In her new capacity as Second Keeper of the Robes, Fanny Burney was required to wait on the Queen at least three times a day and assist in dressing her. The day began at six when Fanny rose and prepared for the Queen’s first, less formal, dressing; it ended at about midnight when the consort went to bed. The junior robe-keeper’s tasks were boringly simple: she had to hold items of dress ready for the Queen, place ribbons, hair ornaments and jewels, put on or take off the Queen’s powdering gown so that the hairdresser could come and create a suitably high and mighty ‘head’. During this operation, which could take an hour or more, the Queen generally read the newspapers.
The Queen had initially resisted the fashion for powdered hair when she arrived in England in the 1760s, but gradually it had become a staple of Court dress. In England Court dress took pride in being behind the times; only here could you see still the huge side-hoops and heavily-embroidered sacques that Mrs Montagu said made women resemble state beds on castors.1 While Marie-Antoinette was leading the French Court into a shocking state of déshabille, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz preferred formality in all things.
The Queen was no beauty and had no interest in personal display. By the time Fanny Burney knew her, ‘the bloom of her ugliness’, as Horace Walpole wickedly put it, was only just going off. She had some unattractive habits – two of the young ladies-in-waiting at this time used to lampoon the way she wiped her dirty nose across her hand after taking snuff;2 she was inelegant, even coarse, but at the same time the Queen was a stickler about matters of form and procedure. An awareness of this made the new robe-keeper nervous and clumsy: ‘I have even […] and not seldom, handed her her fan before her gown and her gloves before her cap!’ Fanny confessed at a later date.3 Such things were ‘of moment’ to the Queen.
The first few times that Fanny was summoned to the dressing room, she was given nothing to do at all: Mrs Schwellenberg and Mrs Thielcke, the Queen’s wardrobe woman, who between them were also responsible for the ordering and maintenance of the Queen’s dresses, were perfectly able to manage alone, and whenever by some accident only one of them was in attendance, the Queen simply helped put her own clothes on. Fanny might well have imagined that she would have plenty of time left over to herself at Court, but not only did her undemanding occupation take up, because it broke up, the whole day, but she found in the first months at Windsor that she was very often late or unready when the bell rang, she had so little to do but prepare to wait. When alone, Fanny was so torpid from depression that she wasted ‘moment after moment as sadly as unprofitably’.4 Wasting time was ingrained in Court culture. When a Major Price congratulated her on the success of her first month, Fanny replied, ‘I only do nothing; that’s all!’ to which he answered, ‘But that […] is the difficulty; to do nothing is the hardest thing possible.’5
Fanny had a drawing room and bedroom on the ground floor of the Queen’s Lodge, the barracks-like building inside the Windsor Castle complex which had been built the previous decade on the site of Queen Anne’s former lodge. It had been designed with George Ill’s large family in mind: all the princesses, from the twenty-year-old Princess Royal down to three-year-old Amelia were kept strictly within the Court and unable, through the Royal Marriage Act, to make anything other than dynastic marriages approved by their father. The inevitable result was that although Queen Charlotte produced thirteen healthy children, not one legitimate grandchild survived the King, and after his sons George and William had succeeded, the throne passed across to William’s niece, the Duke of Kent’s daughter Victoria. King George III was uxorious and a devoted family man, but his large household was not a very happy one: the older princesses apparently ‘hated and feared’ their mother,6 and came to resent their restricted lives (only one of them ever married legitimately, though there were clandestine relationships later). The princes, glaringly absent from Court, pursued lives of dissipation as far as they could. The Prince of Wales was the black sheep of the family, with his factitious cultivation of Whig politics and his support from the ‘fast’ Devonshire House set. Needless to say, Fanny’s sympathies were all with his parents.
Fanny’s rooms looked out onto the castle’s Round Tower and had a window opening into the park. She had a maid and an incompetent servant called John at her disposal, some books (though she had never owned many, on account of her father’s library being so good) and at least two hours in the day to herself. She soon learned, though, that there was no such thing as privacy or leisure at Court. Other courtiers came constantly to the door for tiresome tête à têtes; some, like Margaret Planta, a Swiss woman who was English Reader to the princesses, were pleasant enough, others less so. Fanny Burney was not what they had expected, and they let her know it. When a Mrs Fielding, of the Bedchamber, came to wish Fanny ‘joy’ on the second day,
I saw in her face a strong mark of still remaining astonishment at my appointment. Indeed all the people in office here are so evidently amazed, that one so unthought of amongst them should so unexpectedly fill a place to which they had all privately appropriated some acquaintance, that I see them with difficulty forbear exclaiming ‘How odd it is to see you here!’7
There were social obligations among the courtiers for which Fanny was unprepared and which she resisted, naively expecting to be able to establish her own patterns of behaviour by the simple expedient of ignoring broad hints, or even direct summonses when they were not directly to do with her job. She was not prepared to admit how much bad feeling this might have caused, nor how it showed up the difference in ‘breeding’ between herself and most of her colleagues. The equerries with whom she was expected to take tea every evening were recruited almost exclusively from younger sons of the aristocracy and had gentlemanly manners, but nothing much in common with a middle-class musician’s daughter. Fanny neither spoke nor ate much in front of them (insinuating she was there on sufferance), and her withdrawn manner was put down to dullness or prudery. The ladies-in-waiting were all aristocratic and kept their distance, and it soon became clear that Fanny was unlikely to find any kindred spirits among her fellow courtiers. At the end of her first half-year she was told with evident congratulation by the princesses’ French Reader, Monsieur de Guiffardière, that she had now seen just about everything there was to see of life at Court, and that ‘the same round will still be the same, year after year, without intermission or alteration’.8 This was meant to be reassuring.
