeared to regard as none of her business, and likewise she seemed to have no faith in the doctors’ ability to cure her husband, apparently regarding his death as inevitable – and insupportable. The princesses were almost more alarmed by their mother’s staying in bed all day – an unheard-of occurrence – than they were by their father’s plight. She received them, dressed in a dimity chemise that served her as dressing-gown and a close gauze cap, and the princesses, confronted with her in this unfamiliar condition, struggled, ‘from a habit that is become a second nature’, to repress all outward grief.
In Lower Lodge, Mlle de Montmollin, Miss Gouldsworthy and Miss Gomm – with Lady Charlotte Finch as overseer – kept the younger princesses busy. Five-year-old Amelia was impervious to adult fears. Mary and Sophia ate their dinners like good little girls, but the future looked very black.
On 6 November, the Prince of Wales and Duke of York spent the night with a selection of gentlemen and attendants on an arrangement of chairs and sofas placed in the antechamber next door to where the King paced and talked. At one point he entered the room before the pages could stop him, apparently with the intention of going to the Queen. Distinguishing his sons in the darkness by the stars on their coats, he asked what they did there, and could only be persuaded by the use of some force to return to his room.
At Windsor on the 7th, Mr Pitt learned details from the Prince of the King’s conversation and behaviour over the past few days, showing the ‘derangement’ of his mind. To substantiate the Prince’s opinion, the three doctors, Baker, Warren and Reynolds, were then called in to give their opinion. ‘His Majesty’s understanding is at present so affected’, they said, that there did not appear to them ‘any interval, in which any act that he could do, could properly be considered as done with a consciousness and understanding of what it was about’.
They spoke of the ‘disorder’ either being ‘locally fixed on the brain’, in which case they anticipated it being permanent and life-threatening, or then again not life-threatening. Or it might be a case of ‘a translation of a disorder from one part to another’. They might be able to remove it, but then it might ‘attack some part where it might be dangerous to life’. They concluded their desperate ramblings with the more intelligible statement ‘That on the whole there was more ground to fear than to hope, and more reason to apprehend durable insanity than death.’ Later that day, the Prince wrote more coherently still that the King was now ‘in infinitely a more dangerous state than he has hitherto been, having no recollection whatever.’ The Duke of York came out from the King’s room to look over the shoulder of one Court reporter, the Prince’s ‘creature’Jack Willett Payne, and bid him say that the King’s situation was every moment becoming worse. His pulse was weaker and weaker and the doctors believed it was impossible for him to survive long. ‘All articulation even seems to be at an end with the poor King,’ Payne wrote, two hours later. The monarch was in a ‘most determined frenzy’; poultices, or ‘cataplasms’, had been applied to his feet, and ‘strong fomentations’ had been used without effect. The general agreement was that, if the King did not recover within twenty-four hours, all was over.
It was Princess Augusta’s twentieth birthday on 8 November, a day when it had been intended that Mrs Siddons should read a play before a large company. The birthday passed instead largely unremarked. With tears her birthday present from her mother was offered. The Queen had wondered whether it was right to give it in the circumstances. With tears, Princess Augusta received it, and made a silent curtsey.
But the King recovered his physical health, at least, within twelve hours, passing a bowel movement and perspiring heavily, after which he fell into a profound sleep at midnight on the 9th. He woke within hours, with no fever, but his case was hardly better, for, according to Payne, he awoke ‘with all the gestures and ravings of the most confirmed maniac, and a new noise, in imitation of the howling of a dog.’ He did not have a lucid interval through the night, according to the Duke of York, who sat up with him. He raved all next day on the theme of religion, and of his being inspired, and also of Dr Heberden and of the Trinity and of the Queen. A new horror dawned, that the King would be permanently insane, yet healthy.
