Since the death of her husband, Mrs Thrale’s future had been the subject of speculation in London society. She was still only forty, witty, famous and presumed very rich (though her finances in fact took a sharp downward turn in 1782 because of the resolution of an old family lawsuit). Although nothing was less likely, many outsiders were convinced that she and Dr Johnson would marry; Boswell was mischievously suggesting it as soon as Henry Thrale’s funeral was over,* and her name had been linked with Johnson’s in the newspapers, as well as with William Seward, the brewer Samuel Whitbread and Queeney’s admirer Jeremiah Crutchley. ‘Deluged with proposals’ as she was,2 Mrs Thrale declared firmly that she had no intention of marrying again except for love; and love was something she claimed never to have experienced.3 To the members of her coterie, however, the prospects of Mrs Thrale remarrying or Mrs Thrale staying single were equally alarming. Either way the charmed circle at Streatham Park was doomed to break up.
All through 1782 it was clear that Johnson’s dependence on Mrs Thrale was beginning to grate on her nerves. Age and infirmity were turning the venerable Doctor into something of a liability, and the difficulties of looking after him, overseeing Thrale’s estate, dealing with the executors (of whom Johnson was one) and her continuing lawsuit made Hester restless and unhappy. In the autumn she took the dramatic decision to go and live in Italy for three years with her daughters, to give up the London house they had been renting and to let Streatham Park to Lord Shelburne.
The news stunned her friends. Fanny Burney, like most of them, had come to look on Streatham as ‘my other home, and the place where I have long thought my residence dependent only upon my own pleasure’, as she told Susan. ‘If I was to begin with talking of my loss, my strangeness, […] I should never have done.’4 And if Fanny, who had known the family such a short time, felt this strongly, how much more devastating a loss it was for Samuel Johnson, who had been protected by the Thrales for more than fifteen years.
Johnson’s bitterness at his abrupt abandonment increased his irascibility and caused some painful scenes when Mrs Thrale, Fanny Burney and he were visiting Brighton together that autumn. He humiliated one old acquaintance in company and snapped at another; ‘[he] has really frightened all the people, till they almost ran from him’, Fanny reported in November,5 noting that ‘Mrs Thrale fares worse than any body.’ Johnson was pointedly excluded from almost all the party’s evening invitations and got so tired of being left on his own at the lodgings that he even attended a ball one evening, saying pathetically, ‘it cannot be worse than being alone’6 (a sentiment with which Fanny heartily disagreed). He was still benevolent towards his ‘little Burney’ and planted noisy kisses on her cheeks, but it is not to her credit that in return she was beginning to feel embarrassed to be seen in the sick old man’s company, and disloyally tried to avoid sitting next to him on one occasion because of ‘the staring attention he attracts both for himself and all with whom he talks’.7
Mrs Thrale’s restlessness and her choice of Italy as destination were due to her increasing regard for the singer Gabriel Piozzi, who had become a regular visitor to Streatham in 1780 when he was appointed Queeney’s singing-master. Since their unpropitious introduction at the Burneys’ house two years before, Mrs Thrale had radically changed her view of the elegant Italian, whose company had helped cheer and divert her through the difficult last months of Henry Thrale’s life. For his part, Piozzi was grateful to Mrs Thrale for her respectful (if rather ignorant) appreciation of his talents, having been treated as little better than a mountebank by aristocratic patrons in the past. Piozzi’s protracted absence in 1781 during the early months of Mrs Thrale’s widowhood only served to confirm her admiration of him. She had developed a strange fantasy, based on his supposed resemblance to her father, that Piozzi was her secret half-brother. It was a way to displace and perhaps diffuse the strong feelings Piozzi’s company aroused in her, ‘emotions one would not be without’, as she put it rather forensically, ‘though inconvenient enough sometimes’.8 Just how ‘inconvenient’ remained to be seen. Mrs Thrale soon came to perceive Piozzi as the man who could transform her life, her ideal companion. She foresaw with clarity all the objections that would be raised at the suggestion of a match with someone so far below her in class, ‘parts’ and wealth, and listed the drawbacks carefully in Thraliana, but concluded:
I live a quiet Life, but not a pleasant one: My Children govern without loving me, my Servants devour & despise me, my Friends caress and censure me, my Money wastes in Expences I do not enjoy, and my Time in Trifles I do not approve. [E]very one is made Insolent, & no one Comfortable.9
Essentially, she had already fixed on marrying Piozzi.
Fanny Burney was the first to guess that Mrs Thrale had fallen in love, and was keen to appear sympathetic when the news was broken to her in Brighton. Queeney, however, made no attempt to conceal her disgust. Almost eighteen and in the marriage market herself, it is not surprising that she found her mother’s behaviour inappropriate. ‘[M]ade an Eldest son of’10 in her father’s will, with a fortune of about £50,000 (far more than her mother’s), she had taken on the role of guardian of the family honour. No doubt she felt that her mother would have been more suitably employed brokering marriages for her heiress daughters than indulging herself in a profoundly embarrassing liaison with the music-master. Fanny, too, was horrified at the prospect of scandal ahead. When Mrs Thrale, ‘in a Transport of Passion’ showed her the outpourings about Piozzi in her journal, Fanny’s response – when she had finished crying herself ‘half blind’ over them – was harsh behind its cajolery, as Mrs Thrale recorded:
[Miss Burney] said there was no resisting such pathetic Eloquence, & that if she was the Daughter instead of the Friend, She should even be tempted to attend me to the Altar. [B]ut that while she possessed her Reason, nothing should seduce her to approve what Reason itself would condemn: that Children, Religion, Situation, Country & Character – besides the diminution of Fortune by the certain loss of 800£ a Year were too much to Sacrifice to any One Man.11
Perhaps Fanny thought this little lecture (with its prudent parenthesis about income) would sway her friend, but as the months passed, Mrs Thrale’s ardour for Piozzi only increased, as did Queeney’s antipathy. Once rumours began to go round, the Thrale family friends and trustees marshalled their forces against the proposed Italian journey (on which Piozzi was to be guide), backing Queeney vigorously. The atmosphere in the household became extremely tense, Queeney coldly asserting that her mother was deluded, Mrs Thrale responding with impassioned pleadings, tears and fainting fits.
Fanny, who was intimate with both parties and had heard all the gossip and slander going about, counselled Mrs Thrale to marry Piozzi immediately rather than damage her reputation – a very Burneyan solution – but the affair dragged on unresolved all year, Mrs Thrale torn between powerful self-interest and her sense of duty to her ‘unfeeling’ daughters. A terrible crisis seemed to have settled the matter by force majeure when in the spring of 1783 Mrs Thrale’s youngest child, four-year-old Harriet, died of measles and Cecilia, two years older, was stricken with whooping-cough. Piozzi, anxious to avoid the emotional fall-out, refused to see the distraught mother and left the country soon after, much to Mrs Thrale’s friends’ relief. But Hester sank into a stasis of unhappiness so alarming that Fanny feared a complete breakdown. Mrs Thrale had retreated to Bath, where she expected and craved Fanny’s company, but Dr Burney, anxious as ever to disassociate himself from anything ‘improper’, refused to let his daughter go to her.