The most unfriendly and obstructive of her new colleagues was the one with whom Fanny had to spend most time, Juliana Schwellenberg, the senior female among the German courtiers. ‘Schwelly’, as one of the equerries disrespectfully called her, had spent her whole adult life in the service of the Queen and had established a very effective power-base at Court. She did not take kindly to ‘Miss Bernar’, whose lack of interest and pleasure in Court society was a clear criticism of the system. Their antipathy was strong and immediate. After the first month, Fanny was meeting Mrs Schwellenberg’s frequent outbursts of bad temper with obdurate silence, and was maliciously lampooning her absurdly repetitious speeches in the long journals she was sending once a month to Susan and Fredy Locke: ‘“Upon my vord!” – “I tell you once!” – “Colonel what-you call, – I am quite warm!” – “Upon my vord! – I tell you the same!” – “You might not tell me such thing!” – “What for you say all that?”’9 There was, however, little humour to be extracted from the situation. Mrs Schwellenberg, probably sensing that Fanny craved privacy above all else, seemed bent on imposing her company as much as possible. Every evening was spent à deux with this ignorant and unpleasant woman, and they were obliged to take most of their meals together. Fanny soon realised that Mrs Schwellenberg expected her ‘not to be her colleague, but her dependent deputy! not to be her visitor at my own option, but her companion, her humble companion, at her own command!’10
Even Mrs Delany was struck by Mrs Schwellenberg’s pointed rudeness towards Fanny, and having endured one evening of it, told Fanny she ‘would positively come no more, unless I would exert and assert myself into a little more consequence’.11 But Fanny knew how futile it was to confront such ‘wretched tempers’. The comparison with ‘The Lady’ was strikingly obvious. ‘O Heaven! – how depressing’, she wrote despairingly to her sister, ‘how cruel to be fastened thus again on an Associate so Exigeante, so tyrannical, & so ill disposed!’12
There were occasional releases from the new life; Mrs Delany’s house in St Alban’s Street was a welcome refuge from the stifling atmosphere of the Lodge, but since, like Charles Burney, Mrs Delany derived little but pleasure from Fanny’s appointment, a brave face was required to greet her. Fanny was granted leave by the Queen to visit Chesington one weekend (where memories of Crisp plunged her into melancholy), and received several visits from her father, on one of which they called on the Astronomer Royal William Herschel at his house in Slough, and had the extraordinary experience of being allowed to walk through his partially-constructed forty-foot telescope, the largest at that date ever devised: ‘it held me quite upright, and without the least inconvenience; so would it have done had I been dressed in feathers and a bell hoop – such is its circumference’,13 Fanny wrote (interestingly using dress as a form of yardstick). Such diversions were rare however, and tended to disturb Fanny. ‘I tried to feel happy’, she wrote on parting with Fredy Locke after a visit, ‘but I hardly knew how to describe – nor wish to do it – how far I am from all the sweet peace that belongs to happiness, when I see that sweet friend who brings me almost piercingly near what she has not power to make me reach.’14
By the turn of the year, Fanny was using a metaphor which, unknown to her, was current among the princesses at Windsor, too, and resolving
to relinquish, without repining, frequent intercourse with those I love; – to settle myself in my monastery, without one idea of ever quitting it; – to study for the approbation of my lady abbess, and make it a principal source of content, as well as spring of action; – and to associate more cheerily with my surrounding nuns and monks.15
If she willed herself to do so, she could – surely? – get used to this horrible new life. It might just be a matter of practice, like the ability to walk backwards out of the King’s presence, which she watched Lady Charlotte Bertie perform with consummate elegance:
For me, I was also, unluckily, at the upper end of the room […] However, as soon as I perceived what was going forward, – backward, rather, – I glided near the wainscot, (Lady Charlotte, I should mention, made her retreat along the very middle of the room,) and having paced a few steps backwards, stopped short to recover, and, while I seemed examining some other portrait, disentangled my train from the heels of my shoes, and then proceeded a few steps only more; and then, observing the King turn another way, I slipped a yard or two at a time forwards; and hastily looked back, and then was able to go again according to rule, and in this manner, by slow and varying means, I at length made my escape. […]
Since that time, however, I have come on prodigiously, by constant practice, in the power and skill of walking backwards, without tripping up my own heels, feeling my head giddy, or treading my train out of the plaits […] and I have no doubt but that, in the course of a few months, I shall arrive at all possible perfection in the true court retrograde motion.16
Fanny’s unhappiness at Court was exacerbated by her anxiety about protocol. The many small mistakes she made in her first six months of service loomed as large in her anxious mind as capital offences, and she became abnormally alert and unforgiving about other people’s lapses, too. On a royal visit to Oxford in August 1786, she took profound offence at not being formally received by any of the hosts at Nuneham Courtney (who were all, of course, engaged receiving the King and Queen), and cut Lady Harcourt when she finally met her. Wandering disconsolately round the Harcourts’ house with Miss Planta, she became mildly hysterical and refused to speak to anyone to whom she had not been introduced by a suitable host. Mrs Thrale’s former scorn of ‘such dignity!’ comes to mind, but now it had taken on a manic edge. The lack of welcome at Nuneham simply rubbed in the fact that Fanny was no longer a guest in such houses, but a servant. Like the bell that called her at Windsor and her first wages, it was a symptom of a ‘strange degradation’.17
She experienced an even worse panic on the Queen’s birthday in January 1787, when a ball was held at St James’s Palace. Fanny left the assembly at the appointed time, in order to attend the Queen, but got lost in the palace’s labyrinthine courtyards and corridors almost immediately. Blind, lost, unprotected, uninformed and late (again) for the Queen of England, whose jewels she was meant to take charge of, Fanny gave herself over to a sort of hysterical despair. She couldn’t find her own chair-men so had to hire a hackney-chair, manned (in her opinion) by two drunkards. When she asked to be taken to St James’s Palace (where she already was) the cabbies decided that the lady meant South Audley Street, and set off. Fanny thought she was being abducted and began to scream. She was rescued and helped to the right part of the palace (eventually) by a young clergyman who had been trying to assist her earlier, but whom she had repulsed because he was a stranger. This bizarre incident, written up at great length in the diary, is disturbing to read because so much of Fanny’s distress (not to say all of it) seems to have been self-inflicted. She panicked and ran into risk immediately (her account strongly emphasises the likelihood of assault, rape or murder) rather than accept the assistance of a clergyman to whom she had not been properly introduced.
Any reader of Cecilia will be struck at once by the parallels between this scene and that in the novel when the heroine runs away from an ‘inebriated’ coach driver and, lost in London streets at night, has her pockets picked, is locked into an attic by strangers and descends rapidly into madness. The episode in the novel is effective because the reader knows of Delvile’s mortal danger and the heroine’s incommunicable anxiety on his behalf; the contrast between her secret knowledge and the infuriating unconcern of ordinary observers (or their exploitation of her) is credible and highly dramatic. In Fanny Burney’s real-life ‘mad scene’, however, the only contrast is between her idea of her own sense of extreme vulnerability and the actual dangers faced. The story is all effect and no cause – or at least the cause is irrational. The incident underlines the fragility of Fanny’s state of mind just a few months into her long incarceration at Court; it also suggests some of the damage that was being done to her imaginative processes. Both her later novels, but especially The Wanderer, show a deteriorating grasp on how to make a crisis plausible in fiction.