During these anxious days, the Prince remained at Windsor in his apartments in the Castle. He sent an urgent message to Charles James Fox in France, begging him to return, but he was not otherwise politically active. He confided his own plans for the future to no one, unless to his brother York. His creature Jack Willett Payne was not so reticent, and he had appeared at the Whig bastion, Brooks’s Club, and gave vivid imitations of the King in his distress, mimicking his spasmodic gestures and revealing that he ‘howled like a monkey’. As late as the end of October it had been given out that the King was unable to attend the weekly levees and drawing rooms because he was ‘dropsical.’ Few believed that, odd rumours having circulated about his behaviour in Cheltenham. It was whispered that his attack at Kew had been delirium, or even ‘alienation’. But Payne’s account, from inside the Castle itself, was of a mania on a different scale.2
Several courtiers, in a desperate attempt to reduce the damage, and to the derision of Whig Society, announced that they had suffered a period of insanity themselves with no lasting effects. ‘You see how I am now,’ a very sane Lord Fauconberg offered, after revealing that he had had a strait waistcoat on for a week once upon a time. But the floodgates of gossip were opened with Payne’s contribution. One Whig, ‘Fish’ Crawfurd, writing to the Duchess of Devonshire, was sure of the King’s case: ‘the humour to which his whole family is subject has fallen on his brain, and … nothing will save him except an eruption upon his skin’. In some parts of the country, the King’s near-death calcified into confident reports of his actual death, mourning was prescribed in the newspapers, and tributes paid to him.
Far from dying, the King had found a new lease of life. He was still alive, and gaining strength physically. But on the night of Tuesday, 11 November ‘the ramblings continued’, equerry Robert Fulke Greville recorded, ‘and were more wild than before, amounting alas to an almost total suspension of reason’. ‘No sleep this night,’ he added wearily. ‘The talking incessant throughout.’
The Prince of Wales now ‘took the government of the house into his own hands’. All was done and only done by his orders. His sisters passed all their time with their mother, who ‘lived entirely in her two new rooms, and spent the whole day in patient sorrow and retirement.’ The princesses did not go for walks, they did not ride, they did not even go to church. They lived in an atmosphere of whispers and silence and dread. News came from the King’s room that he was talking much, and with great hurry and agitation, of ‘Eton College, of the boys rowing, etc’. He complained of burning, perspired violently, and called to have the windows opened. By the evening he was turbulent and rambling, and at three in the morning he had ‘a violent struggle, jerking very strongly with his arms and legs’. He had not slept for twenty-nine hours. The only edict to emerge from the Queen’s rooms was that the Archbishop of Canterbury should ‘issue out public prayers for the poor King, for all the churches.’ John Moore, the Archbishop, accordingly produced a moving prayer, and Fanny Burney went to St George’s Chapel that Sunday to hear it read.
The elder princesses were anguished by their father’s state. One morning he attempted to jump out of the window, and in his loquacity did not hesitate to reveal various state secrets to anyone in the vicinity. But he was quieter, too, and arranged his watches and conversed rationally and ate bread and butter and drank tea with relish. His daughters accepted it all and hoped that the care of his poor jumbled mind and weakened frame would result in his recovery. However, as the days went by a new source of tension at Windsor developed. As he waited for Fox to return and direct affairs, the Prince began to be less amenable to the wishes of his mother and less moved by the plight of his father.
Members of the Whig leadership – Lord Minto, the Duke of Portland and especially Richard Brinsley Sheridan – made contact with the Prince and argued for action. The Whig doctor Sir Richard Warren pronounced the King’s recovery in doubt, and, prophesying a period of years during which the King would be incapable of conducting public business, or indeed of attending Parliament, urged a regency. The King himself was aware in his clouded mind of this possibility and had informed his doctors that he lived under ‘an absolute government, no, a republic, for there are three of you’. He begged them, when they had resolved something, to tell him of it, and he would give his order. ‘But let not these pages’, said the humiliated monarch, ‘say to the King, “You must and must not”.’ The other doctors differed with Warren and predicted the King would recover, thus pleasing the administration and putting in doubt the need for a regency. The King believed that he had recovered already, and asked General Gouldsworthy to go to Eton and obtain a holiday for the boys to celebrate his return to life. Gouldsworthy was also to prepare the Queen for the firing of the guns at noon, and to order Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum in church.