Fanny could not condone her friend’s passion for Piozzi, but defended her good nature. ‘Though her failings are unaccountable and most unhappy’, she wrote to Susan,12 ‘her virtues and good qualities […] would counterbalance a thousand more’. Privately, Fanny was shocked by the letters she was receiving almost daily from Bath: ‘Dear, lost, infatuated Soul! […] how can she suffer herself, noble-minded as she is, to be thus duped by ungovernable passions!’13 Indeed the spectacle of a mature woman giving vent to passionate feelings – even publicising them – sent a general shudder round polite society: ‘there must be really some degree of Insanity in that case’, Mrs Chapone wrote to William Weller Pepys, echoing Mrs Montagu’s verdict of ‘lunacy’, ‘for such mighty overbearing Passions are not natural in a “Matron’s bones”’.14
In November Mrs Thrale collapsed after nursing her twelve-year-old daughter Sophia through a dangerous illness, and Queeney began to fear for her sanity as well as for her life. In the epic ego-struggle she had been playing out with Queeney, Mrs Thrale’s threat-cum-battle-cry, ‘Death or Piozzi!’, seemed about to come true. Before the end of the year, the family had agreed a compromise: Mrs Thrale could marry Piozzi as long as the four surviving children, now wards of court, did not have to live with her.
What Piozzi thought about the matter is difficult to ascertain. Mrs Thrale was convinced of his regard for her, but to the outside world he seemed a cold and oddly undemonstrative lover (rather like Henry Thrale, in fact). Having heard at the end of 1783 that the marriage could go ahead, he waited months before setting out from Italy, and only arrived in England to claim his bride the following June. ‘The excuse of Roads, &c, makes me sad, – little as is my haste for his arrival’, Fanny wrote to Queeney in February 1784, ‘yet it seems to me such coolness; – did not my Father travel home through Italy in December?’15 The delay was profoundly humiliating to Mrs Thrale, and probably did more to disgust her friends than any of the former objections to Piozzi’s nationality, religion or profession.
Though her behaviour was later vilified by Mrs Thrale, Fanny showed what seems sincere concern for her friend all through this emotionally charged and well-publicised affair. She was a consistent adviser and trustworthy confidante, refusing to tell even Susan about the details of the case until July 1784. She made no secret of her misgivings (which were, after all, no more than the obvious objections which Mrs Thrale herself had enumerated) yet withheld judgement on Piozzi, whom she admitted she hardly knew, leaving Mrs Thrale the benefit of the doubt about the reluctant bridegroom’s actual intentions. Right up to Mrs Thrale’s marriage to Piozzi at the end of July 1784, Fanny was her ‘sweet’ friend and mainstay, writing in the warmest terms to Susan about their ‘incurable affection’.16 A shocking reversal was in store, as Fanny described in a letter to Queeney written fourteen years later:
[Mrs Thrale] bore all my opposition – which was regularly the strongest the utmost efforts of my stretched faculties could give – with a gentleness, nay a deference the most touching to me – till the marriage was over – And then – to my never ending astonishment, in return to the constrained & painful letter I forced myself to write of my good wishes – she sent me a cold, frigid, reproachful answer, in entirely a new style to any I had ever received from her, to upbraid me that my congratulations were not hearty! As if I could write congratulations at all! or meant to write! How gross must have been such hypocrisy!17
Dr Johnson had ranted against the remarriage, Dr Burney had cringed at it, but though they and some of Mrs Thrale’s other male friends did far less to accommodate the match than did Fanny, Fanny’s inability to write a sufficiently artificial note that could be read with complacency by both Mr and Mrs Piozzi was judged so ungenerous that it cost her the whole friendship. After one more exchange of letters, she was dropped, abruptly and completely. ‘I am convinced from the moment of the nuptials she shewed him [Piozzi] all my Letters, & probably attributed to me every obstacle that he had found in his way’, Fanny wrote to Queeney in 1798, trying to account for it.18
The very fact that Fanny was entering into explanations like this so long after the event rather scotches the idea that she and Queeney had been in cahoots at the time. Her friendship with Queeney lasted a lifetime and in many ways suited Fanny better than the friendship with Hester, though it lacked the alluring ardour and aggravation of the latter. It was based on mutual esteem and shared remembrance of the old days at Streatham, but there was a cause for real sympathy too. Mrs Thrale’s alliance with Piozzi (rich middle-aged widow marries badly-off middle-aged professional musician) was almost a replica of the match between Mrs Elizabeth Allen and Charles Burney. Dr Burney could not have failed to make the connection himself, though his condemnation of the Piozzi marriage seems particularly hypocritical in this context.
Fanny too was aware of the parallels, and they stretched her sympathies all ways. Given her professed view of Mrs Allen having made the running with the widower Charles Burney, Piozzi must have seemed in many ways like her father; Mrs Thrale, her admired friend, was, on the other hand, taking up the disgraceful role of impassioned matron. Ultimately, Fanny could not condemn or condone either of them. The only person for whom she could feel unreservedly sorry was Queeney, who like Fanny herself had been forced to contemplate not simply the existence but the power of a parent’s sexuality. She had had to witness the apparent betrayal of a beloved dead parent by the living one, and accept changes which she thoroughly disapproved. Fanny and her sisters seem to have suffered their stepmother as a kind of purgatory which proved how much they loved their father, but theirs was a muddled kind of moralism compared with Queeney’s unequivocal denunciation of her mother. Fanny more than forgave her father’s faults, she glorified them – as we shall see in the history of her biography of him – but the fact that she never criticised Queeney’s treatment of Mrs Thrale is interesting. In Queeney’s abusive resistance to the changes foisted on her by her mother’s remarriage, Fanny might possibly have found something to admire.
In the way of such things, it took some months for Fanny to realise that she was not going to hear from Mrs Piozzi again. The loss of her friend came at a particularly difficult time (as her reference to her ‘stretched faculties’ hints), when Fanny was still mourning for Crisp, anxious about Susan and sadly witnessing the decline of Dr Johnson. The great Lexophanes never completely recovered from a stroke in 1783, and on his return to London from Lichfield in the summer of 1784 sank steadily. Fanny had visited him at his home in Bolt Court several times the previous autumn, but Johnson still felt neglected. Her prim excuse (in her diary) for staying away was that the house was usually too full of male visitors for her to call on Johnson in comfort now that old Anna Williams was dead and could not act as chaperone. It is just as likely that she shrank from the prospect of hearing Johnson’s views of the Piozzi scandal. William Seward (whom Fanny might also have been trying to avoid) was always attempting to sound her on this subject, and other old acquaintances of Mrs Thrale, such as Lady Frances Burgoyne, seemed to think that Fanny, as proxy to the errant widow, deserved ‘painful conferences’19 of recrimination. In the last ever interview she had alone with Samuel Johnson, Fanny tentatively introduced the subject of Mrs Thrale, presumably hoping that her two old friends could make peace before Johnson died. She got a dusty answer.
I had seen Miss T. the day before.
‘So,’ said he, ‘did I.’
I then said, ‘Do you ever, sir, hear from her mother?’
‘No,’ cried he, ‘nor write to her. I drive her quite from my mind. If I meet with one of her letters, I burn it instantly. I have burnt all I can find. I never speak of her, and I desire never to hear of her more. I drive her, as I said, wholly from my mind.’20
This was on 28 November 1784. Fanny made several more attempts to see Johnson, but he was by then too ill to see her. Bolt Court was full of people trying to pay their last respects or catch the great man’s dying words. On one occasion, Fanny waited alone in a cold parlour rather than have to talk to anyone else, and hovered on the stairs for reports from the sick-room from Johnson’s manservant Frank Barber.