Had Fanny not admired the Queen so much she might have found some release for her overwrought feelings in a spirit of rebellion, but the only outlet she allowed herself was in her communications with Susan and Mrs Locke, both of whom were unsympathetic to the Queen. To everyone else she presented a subdued but uncomplaining front. Inwardly, Fanny felt herself dwindling away, both physically and mentally, and at the turn of the New Year in 1787 made the desperate resolution to ‘wean myself from myself – to lessen all my affections – to curb all my wishes – to deaden all my sensations’.18
She was losing her ability to deal with even simple matters, such as what to do about a letter from the distinguished French novelist, Madame de Genlis. Fanny had been immensely impressed by de Genlis when they met in 1785, but dark rumours about her morals now seemed to make her a dangerous associate. When Fanny tried to ask the Queen’s advice (i.e. permission) on whether to answer the letter or not, she was so nervous that her voice failed and she had to retreat behind her mistress’s chair, ‘that she might not see a distress she might wonder at’. Fanny knew this was strange, even psychotic, behaviour, and that her mind was ‘enfeebled […] by a long succession of struggling agitations’.19 Her Majesty, predictably, told her to have nothing to do with Madame de Genlis.
The challenge to convey to Susan and Fredy her mental sufferings at Court produced some of Fanny Burney’s most acute writing – her description of Fredy Locke bringing her ‘almost piercingly near what she has not power to make me reach’ was one example, another was her novel expression to describe Mrs Schwellenberg’s effect on her ego, ‘little i am fairly as one annihilated’.20 Fanny could evoke the symptoms of her ‘forcible emotions’ powerfully, but didn’t want to analyse their cause, and in contrast all her language about the Royal Family is vacuous and sentimental. The word that recurs with nauseating frequency is ‘sweetness’, but there are quantities of ‘charming’ and ‘gracious’ too. It was as if – just as with her father – Fanny’s critical faculties were being deliberately suspended in this special instance, and the vacuum filled with hyperbole.
Fanny was one of the few people who genuinely admired Queen Charlotte (another, surprisingly, was Susan’s husband Molesworth Phillips21): she considered her a model of propriety and was impressed by her lack of airs and graces. This partly explains her readiness to solicit and defer to the Queen’s advice on personal relationships (which was severely cautious), manners (cold) and taste in literature (stodgy). Asking the Queen’s advice, even on trivial matters, was a fail-safe way to avoid the blame and opprobrium Fanny had begun to fear from the exercise of free will.
Of the various things that gradually impelled Fanny Burney to adopt ‘the worst [prose style] that has ever been known among men’22 for grand or formal performances, the Queen’s influence cannot be discounted. During the long years at Court, Fanny’s anxieties were focused on pleasing this highly conventional, non-intellectual German woman who didn’t like novels. To begin with, the anxiety was about practicalities, movement, manners and procedure, then about morals and later about the moral value of writing. After Fanny had left Court service in 1791, with a pension dependent on the Queen’s pleasure, the anxiety persisted. She knew that everything she wrote from then on would have to pass muster with her patroness, whose taste was for ‘improving’ literature. The first novel that Fanny wrote after leaving the Queen’s service was dedicated to the consort, and the nervous convolution of the dedication demonstrates what she had come to feel was required on such occasions, a development of the ‘white hand’ that Dr Johnson had once found so objectionable:
MADAM,
That goodness inspires a confidence, which, by divesting respect of terror, excites attachment to Greatness, the presentation of this little Work* to Your Majesty must truly, however humbly, evince; and though a public manifestation of duty and regard from an obscure Individual may betray a proud ambition, it is, I trust, but a venial – I am sure it is a natural one.23
The Court did not offer any models of good English. The King himself was bilingual, but few courtiers were. German was the language used intimately and as a blocking device for private conversations (as Fanny experienced often in the Queen’s dressing room). There were also factional registers that performed the same function in English: the Prince of Wales’s friends had their own form of code to conceal their Whiggishness (not that they were heard much at Court), and no doubt a lot of what the equerries were saying to each other derived from public-school jargon and other exclusive cant. In these conditions, Court rhetoric, traditionally florid and enervated, served as the only common currency. It expressed perfectly the artificiality of Court life: its rhetorical affectations mirrored the repetitiousness, rodomontade and retrogression of courtly behaviour itself. As Fanny recognised in a line of a ballad she wrote at this time for the Lockes’ son William – ‘Void was the scene, blank, vacant, drear!’ – there was a direct connection between her state of mind and the rhetorical style she happened to use. She disliked the line she had written, but implies that she actually couldn’t change it. It was ‘a tautology so expressive of the tautology of my life and feelings’.24
Fanny was constantly hearing another sort of bad English, too: the Queen’s. Her Court diary respectfully ignores the Queen’s foreign accent – a courtesy not extended to ‘Schwelly’ or any other German-speakers around the Court, whom Fanny satirised freely. Earlier diary entries about her first meetings with the Royal Family at Mrs Delany’s in 1785 showed her alert to all the Queen’s peculiarities of speech, accent, idiom and cadence. ‘Her language is rather peculiar than foreign’, Fanny noted then;25 ‘She speaks English almost perfectly well, with great choice and copiousness of language’, but ‘her emphasis has [a] sort of changeability’.26 Few examples remain of Queen Charlotte’s speech in this objective phase of Fanny’s diary, but they betray an essential lack of elegance; for instance:
‘For me, I never have half time enough for things. But what makes me most angry still, is to see people go up to a window and say, “What a bad day! – dear, what shall we do such a day as this?”’27
or
‘I am always quarrelling with time! It is so short to do something, and so long to do nothing.’28
The Court entries smooth over these oddities, endowing Queen Charlotte with perfect grammar and syntax. Here is the Queen’s opinion, as reported by Fanny in her more reverential period, of the recently published Letters to and from the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D:
[O]nce I said to the Bishop of Carlisle that I thought most of these letters had better have been spared the printing; and once to Mr Langton, at the Drawing-Room, I said, ‘Your friend Dr. Johnson, sir, has had many friends busy to publish his books, his memoirs, and his meditations, and his thoughts; but I think he wanted one friend more.’ ‘What for? ma’am’, cried he; ‘A friend to suppress them’, I answered.29
This is an unlikely speech from the woman who another time asked Fanny to check her private diary ‘to tell her if it was English’.30 The Dedication of Camilla, and so much of Fanny’s subsequent public writing, addresses someone who could appreciate the meaning and moral of a book in English, but on whom purity of diction and delicacy of expression were almost entirely lost.
Fanny had taken up her position at Court in the hope that her real function would be to read to the Queen and discuss literature. Her first request to read, however, was marred by her usual stage-fright at any sort of performance: ‘my voice was less obedient than my will, and it became so husky, and so unmanageable, that nothing more unpleasant could be heard’.31 A month later, in a ill-conceived attempt to bring her father’s work to the Queen’s notice, she requested from home a copy of The Present State of Music in Germany, probably thinking that the passages about Handel, the King’s obsession, would go down well. Charles Burney, who had vehemently defended his book in 1773 against those who accused him of anti-German prejudice, thought rather differently about it now it was suggested as reading-matter for the Queen. But the opportunity was too good to miss, and he sent Fanny a copy straight away, with all the ‘sensitive’ passages about German lack of genius marked in pencil, so she could avoid them when reading aloud.