Attempts were made to check the King’s ceaseless flow of words – he spoke on the 17th for nineteen hours, and not surprisingly developed a catch in his throat – and even to shave him, which he had resisted. But, after being shaved on one side, he rose and would not allow the operation to continue. As he had not been shaved for a fortnight the effect was bizarre. ‘Cabal flourishes,’ Lord Sheffield wrote. Yet the cause of the caballing was not melancholy but rather gay. The King talked for sixteen hours on 21 November, until the doctors set him to writing to divert him, when he made notes on Don Quixote. ‘He fancies London is drowned, and orders his yacht to go there,’ Sheffield continued. ‘He took Sir George Baker’s wig, flung it in his face, threw him on his back, and told him he might stargaze. Sir George is rather afraid of him. In one of his soliloquies he said, “I hate nobody. Why should anyone hate me?” Recollecting a little, he added, “I beg pardon, I do hate the Marquis of Buckingham.”’
As Fox returned from France and the Houses of Parliament adjourned for a fortnight, to resume business in December with a debate over the regency, the Prince was elated, his sisters desperately unhappy.
During the afternoon of 24 November there was a flurry of movement within the walled garden that lay behind the Queen’s Lodge at Windsor. And now into the garden, emerging into the walled space and moving down the sloping ground in the direction of the trees and shade at the other end, came a hesitant band of princesses. Their father’s doctors, at their wits’ end to know how to deal with an unprecedented royal malady, had that morning in conference had an idea: ‘they thought they would try what effect the letting him see his children in the garden would have’. The forlorn hope was that the deranged King, looking on from a window, would gather strength from the mere sight of the daughters for whom he pined in his confinement.
Despite the doctors’ determination to try ‘the effect’, the King had become agitated at the prospect earlier in the day, and had endeavoured to forbid the scheme. ‘No, I cannot bear it; no, let it be put off till evening, I shall be more able to see them then,’ he begged. But the doctors were adamant, and outside the girls now trooped to take part in the experiment. For a moment all was still on the lawn. The younger princesses were unaware of the watcher at the window. And then, startled, they looked up. There was their father struggling at the windows, making efforts to open them, gesticulating at his daughters and banging in frustration on the pane. But how could this be their father, this pale and haggard man wearing a nightgown and nightcap in the middle of the day? And now others appeared at the window, and the King was removed from sight.
While the elder girls were still shaken and the younger ones stared uncomprehendingly, a gentleman appeared with a request from their father that they would come nearer. They approached, and their father called to them through the window. But by now the Princess Royal was quite overcome, as was Princess Mary, on whom the horror of the scene had not been lost. The matter was decided when it appeared that Princess Elizabeth was about to faint. ‘And, in truth,’ Mrs William Harcourt wrote to Lady Harcourt, ‘they all seemed more dead than alive when they got into the house.’
The princesses, love their brothers though they did, could not but feel uncomfortable about the growing hostility towards their father. As the Prince plunged deeper into politicking, he became more callous towards his father’s suffering, and even took to mimicking him and his mania in public. The Duke of York, not to be outdone, mimicked his father to some friends in a coffeehouse. Their sisters did not know of these excesses, but of one turbulent act of the Prince’s they had personal knowledge. At the end of November, the headstrong Prince drove his three elder sisters and Lady Charlotte Finch around Windsor one evening. Apparently he drove with such ferocity that countless lampposts were left shattered in his wake.
The King’s close confinement at Windsor was coming to an end. ‘There is not only no impropriety in removing him to Kew,’ wrote the doctors on 27 November, ‘but it is advisable.’ They declared that a ‘change of place and objects’ would facilitate recovery, while ‘air and exercise’ were ‘necessary for His Majesty’s cure’. The princesses left for Kew with their mother and an assortment of ladies on the morning of 1 December 1788. They found the house – not usually used in winter – freezing and with their names daubed in chalk by the Prince of Wales on the various apartment doors. Fanny Burney was grateful for a rug which the Queen gave her, though it was a very small one. The news was then broken to the King that they had gone before, and he was invited to join them at Kew House. He had been anxious for the Princess Royal to accompany him in his carriage, which could not be allowed. He had lascivious thoughts in this state, although they generally focused on an elderly lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth, Lady Pembroke.