Johnson’s obvious fear of death troubled Fanny profoundly: ‘Good and excellent as he is, how can he so fear death?’ she wrote, revealing – along with great unworldliness – her own powerful if narrow-minded piety; ‘Alas, my Susy, how awful is that idea!’21 Three days before Johnson died on 13 December, she was relieved to hear reports of his apparent change of mind ‘from its dark horror’. ‘Good, and pious, and excellent Christian – who shall feel [hope] if not he?’22 Despite this professed confidence in the afterlife, Fanny rather proudly noted that on the day of the funeral ‘I could not keep my eyes dry all day’. As with many of her contemporaries in that sentimental era, Fanny’s capacity for ‘feeling’ overrode strictly pious behaviour, a tendency that was to be heartily condemned by the coming generation of evangelically-minded Burneys.
Ten days after Johnson’s funeral, Fanny went to a party at Mrs Chapone’s, the first she had attended in months, but she felt very subdued. ‘How melancholy will all these circumstances render these once so pleasant meetings’, she wrote in her diary, referring to the deaths and losses of the past year. Something else was weighing on her spirits, though, which was all the worse for having, in its beginnings, held out the promise of better days to come. All the time during which Mrs Thrale had been agonising over Piozzi, Fanny herself had been suffering the long-drawn-out agonies of an unrequited love that left her depressed, embittered and, probably for the first time in her life, feeling bleak about the future.
The man she had fallen in love with was a twenty-eight-year-old cleric called George Owen Cambridge, whom she had met among the Blue-stockings. In the early 1780s the Blue-stocking ‘Club’ – deliberately not a men’s-style, exclusive club at all – was at the height of its modishness, and Fanny was a regular at ‘Blue’ parties held by Elizabeth Vesey, eccentric wife of the MP Agmondesham Vesey. Mrs Vesey’s set included Mrs Garrick, Burke, Reynolds and Horace Walpole, the most flamboyant literary figure of the day, whom Fanny described as ‘gay, though caustic; polite, though sneering; and entertainingly epigrammatical’.23 Mrs Vesey fancied herself less stuffy than her rivals Mrs Montagu and Mrs Boscawen. At her soirées, the chairs were placed in odd groupings round the room to break the convention of sitting in a circle, as Hannah More described in her comic poem ‘The Bas Bleu’, dedicated to the hostess:
See VESEY’s plastic genius make
A Circle every figure take,
Nay, shapes and forms, which wou’d defy
All Science of Geometry.24
As a result, ‘Away dull Ceremony flew’: a dozen different conversations could be going on simultaneously, generating a sense of vivacity and plenty of noise. Horace Walpole called Mrs Vesey’s overcrowded parties ‘Babels’ or ‘Chaos’,25 and Fanny records evenings of ‘almost riotous gaiety’ at Mrs Vesey’s house. It was not in the least like Streatham: the hostess was more an object of amusement than a wit in her own right, artlessly trying on Lady Spencer’s strange new hearing aids – ear-shapes in silver – which dropped out whenever she moved, or lamenting the death of a new friend in absurd terms: ‘“It’s a very disagreeable thing, I think,” said she, “when one has just made acquaintance with anybody, and likes them, to have them die.”’ As Fanny recorded, ‘This speech set me grinning so irresistibly, that I was forced to begin filliping off the crumbs of the macaroon cake from my muff, for an excuse for looking down.’26
That ‘Blue’ parties had lost something of their original intensity and pretentiousness shows how much more relaxed women writers had become about their status during the preceding decade. Hannah More’s ‘The Bas Bleu’, which was circulating in manuscript at the end of 1783, emphasises the pleasure that female ‘kindred souls’ were beginning to find in ‘alliance’; a slightly surprising tribute to sisterhood from the woman who was later one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s loudest and most persistent critics. The poem mentions many of the ‘Blues’ by name, and ends with a description of a Blue party’s vital ingredient, ‘Attention’, which William Weller Pepys thought was a portrait of Fanny Burney:
Mute Angel, yes: thy looks dispense
The silence of intelligence;
Thy graceful form I well discern,
In act to listen and to learn:
’Tis Thou for talents shalt obtain
That pardon Wit would hope in vain.27
‘The compliment is preposterous, because the description is the most flattering’, Fanny wrote in her journal,28 though it is easy to see how Pepys made his guess – Fanny had always been a good watcher and listener, absorbed by the minutiae of her own and other people’s behaviour. Observation had been the basis of her art as well as the source of her neuroses – she was all ‘Attention’. This habit of observing was to cause her great pain in the affair with George Cambridge. She would have been much happier both during and after the whole business if she had been less consciously alert.
The first thing that Fanny did not fail to notice about Cambridge was that he and his father, the wit Richard Owen Cambridge, always seemed to be present at Mrs Vesey’s when she herself was invited, and she soon began to believe they were seeking her out on purpose. Richard Owen Cambridge, well-known in his day as the author of a satirical poem, ‘The Scribleriad’, and editor of a magazine called The World, was rich, cultivated and owned a large house by the river at Twickenham; his son George, later Rector of Elme and Archdeacon of Middlesex, was three years younger than Fanny, handsome, intelligent and modest. What attracted Fanny to him were his extremely good manners and his apparent sensitivity, though in the light of what happened – or rather, didn’t happen – later, perhaps she was misreading even these early signs. Young Cambridge forbore to talk about her novels, so Fanny imagined he understood her better than anyone else:
He neither looks at me with any curiosity, nor speaks to me with any air of expectation; two most insufferable honours, which I am continually receiving. […] If I met with more folks who would talk to me upon such rational terms, – […] with how infinitely more ease and pleasure should I make one in those conversations!29
Nothing could have been more likely to win Fanny’s admiration than delicacy about her authorship. George Cambridge was present one evening in January 1783 at the house of Tory hostess Anna Ord when the writer Soame Jenyns set about Fanny with ‘an eulogy unrivalled’ of Cecilia that ‘would have drawn blushes into the cheeks of Agujari or Garrick’.30 Mr Cambridge senior protested that she should not feel embarrassed by such attention from a man of judgement and sense like Jenyns, but this was no comfort to Fanny. His son, however, came over to her as the party was breaking up and said how sorry he had been on her behalf. The next morning he called at St Martin’s Street and engaged her in charming, but general, conversation – all of which she noted down word for word in her journal. It was perfect conduct-book behaviour.
In the circles Fanny and George frequented, any possible romance was sure to be anticipated, encouraged (or deplored), commented upon and generally overseen by their friends. George Cambridge’s admiration for Miss Burney, and hers for him, were obvious to most observers very early on. He seemed to follow her everywhere; they laughed at the same things, finished each other’s sentences, had ‘the same expression, & same smile!’31 It was no surprise to their friends (though a dreadful shock to Fanny) when their names were linked in a newspaper gossip item in the spring of 1783.32 Casting round to guess which of the ‘Blues’ could have betrayed them to the papers so disloyally, Fanny suspected William Weller Pepys again, the man to whom she had attributed some satirical verses about learned ladies in the Morning Herald the previous year which mentioned her.33 But the critic Margaret Anne Doody has suggested the paragraph could, like the poem, quite easily have been the work of Charles Burney, perhaps hoping to spur young Mr Cambridge into action.* Whoever published the gossip about Fanny and George, it had no effect on the young cleric’s behaviour, which was as pleasant, partial and as provokingly non-committal as before.
In the meantime, George’s father had become such an ardent admirer of Fanny that many of her friends began to suspect he was in love with her. When the Cambridges invited Fanny and her parents to Twickenham Meadows for a day in the summer of 1783, the whole family must have thought of it as the start of pre-nuptial socialising; but what Mr Cambridge had in mind was a tête-à-tête with the authoress of Cecilia, whom he monopolised shamelessly the whole time. All his conversation came round to her book. All the felicity of his life, he said, consisted in female society. What a pity she could not stay a month, he said, rather than just a day. Her sister, Mrs Phillips … now there was another very attractive woman.