This plan backfired unpleasantly when the Queen asked to borrow the book for the Princess Royal. ‘It is all over with us for ever!’ Fanny wrote dramatically, fearing her father’s imminent disgrace. She made up an elaborate lie to explain the markings, saying they were proposed revisions which he had sent for her to inspect. Nothing awful came of the incident because evidently none of the Royal Family bothered to read the book – not even the Princess Royal, who thought the marked sections indicated Fanny’s favourite passages! – but Fanny’s profound unease about soliciting patronage seemed fully justified. Later in her Court career she appealed to the Queen on behalf of both her brothers, and though the petitions were heard with ‘some concern & compassion’32 they were not successful, and laid open to scrutiny James’s and Charles’s past sins and present failures. The net effect, felt most acutely by Fanny, was not to raise the Burneys up but to expose their shortcomings.
Though Fanny longed to be rescued from her situation at Court, Charles Burney clearly thought of the arrangement as permanent. In 1787 the organist’s apartments at Chelsea College became vacant and Dr Burney decided to move his wife and remaining unestablished child, fifteen-year-old Sarah Harriet, out of St Martin’s Street at last (although he kept the lease on until 1789.33) Sarah was a gawky and unhappy girl who had been brought up, according to Maria Rishton, in ‘a perpetual state of Warfare’ with her mother.34 Her brother Richard, reputedly the most handsome and charming of Charles Burney’s children, had not stayed long at Winchester College, despite his early patronage by Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale. Between 1781 and 1783 he and Sarah had been sent to Switzerland to learn some French; little else is known of his adolescent years until the summer of 1787, by which time he had removed to India. Mystery and whiffs of scandal surround the circumstances of this, but as nothing has been left in the Burney archive to elucidate ‘beautiful Dick’s virtual disappearance from the family, it is impossible to define the nature of ‘all his transgressions’, cryptically referred to in Susan’s journal of 1789.35* In July 1787, Charles Burney received ‘a letter fm India – which he told us [the Phillipses] he dreaded to unseal’.39 Dr Burney and his wife were clearly anxious about their son, and almost certainly disappointed in their expectations of him. Dick’s marriage to one Jane Ross on her fifteenth birthday in November 1787 (he was an elderly nineteen) cannot have gone down well at home; he was the fourth of Mrs Burney’s five children to make a clandestine teenage match.† Dr Burney later revealed that his youngest son was ‘one of those who have married natives’.40 This does not necessarily mean that Jane Ross had any Indian blood; she was a Christian,41 and likely to have been connected with the Indian Civil Service, which Dick Burney joined when he first reached Calcutta. One of their numerous children was described by Fanny in 1820 as having a ‘Complection a little Indian’,42 which could indicate anything from being half-caste to having a suntan. Initially at least, the union was considered by Susan a ‘very faulty step, & very probable to be not only his own ruin but that of his poor Companion’,43 but though he died at the early age of forty, Dick’s exemplary career as headmaster of the Orphan School at Kidderpore, earnest Christianity (he converted to Methodism) and apparently happy marriage seem to have proved her fears wrong.*
Mrs Schwellenberg, who suffered from asthma, stayed in town for several months in 1787, and during her absence Fanny became much better acquainted with the equerries and left lively sketches of their conversation in her diary. These vignettes are the first signs that she was becoming relaxed enough to observe her surroundings in the way that had previously been second nature. A holiday atmosphere broke out whenever ‘Schwelly’ was absent; there were even fits of laughter and flashes of wit around the tea-table from time to time – nothing to that of Mrs Thrale, Garrick, Johnson or Walpole, of course, but welcome in the chilly ‘monastery’. The equerries worked on three-month shifts, so the company was always changing, and in January 1788 one of them, Colonel Stephen Digby, came back into duty after nursing his wife in her fatal illness the previous summer. By a strange coincidence his wife, Lady Lucy Fox-Strangways, had been the very child at Mrs Sheeles’s boarding school in Queen’s Square who had taken Fanny under her wing in the months following Esther Sleepe Burney’s death in 1762. These poignant recollections helped draw Fanny closer to Colonel Digby, who despite his gouty foot, ruined teeth and taste for melancholic literature appealed strongly to her. His sensibilities seemed much finer than other men’s, and his sorrows made him interestingly vulnerable. Soon the damaged widower was visiting her as often as he could.
Fanny made a rare public appearance at the first day of the notorious eight-year trial of the former Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings, which began on 13 February 1788 on a specially constructed ‘set’ in Westminster Hall. Hundreds of peers, politicians and society people flocked to hear the great orators of the day, Burke and Sheridan, fling accusations of fraud and extortion at Hastings from a charge sheet of phenomenal length. As a spectacle the trial was unrivalled; the galleries were crowded with the nation’s great and good, including many old friends of the Burneys such as Sir Joshua Reynolds and Jeremiah Crutchley from Streatham. The Queen was incognito in the Duchess of New-castle’s box (it is interesting how few people could recognise members of the Royal Family before the age of photography) and saw Fanny conversing at great length with William Windham, Opposition MP and a member of the prosecution. Fanny’s disturbance at talking to this amiable and intelligent man, whom she had met in society before her incarceration at Windsor, was nothing to her distress at seeing Edmund Burke also among the prosecution ‘managers’, loosing his unrivalled oratorical powers against Hastings. His campaign which led to Hastings’s impeachment the previous year had disgusted Fanny, who had met the former Governor-General at her brother-in-law Clement Francis’s house in Aylsham and was his ardent supporter. Fanny’s naivety is evident again here, both in her conviction that Hastings was innocent because ‘he looked with a species of indignant contempt towards his accusers, that could not, I think, have been worn had his defence been doubtful’45 and in her puzzlement at Burke’s apparent perversion of his genius. ‘Mr Burke has no greater admirer!’ she said to Windham, thinking no doubt of her extreme gratification at his former admiration of her; ‘that is what disturbs me most in this business!’ Windham’s reply was another ‘home’ stroke: ‘I am then really sorry for you! – to be pulled two ways is of all things the most painful.’46
When Mrs Delany died that spring, in her eighty-eighth year, Fanny’s only pleasure in life at Court died too; years of obscurity and unhappiness stretched ahead. And life at Court took a darkly dramatic turn later that year when the King fell seriously ill. A long visit to Cheltenham in the summer, to take the waters, had done nothing to cure his sporadic ‘bilious attacks’, nor his hyperactive ‘flow of spirits’, as Fanny described it.47 After a particularly bad ‘bilious attack’ in October, the King called in his chief physician, Sir George Baker, who attributed the illness to the fact that the King had worn damp stockings and eaten four large pears. Despite this comfortably trivial diagnosis, the symptoms did not subside and the royal party’s routine return to Windsor from Kew after their weekly audience at St James’s was delayed by several days. When Fanny met the King at the end of the week, she was alarmed at the change in him:
I had a sort of conference with his Majesty, or rather, I was the object to whom he spoke, with a manner so uncommon, that a high fever alone could account for it; a rapidity, a hoarseness of voice, a volubility, an earnestness – a vehemence, rather – it startled me inexpressibly[.]48
The King himself knew that something was amiss; he was mildly delirious, couldn’t walk properly, sleep or speak, and said to one of the ladies-in-waiting, Lady Effingham, with a frankness and familiarity that was also one of his symptoms, ‘My dear Effy […] you see me, all at once, an old man.’49 Fanny feared that he was on the verge of ‘a great fever’, others that his whole constitution was breaking down, though none of this was discussed openly. ‘Nobody speaks of his illness, nor what they think of it’, Fanny wrote in her diary.50 The word ‘mad’ was not mentioned at all.