At first, George III refused to leave Windsor, his favourite residence, and became so frantic that ‘they were obliged for the first time to threaten him with a strait waistcoat’. Finally, he hobbled past a mournful gauntlet of members of the household who lined the passage of the Queen’s Lodge and, braving crowds who clung to the railings outside the house to see him go, departed back to the house at Kew where he had first been taken ill.
At Kew the King occupied a suite of three rooms, with two equerries or pages always in attendance. The Queen, as at Windsor, took a separate suite of rooms – in this case, a bedroom, the drawing room and the gallery on the first floor – and the princesses had their apartments beyond hers. The house, never designed for winter habitation, was so cold and draughty that the Vice Chamberlain, Colonel Digby, of his own accord and shuddering at the ‘naked, cold boards’, sent out to purchase not only carpets but sandbags for doors and windows to stop the wind whistling through the rooms. ‘The wind which blew in upon these lovely Princesses’, he declared, ‘was enough to destroy them.’ But they were made of sterner stuff. The dullness of those hours when the crocodiles of royal children snaked around the shrubberies and lawns seemed, to the princesses in retrospect, an idyll. Now at night, in company with the other inhabitants, they feared that they heard the King, though his apartments faced towards the garden and only the animals in the menagerie could hear his cries.
The day after Parliament met following the November adjournment to consider the King’s case, seventy-year-old Dr Francis Willis joined the medical team at Kew. Willis was a ‘mad-doctor’, a physician who devoted himself to the care of the insane at an asylum at Gresford near Lincoln where, with his two sons John and Thomas, he supervised 800 lunatics. Queen Charlotte found Willis’s arrival hard to bear. It announced to the world, as much as if the King had been placed in the care of Dr Monro of Bedlam, that he was now regarded as a madman. Moreover, with the Lincolnshire doctor – a rough man with none of the sophisticated manners of Baker or Warren – came the odious instrument then commonly employed in the management of the mentally ill, the strait waistcoat or straitjacket.
On 8 December, Willis, examined by a House of Commons committee keen to establish the prognosis of the King’s case, declared that he had treated no fewer than thirty patients a year with mental disorder for twenty-eight years, and he believed, like Baker, that the King would recover. Three months was, in his estimation, the normal time of recovery for nine out of ten people who had been placed in his care. But he submitted that the King’s cure might take a little longer. ‘When His Majesty reflects upon an illness of this kind, it may depress his spirits, and retard his cure more than a common person.’ At any rate, he saw no ‘present signs of convalescence’.
Lady Charlotte Finch led the Queen and princesses in prayer on the Sunday. The prayers that they said so fervently seemed answered when the King appeared to be recovering day by day, and he even went for a walk in the Gardens. In another ‘experiment’, Mary and five-year-old Amelia were held up to a window so that he could see them. But ‘when he had fixed his eyes upon them, he pulled off his hat, which in his agitation he flung one way, his gloves and cane another, and ran into the house’ – where he burst into tears. Next day, 13 December, despite this scene, the King’s incessant pleas to be allowed to see his ‘Emily’, Princess Amelia, were answered, and she was brought to him. (At night he rolled to and fro, reciting her name and asking her wraith how she could let him be subjected to these humiliations.) He ‘pressed the Princess Emily in his arms who cried very much and was frightened.’ In just a few weeks the King had become very thin, and he had grown a beard. Furthermore, his speech was rambling, though he tried to check it in front of his daughter, and even his movements were wild and abrupt. Princess Amelia was hurried away, and that night Dr Willis took the decision to ‘confine’ the King for the first time in the strait waistcoat, and he remained in it till morning.