The slowness with which the ‘romance’ between Fanny and George Cambridge progressed puzzled everyone, Fanny most of all. Even her published diaries, carefully pruned of embarrassing revelations, show how soon in the friendship she began to note down signs of ‘Mr G.C.’s preference for her. Her unpublished journals go much further, revealing how ‘tremblingly alive’ she was to his every word and gesture, and what elaborate feats of interpretation she could perform in order to corroborate her inner conviction that he was as much in love with her as she was with him. Susan, the recipient of dozens of tormented letters on the subject of ‘G.C.’, surely found it as painful as we do to read page after page of feverish wishful-thinking such as this: ‘I am greatly mistaken if he was pleased at seeing me […] decamping. […] If you had seen with how irresolute an air he followed me in my retreat with his Eye, & turned entirely round to look after me, you must have concluded he was provoked at my departing in such a manner’;34 or this: ‘His smile, indeed, had as much of pain as of pleasure in its expression; – what it meant, I can not tell, but it was a look of so much unaccountable consciousness as I cannot easily, if ever, forget.’35
Over the months of their acquaintance – spreading alarmingly into years – Fanny became convinced that it could only be a matter of time until George Cambridge declared himself. Pathetically and humiliatingly, she hung on in the belief that only delicacy and sensitivity (which she imagined he had in great store) were holding him back. No proposal ever took place, though Fanny thought he ‘seemed irrepressibly attached to me, – and has been deemed honourably serious by all our mutual acquaintance’.36 Seemed, deemed – her disbelief is palpable, added to which was the shame of ‘all our mutual acquaintance’ thinking likewise. Fanny became more puzzled when she tried to analyse his behaviour, which she considered ‘long past all mere impeachment of trifling’, but George Cambridge’s manners must have been smooth and plausible enough to conceal anything:
He loves me? I said internally, else he would not return in less than a week. No, he means nothing. Yet so interested his air & look, so gay, animated, & undisguised the pleasure he received in our conversation […] How astonishingly does he deceive me, if he went not from the House impressed with the most flattering sensations towards me … Yet firmly I believe I am deceived.37
Of course the last thing Fanny could do to bring matters to a head was act: the courtship process required real or affected passivity from women until some sort of declaration had come from the man. And yet in the situation she found herself relative to George Cambridge, he was the effeminately passive party, she the ardent, watchful lover. It is interesting that in her next novel, Camilla, which is in effect a lengthy dramatisation of the difficulties of interpreting love-signals, it is the hero Edgar, not the heroine, who experiences the kind of bewilderment that Fanny herself experienced over George Cambridge.
In January 1784, George’s sister Kitty was mortally ill, and Mr Cambridge broke the news to Fanny with a warning for her to ‘bear up against this misfortune as he did’.38 Fanny had but one fault, Mr Cambridge declared, ‘and that is too much feeling. You must repress that, therefore, as much as you can’. Though this was primarily advice about how to brace herself for the death of his daughter, it is possible to see in Mr Cambridge’s words a veiled caution about ‘too much feeling’ with respect to his son, too. But Fanny was by this time in the grip of an obsession which no amount of advice or rationalising could ameliorate. She had tried snubbing George – he looked hurt; she tried avoiding him – he turned up uninvited; she tried to banish all thought of him from her mind – and found her mind filling up again with anxious fourth and fifth thoughts. Truly, hope deferred maketh the heart sick. While Mrs Thrale waited for her tardy lover to join her in Bath, Fanny Burney was in just as fervid and unhappy a state of mind, though instead of coolness, poor Fanny had to suffer ‘torturing uncertainties’ from George Cambridge’s unremitting but ultimately meaningless attentions. Though she congratulated herself that her behaviour towards him had been exemplary, the passions he had secretly aroused in her were hardly less strong than the passion she had so loudly criticised in Mrs Thrale.
At several times during those three years she felt intensely bitter about the insensitivity of the ‘sensitive’ young cleric, yet guilty that her own assumptions had possibly been too forward, too ‘knowing’ and indecorous, inviting cynical interpretation, like Swift’s of the apparently coy female blush. She vacillated between thinking that the whole affair had been a dreadful delusion on her part and that Cambridge had in fact practised ‘endless deceit & treachery’ on her.39 In the spring of 1784, her nosy and prudish friend Anna Ord had heard definite rumours that the couple were about to marry, which provoked this outburst from Fanny to her sister, full of angry emphases:
some thing must have been very wrong in somebody’s management, & I will not think it my own! – Neither, indeed, could it be my own; – were the rumour the effect of my behaviour, it could only be called a flirtation, – a coqueting, – &c., – a Marriage is never settled but in consequence of conclusions from the Man’s behaviour.40
Cambridge’s ‘behaviour’ seems to have been made up of gestures rather than words. If – as is highly unlikely – he and Fanny ever discussed their feelings for each other, no record remains of it. The wordlessness of the affair was its most torturing aspect for Fanny, endlessly keeping the interpretation of ‘G.C.’ open to question. There was a neurotic element to this that seeped into her work in a particularly damaging way. Her later novels are clogged with details of physical gestures, as if ‘conduct’ in its most literal, physical forms was of more interest to her than action, and could provide a satisfactory substitute for plot and character. Camilla can be read as a dictionary of body-language, much of it casual or meaningless, The Wanderer as the ultimate novel of inaction, a book in which the heroine’s ideas of propriety induce a wordless, sighing, glancing, blushing stasis.
Despite several attempts to forget all about George Cambridge, Fanny kept meeting him in company, and the wounds of the affair did not heal for years. In the meantime, her siblings were moving on, and with the prospect of marriage and Twickenham Meadows receding, Fanny was in danger of being stranded for ever at St Martin’s Street with only her father, stepmother and unsympathetic half-sister Sarah for company. Charles Burney junior had married in 1783. Having failed to get accepted for ordination, he had become a schoolmaster in Chiswick, where he fell in love with the headmaster’s daughter, Sarah Rose (known in the family as ‘Rosette’). On his father-in-law’s death three years later, Charles took over the school, moved it from Chiswick to Hammersmith, and at last began to build up his career as a schoolmaster and classical scholar.
James’s career, on the other hand, had been going downhill since his voyages with Cook and his uninspiring stint as Captain of the Latona. In 1782 he had been appointed Captain of the Bristol, head of a convoy of East India Company supply ships bound for India via the Cape of Good Hope. This was his last commission; James was brought home in June 1785, ostensibly on grounds of ill-health (a ‘chronic liver obstruction’, according to the log41) and was retired on half-pay the same year, aged thirty-five. Dr Burney was still angry about this more than twenty years later, blaming James’s liberal politics (and possibly loud mouth) for his inability to rise in the navy: ‘Painism & politics had been his ruin’, the Doctor wrote warningly to Charles junior in 1808, ‘instead of being an admiral to wch his standing entitled him […] he was upbraided for his political principles – & laid on the shelf for the rest of his life.’42
Certainly, James’s humanitarianism cannot have endeared him to the authorities during the naval mutinies of the mid-1790s, when he sent a defence of the seamen’s position (unsolicited, of course) to the First Lord of the Admiralty. Justice demanded a more equitable distribution of prize money between officers and men, he wrote, more liberty on shore and a closer check on punishments, the misapplication of which ‘is too well known to require proof. I served in a ship where every one of the maintopmen were stripped and flogged at the gangway for no other cause than that another ship in company got her topgallant yards up first, and not for any wilful negligence on the part of our men’.43 This kind of outspokenness must have infuriated cautious Dr Burney, but, as Joyce Hemlow points out in her edition of Fanny Burney’s Journals and Letters, he probably never knew that James had given the Admiralty far more solid grounds to dismiss him, since he had been guilty of disobeying orders.44 How is not entirely clear, but the Bristol’s movements around the Indian coast seem more erratic than were strictly necessary to avoid the French forces under Suffren which were patrolling the waters around Ceylon. Unlike the soldierly Molesworth Phillips, James Burney was not anxious to get advancement through military glory (he played a very minor part in the action off Cuddalore in June 1783), but kept his eye on the main chance. Fanny artlessly mentions in her 1771 diary the fact that James had taken private ‘merchandise’ with him on his first trip to India.45 Perhaps he was indulging again in a spot of private trading in the 1780s, and perhaps there was more of the would-be wheeler-dealer in ‘Admiral Jem’ than has survived in the family records.