Sir George Baker kept taking the King’s pulse and occasionally examined his urine, but in truth had no idea what the matter was. ‘Unformed gout’, was one theory, and the wet stockings remained another. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the likely cause, porphyria (a genetically passed-on condition), was investigated by Ida Macalpine and Robert Hunter in their book George III and the Mad-Business. In the crisis of 1788–9, the Court doctors simply sat tight, treated the symptoms as best they could and hoped the King’s illness would pass before a definite diagnosis became necessary.
An article in the Morning Herald on 5 November however revealed to an anxious nation the fact that the King had been delirious during his ‘indisposition’. This was a dangerous leak, reckoned ‘treasonable’ by the Queen, who was terrified by recent developments and their implications for the future. The same day, the Prince of Wales appeared at Windsor ready to assess the situation for himself, but his presence agitated the King to such an extent that at dinner he broke ‘into positive delirium’,51 attacked the Prince and sent the Queen into violent hysterics. After this, the doctors persuaded the King to be separated from his wife at night (clearly she was frightened of him by this time), but he kept bursting in unexpectedly, sometimes raving, abusive and foaming at the mouth. A more drastic removal followed, with the Queen and princesses sealed away in a distant set of rooms. ‘I am nervous’, the King said meekly after this dramatic episode; ‘I am not ill, but I am nervous: if you would know what the matter is with me, I am nervous’.52
The new arrangements at Windsor, overseen by the Prince of Wales, changed the whole tenor of Court life. The equerries were on call most of the time outside the King’s room, but the Queen’s women had less to do and Fanny found herself often alone. The usual routine ceased, and with it the usual flow of news and gossip; no one went out of the castle, everyone seemed isolated in their quarters, waiting to see how the situation would develop. ‘[A] stillness the most uncommon reigned over the whole house’, Fanny wrote to her sister. ‘Nobody stirred; not a voice was heard; not a step, not a motion. I could do nothing but watch, without knowing for what: there seemed a strangeness in the house most extraordinary.’53
In the first week of the King’s illness, Fanny had begun writing again ‘in mere desperation for employment’.54 It was a tragic drama, eventually titled Edwy and Elgiva, based on the story of the short-lived Anglo-Saxon King Edwy as told by Hume in his History of England. She did not, however, stick at the play with enthusiasm; at this stage it was more of a vent for her overwrought feelings than an intentional work of art. She saw Colonel Digby rather more often than before, because he took advantage of the disruption to the usual routine to invite himself to tea or dinner without notice, slipping away if Mrs Schwellenberg appeared. Fanny seemed to have forgotten all her earlier scruples about being unchaperoned in a room with a man, but she deluded herself if she thought no one noticed or minded. Their friendship even made its way into the King’s unstoppable flow of speech: ‘[Mr Digby] is as bad as any of them,’ he had said on 20 November, ‘for he’s so fond of the company of learned ladies, that he gets to the tea-table with Miss Burney, and there he stays and spends his whole time.’55
All the equerries had been called into service during the crisis at Windsor, but the royal household was soon to be drastically reduced. Windsor was felt by the politicians and doctors alike (some of whom were now receiving death threats from the public) to be too exposed a residence; Kew, with its large private gardens and seclusion, would be a better hideaway for a noisy, delirious monarch. The Court moved at the end of November, packing up hastily, ‘as if preparing […] for banishment’56 and cramming into the smaller palace very uncomfortably. Nothing was ready, everywhere was cold, and the usual disposal of apartments had been changed by the Prince of Wales (who rode over in advance and chalked names on the doors) to accommodate a suite of sick-rooms on the ground floor for the King and an empty set of rooms above him (ostensibly to ease the King’s rest, but much more likely to ease everyone else’s). Fanny’s new room was at the end of a servants’ passageway, up a winding staircase with a makeshift coal-hole at its foot. The great advantage was its distance from Mrs Schwellenberg, who was being exceptionally difficult. Colonel Digby liked its isolation, too, and took the liberty of using the room as a study-cum-bolthole, sitting reading Mark Akenside’s poetry to Fanny while she got on with her endless needlework, like an old married couple.
The sentimental bond she found with Digby helped Fanny through the terrible winter at Kew. One of her jobs was to take the Queen a report from the doctors first thing every morning; this often entailed a long wait in a cold, wet passageway (Mrs Schwellenberg having refused to let her sit in the parlour) and then having to break bad or indifferent news to her mistress. The King’s relapses during November and December made everyone fear that his illness would be too prolonged to enable him to keep the throne. The Prime Minister, Pitt, and the Chancellor, Thurlow, had been shocked by the King’s deterioration when they attended the Privy Council that signed permission for the Court’s removal to Kew. To prevent the Opposition gaining power through their patron, the Prince of Wales, the Government had to stall for time and keep reports about the King’s health as non-commitally optimistic as possible. Pitt was now prepared to concede the need for a Regency, as long as he could restrict it, keeping his party in government. Everything hung on the bulletins from the sick-room, where the desperate struggles of the Regency crisis were seen in microcosm, with the only ‘Opposition’ doctor, Robert Warren, gloomily prognosticating no hope of a recovery and Francis Willis, the Queen’s favourite, saying quite the opposite.