Four days later, the waistcoat was employed again. Dr Warren reported from Kew that the King had become ‘very unquiet… had no sleep during the whole night, and was confined by Dr Willis early this morning’. Dr Warren released the King from this confinement at ten in the morning, and left him eating breakfast but talking at the same time in ‘a very disturbed manner – the whole resembling our worst Windsor days’. The following day the King was even more ‘agitated and confused’, Sir Lucas Pepys informed the Prince of Wales, ‘perhaps from having been permitted to read King Lear, which he is now reading and talking about.’ The King’s mind, although turning on a few subjects only, was not deprived of guile or logic. When a doctor forbade him the play, he asked instead for Colman’s Works, which he knew contained the original ‘altered by Colman for the stage’.
Such was the King’s fear of the straitjacket, so docile did he become when threatened with it, that the punitive measure came slowly to be regarded as having magical curative powers. Both family and politicians began to afford Dr Willis a certain respect, although the King remained wary of him. On one occasion when the monarch was castigating him for having left the Church to join the medical profession, Dr Willis objected: ‘May it please your Majesty, Our Saviour went about healing the sick.’ ‘Yes,’ replied the King, ‘but I never heard that he had £700 a year for doing so.’
The case appeared hopeless. The King was ‘good humoured, but as incoherent as ever’, wrote Baker and Reynolds on Christmas Eve. He slept one hour or maybe two a night, and Christmas Day 1788 was a sad day at Kew. The bells of St Anne’s Church on the Green clamoured, but none of the inhabitants of Kew House joined the congregation. A regency appeared inevitable.
And then, without warning, the King began to improve. He was ‘in a much more composed and collected state yesterday than he has been hitherto’, the report of 28 December read. On New Year’s Day, Dr Willis reported that the King had played several games of backgammon with him, and ‘conversed in a collected, sensible manner yesterday evening for seven hours’. The King, he believed, was ‘more himself than I have ever seen him since I have had the honour to attend His Majesty’. So the question now arose, and was to grow more urgent: was the King to be judged incapable of conducting public business and even of going down to Parliament because for an hour or two a day he was ‘raging’? The Whigs deemed him incapable; Pitt and the Tories now believed, or affected to believe, that he was on the verge of a full recovery. Before the point could be resolved, the King worsened again.
The princesses themselves were spared the sight of their father after the failure of the November and December ‘experiments’ at Windsor and at Kew until he again seemed on his way to recovery. Visiting him on 17 January 1789, and seeing him play a game of piquet, the Queen judged – and Dr Willis agreed – that he had behaved with propriety. The following day the King’s request to see his daughters was granted, although he had awoken ‘never more disturbed in his life’. (After the princesses had gone, the King told one of his pages that the Queen had consented that ‘Esther’ – Lady Pembroke, the elderly lady of the Court for whom he had conceived a passion – should come to him.)
On another occasion the King called to Miss Burney whom he had spied in the garden, and when she desperately tried to get away he lumbered after her to try her nerves a little further. But while the King was still for hours at a time ‘very deranged, his looks wild’, he was also now rational for long periods. The manner of his greeting Royal and Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth on one occasion was affecting. He told them he had been reading King Lear, to which they could think of no response. But, the King continued good-humouredly, ‘in some respects he was not like him, he had no Goneril, nor Regan, but only three Cordelias.’
In the course of February 1789 the Queen took twelve-year-old Princess Mary to visit her father. ‘Twice,’ she believed, ‘he was going to say something wrong, but he put his hand upon his mouth, and said “hush” and then in a moment spoke properly’. Princess Sophia read to him from a Life of Handel later in the month. Although there were worse days, on 26 February the doctors announced: ‘There appears this morning to be an entire cessation of His Majesty’s illness’. And the following day the glorious news was posted on the railings of the Queen’s House: ‘A perfect recovery.’ The prayer for that recovery, which the Queen had instigated, and which was read in all parish churches on Sunday mornings, had at last been answered. It was discontinued, and a prayer of thanksgiving substituted.