Whatever his actual insubordination,* James’s naval career was over by 1785, and he seems to have known it – the huge travel expenses he claimed for his home journey from Weymouth to London have the look of an act of spite against the Admiralty. As soon as he got back, he retreated to Chesington, which even without Crisp was where he felt most at home. His wedding with Sally Payne took place at Chesington Church in September. Bride and groom were both described in the register as being ‘of this parish’; Sally had in fact moved out to Chesington Hall the month before, which is perhaps why neither Dr Burney nor Fanny attended the wedding. James and Sally’s first baby, Catherine (known as Kitty) was christened in the same church ten months later; her date of birth is unknown. The couple settled at Chesington Hall for several years, much to the pleasure of the ageing Mrs Hamilton and Kitty Cooke, after whom, presumably, the baby was named.
The week before James returned to England in 1785, another ship from India had landed, carrying the Governor-General, Warren Hastings, fetched home to stand trial for fraud in what was to become the most famous and long-running legal battle of the period. With Hastings was his personal surgeon and confidant, forty-one-year-old Dr Clement Francis, who nursed an interesting secret ambition. He had read a novel called Evelina while he was in India, and admired it so much he had resolved to marry its authoress. He had probably met James Burney at some time in the previous three years; it is hard to see how he could otherwise have gained an introduction to the household in St Martin’s Street as quickly as he did. It was not the authoress of the family, however, with whom he forged a rapport, but her younger sister Charlotte. Clement Francis was sixteen or seventeen years her senior, but this didn’t seem to put Charlotte off, and his income must have been enough to satisfy Dr Burney because, unlike in Hetty’s and Susan’s cases, no objections were made to the match. The couple married in February 1786 and settled in Norfolk. Recalling the wedding day, Susan wrote to Charlotte of Fanny’s unenviable fate, returning to ‘that solitary Newton House!’48 Without cheerful Charlotte, it would be solitary indeed.
With the new marriages came children: Charles’s wife gave birth to their only child, Charles Parr Burney, in 1785, and Charlotte’s first baby, a girl with her own name (who grew up to be the first editor of her aunt’s diaries), was born, like her cousin Kitty, in 1786. Hetty had five surviving children by this date and Susan two, a daughter called Frances and a son called Norbury.
Susan’s little boy was so named because his mother had gone into labour unexpectedly while visiting Norbury Park, the home of her friends and neighbours in Mickleham, the Locke family. William Locke, a direct descendant of the philosopher John Locke, and his beautiful German wife Frederica, were to play an important part in the Burney sisters’ lives. Almost as soon as they met in 1784, Mrs Locke, who was two years older than Fanny, five older than Susan, developed an intense sentimental friendship with both sisters which Charles Burney, for one, found rather cloying. Highly-strung to the point of being almost unstable, Mrs Locke caused her husband some anxiety, but Fanny and Susan, both women of feeling, could hardly get enough of ‘Fredy’s ‘soft & insinuating manners’,49 and the three women spent much of the summer of 1784 very happily together in and around Norbury.
The Lockes’ house at Norbury Park was brand new and had been decorated in the height of avant-garde elegance. Its situation on top of a hill above the Dorking gap gave long views down the Mole Valley in one direction and as far as London the other. It had been built by Thomas Sandby in the mid-1770s, but was only really finished in 1783 with the completion of its famous Painted Room, a drawing room whose walls were decorated with full-scale landscapes in trompe l’oeuil fashion to blend with the real landscape (fashionably ‘improved’) visible through the bay windows. The illusion was meant to be of sitting entirely in the open air. The corners of the room were painted to resemble the trellising of a summer-house or belvedere, the doors concealed in the design and even the carpet chosen in green, to imitate grass. It was an elegant, elaborate fantasy room which provided an ironic twist to great-grandfather Locke’s empiricism, his belief that knowledge comes initially only through the senses and that no art is superior to nature. Though Pevsner says of the Painted Room ‘[i]t would be difficult to find a better example anywhere of the late C18 Englishman’s delight in nature’,50 it surely showed a yet stronger delight in artifice and nature tamed.
Fanny thought Norbury Park ‘paradise’ and the Lockes the ideal family, with their beautiful house, grounds, children, and their intelligent and sensitive conversation. Dr Burney had long admired John Locke as England’s foremost metaphysician, an equal to Newton in his personal pantheon, so he had no objection to the friendship, despite some sarcastic references in a letter to Thomas Twining to ‘Paradise Regained’.51 William Locke represented the acceptable face of liberalism, enlightened and mannerly, whose views began to work on Fanny whether she realised it or not at the time. ‘The serenity of a life like this smoothes the whole internal surface of the mind’, she wrote while staying at Norbury in the autumn of 1784. ‘My own, I assure you, begins to feel quite glossy.’52
The Lockes’ kind hospitality was particularly welcome to Fanny because of an imminent separation from Susan which in fact lasted less than a year, but which at its start threatened to be permanent. Fanny’s emotional dependence on her sister was greater than ever during and after the Cambridge affair, as is evident in a plangent letter of 3 October 1783:
I seem dissatisfied with myself, and as if I had not made the most of being with you. Yet I am sure I cannot tell how I could have made more. Were I but certain of meeting you again in any decent time – but I have a thousand fears that something will interfere and prevent that happiness; and there is nothing like being with you, my Susy – to me, nothing in the world.53
Susan’s frail health broke down in 1784, and on the doctors’ recommendation of a warmer climate the Phillipses decided to move to Boulogne. Fanny had some difficulty understanding the necessity for her going so far: even if Susan got better, there was no guarantee of her return, and if she worsened, it would be difficult for any of the family to reach her quickly. The slowness of the post was a torment, and Fanny became preoccupied by Susan’s absence in ways more usually felt for a lover. ‘My heart was very full […your] image seemed before me upon the spot where we had so lately been together’,54 she wrote on the first day of the separation, as if she had prematurely seen her sister’s ghost.
An important new friendship Fanny made in these years was with Mary Delany, widow of Swift’s friend Dr Patrick Delany. Mrs Delany had been born in 1700, married twice, and had gained a reputation in her second widowhood as one of the ‘Old Wits’ – an indication that to be ‘Blue’ was not entirely new. She was also an amateur artist, specialising in découpage, embroidery and shell-work, the decorative fad of the period. With her accomplishments, intelligence and refinement Mrs Delany was, according to Edmund Burke, ‘a pattern of a perfect fine lady, a real fine lady, of other days’,55 and she reminded Fanny forcibly of her grandmother, Frances Sleepe. In the person of this benign and cultured woman, Fanny at last re-established a truly maternal figure in her life. When Mrs Delany’s bosom friend the Duchess of Portland died in the summer of 1785 and the old lady sank under the weight of her grief, it was Fanny’s ‘feeling’ solicitude that helped her through the bereavement and set the seal on their own friendship. They spent long afternoons together, talking about the past or looking through Mrs Delany’s boxes of old letters from Swift and the poet Edward Young. Soon, Fanny was spending so much time at Mrs Delany’s house in St James’s Place that a bedroom was set up for her there.