Dr Willis, a well-known ‘mad-doctor’ from Lincoln, had been called in as a last resort in December and was soon imposing a draconian regime on ‘the loved Royal sufferer’,57 as Fanny referred to the King. Emetics and febrifuges, blisters and bark were applied liberally, and increasingly the King was ‘put under coercion’58 in a strait-waistcoat or on the sinister ‘Restraining Chair’ which had been built for him. The Willises – father and two sons – took over the care of the monarch exclusively; none of the pages or equerries was allowed access without permission, and their own asylum attendants were brought in to help ‘coerce’ the violent, sleepless and abusively ranting King. No wonder Fanny experienced the ‘severest personal terror’ of her life59 when she accidentally came across the King and his warders in the grounds of Kew Palace one morning in early February. To see him was not only forbidden, it was dangerous, and she set off at speed, looking for somewhere to lose herself among the garden’s ‘little labyrinths’. To her horror, though, the King had spotted her and she could hear him in pursuit, calling out her name ‘loudly and hoarsely’. But Fanny was too terrified to stop, even when she heard Willis’s voice begging her to:
‘I cannot! I cannot!’ I answered, still flying on, when he called out ‘You must, ma’am; it hurts the King to run.’
Then, indeed, I stopped – in a state of fear really amounting to agony. I turned round, I saw the two Doctors had got the King between them, and the three attendants of Dr Willis’s were hovering about. They all slackened their pace, as they saw me stand still; but such was the excess of my alarm, that I was wholly insensible to the effects of a race which, at any other time, would have required an hour’s recruit.60
Fanny felt later that forcing herself to walk towards the King that day was ‘the greatest effort of personal courage I have ever made’. To her relief, he looked benign instead of angry, ‘though [with] something still of wildness in his eyes’; he spread out his arms to embrace her (she imagined she was about to be attacked) and kissed her cheek, a most extraordinary gesture. The doctors ‘simply smiled and looked pleased’,61 and the King entered into a rambling conversation with Fanny, during which he sang bits of Handel in a croaking voice and became tearful remembering Mrs Delany. ‘I have lived so long out of the world, I know nothing!’ he said, plying Fanny with questions about his friends and staff until the doctors and attendants gently persuaded him to come away. She was moved by the evidence of improvement, and having first reported ‘almost all’ of this strange encounter to the Queen (omitting the kisses, presumably), spread it quickly around the Court, much to the delight of the Willises. Though the Regency Bill was in print the following week, it was put off, and before the month was out His Majesty was slowly getting back to normal. By 10 March, only five weeks after Fanny’s chase with ‘Mad King George’ around Kew gardens, the first medallions had been struck, celebrating his full recovery. For the time being, the Regency debate was over.
A royal progress around the West Country was organised for the summer of 1789, part convalescence and part triumphal parade, which Fanny was elected to join. Colonel Digby was also of the party, which set off towards Weymouth via the New Forest in late June. All along the route, people came out to watch the procession and vehicles were parked by the roadside, ‘chariots, chaises, landaus, carts, waggons, whiskies, gigs, phaëtons – mixed and intermixed, filled within and surrounded without by faces all glee and delight’.
At Winchester the town was one head. I saw Dr Warton, but could not stop the carriage. The King was everywhere received with acclamation. His popularity is greater than ever. Compassion for his late sufferings seems to have endeared him now to all conditions of men.62
Buglers dressed quaintly in forest-green greeted the royal party as it entered the New Forest, and ‘God Save the King!’ was heard everywhere. At Weymouth, which had given itself over to a protracted holiday, the words appeared on patriotic caps and bandeaus, ‘all the bargemen wore it in cockades; and even the bathing-women had it in large coarse girdles round their waists. It is printed on most of the bathing-machines, and in various scrolls and devices it adorns every shop and almost every house in the two towns’.63 There was no getting away from the loyal prayer: even when the King bathed in the sea, there was a group of musicians hidden in an adjacent bathing machine to strike up the anthem as soon as his convalescent royal flesh hit the water.
It wasn’t until they had been in Weymouth for several weeks that Fanny, and most of the King’s party, had any idea of what was taking place in France during this momentous month. Miss Planta’s brother-in-law joined them on 26 July with news of ‘confusion, commotion and impending revolution’;64 slowly they began to read and hear of the fall of the Bastille and the arrest of King Louis XVI. ‘Truly terrible and tremendous are revolutions such as these’, Fanny wrote to her father later that year:
There is nothing in old history that I shall any longer think fabulous; the destruction of the most ancient empires on record has nothing more wonderful, nor of more sounding improbability, than the demolition of this great nation, which rises up all against itself for its own ruin – perhaps annihilation. Even the Amazons were but the poissardes of the day; I no longer doubt their existence or their prowess; and name but some leader amongst the destroyers of the Bastile, and what is said of Hercules or Theseus we need no longer discredit. I only suppose those two heroes were the many-headed mob of ancient days.65
By contrast the crowds that surged round the royal party as it progressed from Weymouth to Exeter were strikingly loyal, affectionate and indulgent (the theatre audience at Weymouth sat patiently waiting for the King and Queen until eleven o’clock one evening before a performance by Mrs Siddons could begin); their ‘honest and rapturous effusions’ caused Fanny to cry ‘twenty times in the day’.66 George III hadn’t been so popular in years.
Colonel Digby, whose family seat, Sherborne Castle, was included in the royal tour, was present much of the time, though less attentive to Fanny than before. ‘[H]is dauntless incaution had now given way to fearful circumspection’,67 she noted, though she found it impossible to credit Court rumours that the Colonel intended to marry one of the maids of honour, the young, lovely and rich Charlotte Gunning. Fanny felt that her intimate friendship with Digby was too sincere ever to be broken, whoever the object of his romantic affections might be. She was realistic enough to see that Digby’s ‘high family’ and his first wife’s ‘still higher connections’ made her an unlikely candidate for second wife, but couldn’t anticipate being dropped entirely: ‘[I am] firmly impressed with a belief that I shall find in him a true, an honourable, and even an affectionate friend, for life’,68 she had written in August 1788.
As with George Cambridge, she was wrong. Digby proposed to Miss Gunning during the West Country tour and they were married in January 1790. Digby, in the time-honoured way of the male in such circumstances, avoided Fanny like the plague thereafter, though he expected her to socialise with his wife. It was a bitter disappointment and another public humiliation for the Second Keeper of the Robes, now in her thirty-ninth year, who tried to put a brave face on the matter, but was writing privately to Susan in terms redolent of her anger at George Cambridge: ‘He has committed a breach of all moral ties, with every semblance of every virtue!’ […] ‘never has any Mask more completely done its office of Duping!’69
Life at Court after this second jilting became insupportable to Fanny, and she began to discuss with Susan the means by which she could resign her post on grounds of ill-health, plans she referred to as her ‘Visions’. She bravely broached the subject with her father when they met at the annual Handel Commemoration in May 1790, letting him know for the first time how miserable she had been in the Queen’s service. His remorseful response bound her to him more than ever before: ‘“I have long,”’ he cried, ‘“been uneasy, though I have not spoken; … but … if you wish to resign – my house, my purse, my arms, shall be open to receive you back!”’70
Having thus acquired, in her quaint but revealing phrase, ‘permission to rebel’, Fanny began to think that the end of her ordeal was in sight and dutifully exerted herself to make some last attempts at soliciting favours for her family through the Queen. James, who thought he could have command of a frigate simply for the asking, perhaps impressed Lord Chatham more with his hubris than his suitability; by the end of 1790 the war was over, and James never worked again. Charles’s case was more sensitive, but no more successful; he failed to win the headmastership of Charterhouse and was refused the mandate degree he needed to take Holy Orders. His father’s response to this humiliation makes a significant connection between writing and freedom from patronage: ‘You, my dear lad, have still one revenge in store, wch is to produce some literary work, wch with diligence & good conduct shall make your enemies ashamed’.71 The only fail-safe way to advance in life and wreak ‘revenge’ on those who kept you down was to create something entirely on your own.
Fanny prepared a statement about her wish to leave Court for the Queen, but lacked the nerve to hand it in. It seemed that the only people not to have noticed her condition were the Queen and Mrs Schwellenberg; elsewhere ‘there seemed about my little person a universal commotion’.72 The Warren Hastings trial, which she attended at least seven times that year, brought her into contact with a number of her friends, who were appalled at how haggard she was looking, and the effects of her ‘seclusion from the world’ had even attracted the attention of the press, who ‘dealt round comments and lamentations profusely’.73 Fanny was fading dramatically, displaying psychosomatically-enhanced symptoms of a cough, breathlessness, fever and weight-loss that were redolent of both consumption and a wasting disease, such as anorexia nervosa. Like Mrs Thrale with her desperate formula, ‘Death or Piozzi!’, Fanny had set up a dangerous bargain with herself: ‘resignation of place or of life was the only remaining alternative’.74
Mrs Thrale herself (now Mrs Piozzi) was back in England and enjoying the success of her new career as an author (she had published four books between 1785 and 1789, including her Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson LL.D, which led the field in Johnsoniana). She heard the rumours about Fanny’s sufferings, but was unconvinced by them: ‘my Notion always was that her Majesty confided in, & loved the little cunning Creature as I did: while She, to cover her real Consequence at Court, pretended disgust & weariness among her friends.’75 Mrs Piozzi was clearly much more embittered towards her than Fanny could have guessed: when they met by accident, at Norbury Park in the late 1780s and at St George’s Chapel, Windsor in 1790, the older woman was polite but distant. (The latter was the occasion when the Queen made Fanny cringe by asking, ‘Who was that painted foreigner?’) Mrs Piozzi could be as powerful an enemy as she had once been a friend, and her view of Fanny’s attachment to the Queen was distinctly uncharitable: ‘no one possesses more powers of pleasing than She does, no one can be more self-interested, & of course more willing to employ those Powers for her own, and her Family’s Benefit’.76
It took Fanny seven months to propose her resignation to the Queen, but the Queen was unconvinced of any necessity and simply let the matter rest. Fanny relapsed despairingly, taking hartshorn, opium and Dr Willis’s (unspecified) ‘violent’ medicines to relieve her debilitating symptoms: ‘so weak and faint I was become, that I was compelled to put my head out into the air, at all hours and in all weathers, from time to time, to recover the power of breathing, which seemed not seldom almost withdrawn.’77
It was during this dreadful year that Fanny returned to the composition of her tragedy Edwy and Elgiva, finding dismal solace in the plight of her murdered heroine. She did not harbour any ambitions for this ‘almost spontaneous’ work78 – in fact she wasn’t sure it was a ‘work’ at all – but she finished a first draft in August and went straight on to start another play in the same vein. By June 1791 she had three tragedies half-written and a fourth begun: ‘I could go on with nothing; I could only suggest and invent’, she wrote in her journal, indicating how restless and obsessive this spurt of composition actually was:
The power of composition has to me indeed proved a solace, a blessing! When incapable of all else, that, unsolicited, unthought of, has presented itself to my solitary leisure, and beguiled me of myself.79
Fanny Burney’s ‘Court plays’, which were not published until 1995, have little claim to literary or dramatic merit but have attracted critical attention on account of their vivid symbolism and the clues they offer to their author’s subconscious feelings. There is no evidence that at the time of writing Fanny intended them to be staged or printed; in their early drafts they could perhaps be better described as effusions than dramas, disparate fragments of blank verse that the author had organised into a familiar form. Like Crisp’s Virginia, these are plays that favour speech over action. The climax of Edwy and Elgiva, for example, is reported rather than seen on stage: ‘’Twas horrible! – the cries of Elgiva,/ Torn from her home and husband, rent the Heavens’, Sigebert says of the heroine’s abduction. ‘Who could have viewed unpitying her despair?’80 Certainly not the audience, from whom it is hidden. In the same play, there are no fewer than twenty-three scenes in the fifth act, all taking place in the same unspecified ‘forest’. Indeed, in the composition of these plays, Fanny seems to have forgotten everything she ever knew about dramatic structure and the writing of blank verse – consistently bad in each – and to have given herself over to her ‘fits’ of composition as she might to a drug. She made the analogy of possession clear in a diary entry for May 1791 that speaks of the works themselves as having the power of composition, as if she experienced them as incubi rather than as inspirations: ‘[they] seize me capriciously; but I never reprove them; I give the play into their own direction, & am sufficiently thankful, in this wearing waste of existence, for being so seized at all’.81
The tragic dramas are all set in the distant past and share very similar themes: civil strife, the constraint of women, filial duty and sacrificial marriage. Edwy and Elgiva and The Siege of Pevensey made use of historical subjects adapted from Hume’s History of England, the former tapping into the late-eighteenth-century nationalist vogue for the Anglo-Saxon period. Hubert de Vere (‘a pastoral tragedy’) and the fragmentary Elberta were Gothic romances which the author may have wished to dignify by setting in the thirteenth and eleventh centuries respectively. Each play features a heroine who quickly falls victim to the political and sexual power-struggles of the men around her, and each contains a malign authoritarian as agent provocateur and a weak or prevaricating ‘protector’ figure whose shortcomings expose the heroine to danger and, in all but the case of Adela in The Siege of Pevensey, death. The repeated themes of constraint, monasticism and forced marriage are fairly obviously metaphors for Court life and the impositions it laid on Fanny’s personal and creative liberty. Her passively suffering heroines face the same choice between death or submission that she had come to see as the stark reality of her own situation.