Like Fanny, Mrs Delany had been ‘bashful to an extreme’ in her youth, ‘even blameably so’, to quote her husband’s judgement in 1757.56 Despite being a superior harpsichordist and dancer, nothing would induce her to display her talents in public. ‘She could not bear the attention of others to her’, Dr Delany continued, but ‘blushed and fluttered herself into a confusion.’57 Mrs Delany was the personification of eighteenth-century female propriety, described by Burke as ‘the highest bred woman in the world, and the woman of fashion of all ages’,58 but there was nothing vapid or anodyne in her character. She had ‘bottom’ as well as refinement, and her autobiography is full of surprises, from her frank description of her first husband’s vices to outbursts such as this against modern men in general:
Would it were so, that I went ravaging and slaying all odious men, as that would go near to clear the world of that sort of animal […] moneyed men are most of them covetous, disagreeable wretches; fine men, with titles and estates, are coxcombs; those of real merit are seldom to be found.59
This from the ‘highest bred woman in the world’, ultra-conservative friend of the Royal Family, model of propriety, gives us, like Fanny Burney’s own vituperativeness on the same subject, pause for thought. It serves to remind us that the bounds of propriety in the eighteenth century were ‘wider than historians have been apt to admit’, as Amanda Vickery amply demonstrates in her study of the subject.60 It also indicates that a system which upheld ‘separate spheres’ for the sexes left many women feeling frustrated by the behaviour of the opposite ‘sphere’ and powerless to influence it. Novel-writing provided a rare opportunity for women to contribute to the debate in a really active way, albeit the examples of feminine excellence their books posit strike us now as passive and somewhat insipid. ‘Prim’ is the word we now link with ‘proper’, but for eighteenth-century women, propriety was a hotly contentious issue. A novelist like Fanny Burney was in the front line of an ongoing battle to defend and extend ‘polite’ values, a consideration which should cast a slightly different light on her gentility, politeness and even prudery.
Mrs Delany’s illness in 1785 following the Duchess of Portland’s death had been drawn to the attention of the Queen, whose regard for the old lady was such that she offered her a pension of £300 a year and a grace-and-favour house in St Alban’s Street, Windsor, opposite the main gate of the castle. The King himself oversaw the decoration and fitting up of the house, even to laying in a supply of pickles – an amusingly frugal choice, perhaps intended for use on royal visits, since their Majesties were well-known as being plain eaters. As soon as Mrs Delany was settled in Windsor with her teenaged great-niece Mary Ann Port, the Queen became a regular visitor. Fanny was excited to be moving at the edges of such exalted society; through Mrs Delany she had met the late Duchess of Portland, Horace Walpole, Lady Weymouth (the Queen’s lady-in-waiting) and a host of other titled people. Now she shared a friend with the Queen.
Fanny was impressed by the marks of royal condescension and the Queen’s generosity towards Mrs Delany, however oddly conceived it was at times. When the weaver-bird that was Mrs Delany’s only memento of the Duchess died, the Queen sent one of her own birds as a substitute, thinking that Mrs Delany might never notice the difference. Fanny, who had been the person who discovered the bird dead in its cage, had to state outright to the Queen’s messenger that there was no point trying to deceive the old lady, however poor her sight, and that the Queen’s bird might be accepted as a replacement, but not palmed off as a substitute. The fact that the Queen didn’t think anyone could tell the difference between one caged bird and another was, in view of what was about to befall Fanny, somewhat ironic.
During the frequent royal visits to her house in Windsor, Mrs Delany puffed her young friend’s talents assiduously, knowing how well Cecilia had gone down with the princesses, and she spoke highly of Miss Burney’s delicacy and taste, clearly signalling to the Queen that she might grant her an audience. The royal interview seemed about to happen by default when the Queen called unexpectedly on a day when Fanny was also visiting, but the prospect of being introduced was simply too much for the ardent royalist ‘Fanny Bull’, who fled to her room, ‘quite breathless between the race I ran with Miss Port and the joy of escaping’.61 Two days later, when Miss Port, Mr Dewes (a nephew of Mrs Delany), and his young daughter were all assembled very casually in the drawing room of the house, a ‘large man, in deep mourning’ walked in without ceremony and shut the door behind him. Fanny was the first to see him, Miss Port the first to recognise him as the King.
The whole party, apart from Mrs Delany and the King himself, became extremely self-conscious, trying so hard to be inconspicuous that they didn’t dare move from the positions in which he had surprised them. Fanny’s first impression was that they were behaving like people playing a children’s ‘statue’ game, her next, interestingly, that they were as artificially disposed as actors:
It seemed to me we were acting a play. There is something so little like common and real life, in everybody’s standing, while talking, in a room full of chairs, and standing, too, so aloof from each other, that I almost thought myself upon a stage, assisting in the representation of a tragedy, – in which the King played his own part, of the king; Mrs Delany that of a venerable confidante; Mr Dewes, his respectful attendant; Miss P[ort], a suppliant virgin, waiting encouragement to bring forward some petition; Miss Dewes, a young orphan, intended to move the royal compassion; and myself, – a very solemn, sober, and decent mute.62
The burlesque tone of this was typical of Fanny’s first reports back to her family about meetings with the King and Queen, which became more frequent as the months went by. The informality of their visits to Mrs Delany allowed Fanny an intimate view of the monarch and his wife. The King’s simplicity, forthright manner and earnestness implied ‘a character the most open and sincere’:
He speaks his opinions without reserve, and seems to trust them intuitively to his hearers, from a belief they will make no ill use of them. His countenance is full of inquiry, to gain information without asking it, probably from believing that to be the nearest road to truth.63
Fanny’s description of this artlessness, and the King’s attentive expression, inviting the spontaneous revelation of ‘truths’, make him sound childlike in conversation with her. His characteristically quick and disjointed speech reminded her so forcibly of how it was represented in contemporary lampoons that she had trouble keeping a straight face during their first conversation, which was on the subject of Evelina:
[C]oming up close to me, he said,
‘But what? – what? – how was it?’
‘Sir?’ – cried I, not well understanding him.
‘How came you – how happened it – what? – what?’
‘I – I only wrote, sir, for my own amusement, – only in some odd, idle hours.’
‘But your publishing – your printing – how was that?’
‘That was only, sir, – only because –’
[…] The What! was then repeated, with so earnest a look, that, forced to say something, I stammeringly answered –
‘I thought – sir – it would look very well in print!’
I do really flatter myself this is the silliest speech I ever made!64
Fanny’s new familiarity with the nation’s first family was more a matter of amazement even than pride. Her guide to Court etiquette, written to Hetty in December 1785, was designed to reassure her own family that her head had not been turned:
Directions for coughing, sneezing, or moving, before the King and Queen.
In the first place, you must not cough. If you find a cough tickling in your throat, you must arrest it from making any sound; if you find yourself choking with the forbearance, you must choke – but not cough.
In the second place, you must not sneeze. If you have a vehement cold, you must take no notice of it; if your nose-membranes feel a great irritation, you must hold your breath; if a sneeze still insists upon making its way, you must oppose it, by keeping your teeth grinding together; if the violence of the repulse breaks some blood-vessel, you must break the blood-vessel – but not sneeze.
In the third place, you must not, upon any account, stir either hand or foot. If, by chance, a black pin runs into your head, you must not take it out. […] If […] the agony is very great, you may, privately, bite the inside of your cheek, or of your lips, for a little relief; taking care, meanwhile, to do it so cautiously as to make no apparent dent outwardly. And, with that precaution, if you even gnaw a piece out, it will not be minded, only be sure either to swallow it, or commit it to a corner of the inside of your mouth till they are gone – for you must not spit.65
In short, all normal life, all natural behaviour is suspended in the royal presence. Critics have made much of the aggression of this letter; in its highly indulgent grotesquerie they see signs of Fanny’s inner anger at a life of self-repression. Julia Epstein thinks it displays ‘Burney’s deep resentment of her powerlessness’ in the face of her father’s social ambitions for her at Court,66 though it pre-dates the first signs of those ambitions by half a year. It is important to note that the letter was written before Fanny had any personal knowledge of Court life at all; her information about protocol at this date came solely from Mary Delany. Fanny could indulge this violent satire because she did not in any way feel personally implicated in it.
In the same letter, she had mentioned jokily to Hetty how pleasant it would be to gain ‘preferment’ if that meant getting ‘a handsome pension for nothing at all’.67 No doubt, the spectacle of Mrs Delany being showered with gifts, money and a house full of pickles had given Fanny a rosy image of royal patronage, but it was an uncharacteristic act on the part of the royal couple, so noteworthy as to be mentioned in the King’s obituary.68 On the whole, the King and Queen liked to get value for money, whether from things, like the hard-wearing, no-nonsense uniform which was de rigueur for the men at Windsor, or from people, like Mrs Delany (a cynic might, after all, question the generosity of granting a lifetime annuity to an eighty-five-year-old). Fanny’s ‘blossom of an idea’ of sudden wealth, being released from dependence on her father and stepmother and allowed all the time in the world in which to write or please herself, was an engaging fantasy, but unlikely to be satisfied by ‘Mr and Mrs King’ – who, it might be remembered, are seated in Gillray’s satirical cartoon ‘Temperance enjoying a Frugal Meal’ below an empty picture-frame bearing the title ‘The Triumph of Benevolence’. Far from offering a way out of ‘attendance and dependence’, Fanny’s association with the Royal Family condemned her to even more of both.
Susan and Fredy Locke had seen what was coming, though Fanny dismissed their speculations as absurd. When in May 1786 Charles Burney was called to Windsor by Lemuel Smelt, a former deputy-governor to the royal princes, and told to bring Fanny with him, the Doctor and his daughter both imagined that it was he and not she who was in line for ‘preferment’. Aged sixty, Burney was showing no signs of ambition-fatigue. Through the intervention of Burke in the dying days of the Fox-North coalition, he had been appointed organist of Chelsea College, a post offering a very small salary but with the possibility of providing free accommodation in the future within the college – a valuable perk.
The post Burney coveted most, though, was to be Master of the King’s Band. He had been passed over before (unfairly, in his view, of course) but when the latest holder of the office, John Stanley, died in 1785, Burney was convinced that the job was his for the asking. He had presented the King with an elaborately bound copy of his account of the 1784 Commemoration of Handel (the monarch’s favourite composer) as a reminder of his musical and literary worth, and began to make enquiries about the succession as soon as Stanley was dead. Mr Smelt advised him to appear on the Terrace at Windsor – the long walk on which the Royal Family promenaded in public – as a ‘hint’ to the King, but when the royal party appeared they passed by the Doctor without speaking to him. It was Fanny who was honoured with a conversation, even though she had been trying to hide behind her hat. She was embarrassed by her consciousness of her ‘real errand’, to promote her father’s career: ‘The very idea of a design, however far from illaudable, is always distressing and uncomfortable’,69 she wrote, indicating once again how often she acted against her own judgement and instincts to please ‘il Padre’. When the King and Queen had spoken to her and moved on, the Doctor hung around for some time, chagrined by the evident failure of his expectations. Fanny hoped that the marks of favour shown to herself might be something ‘to build upon’, but was distressed by how ‘conscious and depressed’ her father was. ‘There is nothing that I know so very dejecting as solicitation’, she wrote in her journal. ‘I am sure I could never, I believe, go through a task of that sort.’70 Charles Burney had been soliciting all his life, and it was degrading. Only his adoring daughter could have seen his constant efforts towards advancement in the light of heroic endurance. Elsewhere, the Doctor was known as ‘The Hare with Many Friends’, an unflattering reference to John Gay’s poem in which the Hare’s popularity is of no practical use at all in a crisis (‘Her care was never to offend;/ And every creature was her friend’71).
A few weeks later the bombshell dropped when Mr Smelt requested a private interview with Fanny on behalf of ‘a great personage’ – the Queen – ‘who had conceived so favourable an opinion of me as to be desirous of undoubted information, whether or not there was a probability she might permanently attach me to herself and her family’.72 In other words, Fanny was being offered a place at Court, with apartments in the castle, a salary of £200 a year and a footman. Fanny’s face must have fallen so much at this speech that Smelt immediately made it clear that it was (just) possible to refuse. He himself was extremely surprised at her reaction: ‘I saw in his own face the utmost astonishment and disappointment’, Fanny wrote to Charlotte Cambridge, desperately asking advice on how to proceed (and at the same time obliquely communicating her predicament to George Cambridge). No wonder Mr Smelt was astonished. As people kept reminding Fanny over the coming weeks and months, places at Court were coveted by ‘thousands’ of candidates, and rarely if ever offered to someone of her low rank in life and negligible birth. Smelt would have expected her to be overcome with pleasure, self-satisfaction and gratitude rather than dread and repugnance.
Fanny was fully sensible of the honour being done her (or rather her father, as the appointment was clearly a form of compensation to him), but she saw with lightning clarity that life as a courtier would mean the end of ‘all possibility of happiness’. The word ‘permanent’ made it sound like a life sentence; attendance on the Queen was to be ‘incessant’, and confinement to the Court ‘continual’. For someone like Fanny, ‘to whom friendship is the balm, the comfort, the very support of existence!’73 it would be hell on earth, a world away from her ‘blossom of an idea’ of getting an obligation-free pension. Smelt’s suggestion that he could send back a respectful excuse to Her Majesty and keep the whole matter secret, even from her father, would have been jumped at by anyone less duty-bound and less strictly honourable than Fanny. But the mention of her father, and Smelt’s insinuation that she could further his interests by accepting the invitation (i.e. she could damage them by refusing), removed any real power of choice. By the next morning, she was already speaking in the passive tense of when the affair would ‘be decided’, and by the evening, when she received a summons from the Queen at Windsor, the future began to close in on her. ‘I now see the end’, she wrote to Miss Cambridge in despairing tones; ‘I see it next to inevitable.’74
Fanny’s appointment as Second Keeper of the Robes was settled with brutal speed. Within a month of the invitation, she was in residence at Windsor, at just the time she had been expecting to go to Norbury to spend the summer with the Lockes and Susan. In her new position, she would be able to invite close friends and family to the castle, but not go out herself, and her panic as the last days of freedom ticked by is evident in a letter to her father: ‘I shall want to decamp the very instant I have it in my power’, she told him, waiting for the castle business to be settled.75 Part of the preliminaries involved a visit to her future apartments in the Queen’s Lodge and a pep-talk from the retiring robe-keeper, Mrs Haggerdorn, who had come to England in 1761 with Queen Charlotte’s entourage from Strelitz. German was still the main language spoken around the Queen; Fanny’s superior, Juliana Schwellenberg, only spoke English on sufferance, and then badly.