Margaret Anne Doody, in her exhaustive psychological interpretation of the tragedies,82 has found in them evidence of violent resentments towards George Cambridge, Stephen Digby and, most of all, Charles Burney, the ‘protector’ who had failed to protect or rescue, whose alterego de Mowbray in Hubert de Vere is his own daughter’s murderer. The question of ‘protection’ is an interesting one, since the dutifully self-sacrificial daughters in these plays all end up, in a reversal of natural law, protecting their fathers’ feelings, honour or lives (again, this is reminiscent of Crisp’s Virginia, the manuscript of which Fanny had inherited). In The Siege of Pevensey, Adela’s father is so sensitive to the violence a forced marriage between her and de Warenne would entail that she volunteers to enter a convent to save him from the temptation to commit suicide. Far from asking ‘permission to rebel’, the women in these tragedies accept their fate – which is to be badly protected, or not protected at all, by someone less capable or less responsible than themselves.
The language of the plays encourages psychoanalytical interpretations; at times it resembles confessional, or even ‘automatic’ writing. Here is Dunstan in Edwy and Elgiva in the scene following the plot’s (invisible) climax:
I feel petrified! – My King! – rash Youth,
Why would he thus provoke – What are these men?
They shrink – they know – or fear me – Hah! a Corpse
Perhaps ’tis Elgiva – yes ’tis ev’n so!
Her lifeless frame – that deed is surely done.83
And here Elgiva, in the draft of a sub-Shakespearean lament over her forced divorce from Edwy:
The Song of Joy let Treach’ry Sing
Vice is now to Mirth inclin’d,
Bring me Myrtle, Lawrels bring,
Bind their Brows, their Tresses bind.
Hark I hear of Death the knell; –
Hist! of Ghosts I hear the Yell
Murmuring in the Swelling Wind.84
The state of distraction which the author may be trying to convey in these characters’ speeches is out of her control; she is too distracted herself to write it. Doody thinks that the plays reveal ‘a truly suicidal streak’ in their author, immured in a Court that had come to resemble an asylum for the insane, and speculates that Burney may have really feared going mad herself. There is certainly an air of desperation about these pieces, an artistic letting-go, as if Fanny was daring herself to see what would happen. Her distressed and dying heroines are abandoned in a variety of graveyards, dense forests or wildernesses, physically or mentally wounded, waiting for ‘the doom of death’ with ‘swelling bosoms’ panting for ‘some finer, lighter, purer region’.85 They are also, more completely, ‘abandoned’ in their inflated language and nightmare visions. Fanny seems to have anticipated the worst excesses of the coming vogues for ‘Gothic’ and Romanticism.
Her misgivings about her tragedies were obvious from the start. ‘Believe me, my dear friends,’ she wrote to Susan and Mrs Locke only months after leaving Court, ‘in the present composed & happy state of my mind, I could never have suggested these Tales of Woe; – but having only to connect, combine, contract, & finish, I will not leave them undone.’86 It was perhaps an unfortunate instinct. Though her tragedies were never going to be viable commercially (unlike her comedies), Fanny seems to have valued them because they were written in extremis. In her later novels she adopted much the same style for the episodes of high drama, and it worked no better there, but it is clear that ‘spontaneous’ writing, uncontrolled and empty though it was, struck her as somehow truthful to strong feeling.
The Court plays may have performed a valuable function by letting Fanny dwell on the fantasy of suicidal sacrificial death without actually having to go through with it. Even in her worst period of physical debilitation, she displayed a strong instinct for self-preservation and surprising will-power. When the Queen offered her a holiday instead of retirement, she refused, incurring temporary displeasure of the sort she wouldn’t have dared weather before. Elsewhere, opinion was moving strongly in sympathy with the ailing Second Keeper. The subject had become prime gossip among the London intelligentsia, and was flamboyantly indulged by James Boswell when he turned up at Windsor one Sunday in October 1790 to beg for a look at Fanny’s correspondence from Dr Johnson for his forthcoming biography (which she refused). William Windham, who was marshalling members of The Club to petition Dr Burney on the subject, said that Fanny’s release from Court had become ‘the common cause of every one interested in the concerns of genius & literature’,87 a recognition of how highly regarded Miss Burney’s achievements really were in the outside world.
Of course, the agitations of Oppositionists like Windham were dangerously open to misinterpretation, but fortunately there was not time for the matter to become overtly political; Fanny’s resignation was gradually accepted by the Queen, and after many delays and setbacks she was released from duty on 7 July 1791, almost five years to the day since she had entered the castle with such fear and trembling. ‘My Heart was a little sad, in spite of its full contentment’, Fanny wrote to Susan when she arrived at Chelsea College, but she soon began to revive.
Her father had set up a desk for her in his study (now called the Grubbery), which he was prepared, for the first time ever, to share. With his great task of the History of Music completed (the third and fourth volumes came out together in 1789), some of the urgency had gone out of the Doctor’s work habits and he was happy to have a companion with whom to read, work and compare progress. There was no talk of Fanny becoming his amanuensis again – Sarah had inherited that function for a time, and the Doctor had paid help too when he needed it. But the apartment at Chelsea College was not very large, and a certain claustrophobia must have struck them all at the start of the new arrangement. Fanny and her half-sister Sarah – aged thirty-nine and nineteen respectively – had nothing in common except a desire for solitude in which to read and write; now they had to share a bedroom. What Mrs Burney thought of the unexpected readmission of her stepdaughter into her household is not recorded.
* It is a thousand pages long.
* Joyce Hemlow extrapolates from Susan’s remark that Dick was ‘involved in misdemeanours and difficulties’.36 Her further suggestion that the dissolute younger brother Lionel Tyrold in Camilla is based on Dick Burney is taken up by the editors of the Early Journal and Letters, who state as if fact that Dick ‘was exiled to India, probably because of libidinous conduct which may have led to resultant victimization by blackmailing and debts’.37 As the editor of Sarah’s letters, Lorna J. Clark, points out, there is no evidence to support this surmise, or the identification of Dick with Lionel Tyrold.38
† Presumably Dick witheld the information from home for some time: Susan Burney’s reaction to the news in her journal is dated June 1789.
* Dick Burney’s monument in the Mission Burial Ground, Park Street, Calcutta, says he ‘eminently exhibited the characteristics of an enlightened tutor and a spiritual guide’. Whatever his ‘transgressions’, they seem to have been overcome very early on. By 1790, his mother was gushingly thanking his friends Mr and Mrs Charles Grant for having ‘recovered my son’,44 and correspondence between Dick and his parents is mentioned at intervals on the family grapevine.