Mrs Delany was delighted at the ‘honourable and delightful employment’ offered to her young protégée, ‘for such it must be near such a Queen’.76 Fanny kept very quiet during the general rejoicing: ‘Every body so violently congratulates me, that it seems as if all was gain’, she wrote to Charlotte in June. ‘However, I am glad they are all so pleased. My dear father is in raptures; that is my first comfort. Write to wish him joy, my Charlotte, without a hint to him, or any one but Susan, of my confessions of my internal reluctance and fears.’77 Thus the sisters conspired to bolster their father’s feelings one more time. For all her protestations about how kind and dear a father Charles Burney was, Fanny was convinced of two things: that he would neither understand her position nor treat her sympathetically if she acted against him: ‘To have declined such a proposal would […] have been thought madness & folly, nor, indeed, should I have been permitted to decline it, without exciting a displeasure that must have made me quite unhappy.’78
Charles Burney took some of the credit for his daughter’s preferment, by which he was profoundly flattered and gratified. The Doctor venerated the monarchy and saw nothing but pleasure ahead in Fanny serving them; he also saw plenty of opportunities for her to solicit favours for himself and his sons. Burney’s biographer Roger Lonsdale is right to say that there was no conscious cruelty involved in his eagerness to deprive Fanny of her liberty and peace of mind, but to conclude that ‘his excitement rendered him temporarily insensitive to all other considerations’79 is possibly too forgiving. What was this ‘excitement’ in truth other than unseemly fervour for recognition and self-promotion? And what was temporary about its manifestations?
In his essay on Madame d’Arblay’s life and work, Thomas Macaulay was in no doubt that Dr Burney’s ‘transported […] delight’ on this occasion was a damning indictment of him as a parent, and that he suffered delusions of ‘infantine vanities and chimerical hopes’:
[Charles Burney] seems to have thought that going to Court was like going to heaven; that to see princes and princesses was a kind of beatific vision; that the exquisite felicity enjoyed by royal persons was not confined to themselves, but was communicated by some mysterious efflux or reflection to all who were suffered to stand at their toilettes, or to bear their trains.80
Macaulay declared that the Court section of Madame d’Arblay’s diaries enraged him on her behalf. This is probably exactly the response, consciously or not, which Fanny Burney wanted to provoke in a reader of her diaries, whether that reader was herself, Susan, or some unknown person in the future. Her ‘loyal’ attention to the detail of Court life was, like everything else in that voluminous work, a form of self-justification. Having read the published Diary and Letters in the 1840s, Macaulay was withering about the King’s boorish literary judgements and the Queen’s amazing meanness at sending out a servant to buy books cheaply off second-hand stalls, marvelling ‘in how magnificent a manner the greatest lady in the land encouraged literature’.81 To draw the foremost novelist of the day into this company was, he felt, perverse; the £200 she received a year was no compensation for the loss of income through writing, and Fanny was clearly not the kind of ‘woman of fashion’ who might have made a useful wardrobe attendant: ‘[T]hough Miss Burney was the only woman of her time who could have described the death of Harrel, thousands might have been found more expert in tying ribbands and filling snuff-boxes’, he concluded rationally.82
Macaulay’s indignation at Fanny Burney’s fate was sadly not felt by any contemporary champion. There is plenty of evidence that she still hoped George Cambridge might save her, but his failure to step in with a last-minute proposal of marriage, his failure, in fact, to react at all to the news of her imminent ‘banishment’, struck her as ‘coldness of Heart, innately unconquerable, & a selfishness of disposition which to nothing can give way’.83 It is perhaps not surprising that at a period when she was suffering so much from her own slavery to duty, she imagined that Cambridge ought to show a similar selflessness. Her strong language indicates that she knew finally that the ‘romance’ was over. This knowledge must have added sharpness to a situation that was already extremely painful. When she wrote to Susan that she would now have to give up ‘all my most favourite schemes, and every dear expectation my fancy had ever indulged of happiness adapted to its taste’,84 we get a glimpse of how much Fanny Burney had been living on her hopes.
It is significant that the metaphor that her fate suggested was that of a marriage. The preparations were ironically similar, as she wrote to Charlotte from St Martin’s Street:
I am now fitting out just as you were, and all the maids and workers suppose I am going to be married, and snigger any time they bring in any of my new attire. I do not care to publish the affair, till it is made known by authority; so I leave them to their conjectures, and I fancy their greatest wonder is, who and where is the sposo; for they must think it odd he should never appear!85
On the fateful day of leaving home, she went first to Mrs Ord’s house where the inferior Burney carriage was swapped for a suitably grander one (with their own coach following as a baggage-van). They set off for Windsor, Mrs Ord and Dr Burney both in very good spirits, Fanny ominously quiet and subdued. As they walked from Mrs Delany’s house to the Queen’s Lodge fifty yards away, the new courtier was on the verge of prostration:
I could disguise my trepidation no longer – indeed I never had disguised, I had only forborne proclaiming it. But my dear father now, sweet soul! felt it all, as I held by his arm, without power to say one word, but that if he did not hurry along I should drop by the way. I heard in his kind voice that he was now really alarmed; he would have slackened his pace, or have made me stop to breathe; but I could not; my breath seemed gone, and I could only hasten with all my might, lest my strength should go too.86
Charles Burney was worried enough to stay until Fanny had seen the Queen and been shown her apartment by Mrs Schwellenberg. Fanny took pains to assure him that everything had gone well, and let him conclude that her former indisposition had been nerves about the day’s formalities. This satisfied her father, who shook off his apprehensions in a trice. ‘[H]is hopes and gay expectations were all within call’, Fanny wrote with devastating perspicuity in her account to Susan, ‘and they ran back at the first beckoning.’87 Dr Burney went back happy and proud to dine with Mrs Delany and Mrs Ord, while Fanny faced her life at Court in a spirit of grim determination:
I am married, my dearest Susan – I look upon it in that light – I was averse to forming the union, and I endeavoured to escape it; but my friends interfered – they prevailed – and the knot is tied. What then now remains but to make the best wife in my power? I am bound to it in duty, and I will strain every nerve to succeed.88
* And composed some scurrilous verses to support his speculation.1
* Another small circumstance supports this only too credible theory. In the spring and summer of the same year, Fanny had her portrait painted in miniature by john Bogle, whose wife was a friend of Mrs Burney. The miniature was a form particularly associated with love-tokens because it was designed to be worn or carried about the person; such portraits were very commonly commissioned at the beginning of or during engagements. Apart from patronising a friend’s husband and celebrating the famous authoress of Cecilia, Dr and Mrs Burney might have intended the portrait as a gift for Fanny’s intended.
* Possibly the fact that he unilaterally changed the rendezvous agreed between the Admiralty and the East India Company.46 James’s protestations of surprise that the Admiralty had been dissatisfied with his management of the convoy ring very false, and his ‘clarification’ of the events of 1782, in a series of petitioning letters in 1806 and 1807, is anything but clear. Still hopeful of winning back the trust of the Admiralty, he didn’t understand how dead the issue was for them. On the back of one of his letters wanting to know why his enquiries are unanswered, one Admiralty official has written: ‘This person’s Name is not on the List of Officers’, with his secretary’s response underneath, ‘A Superannuated Captain at 12d/a’.47