[49] Charlotte Burney in Early Diary, 1889, ii. 307. Lord Macaulay (Edinburgh Review, lxxvi. 540) had been told that the publishers gave two thousand pounds. Probably — as Mrs. Ellis does not fail to suggest — there was some confusion on the part of Macaulay’s informant between pounds paid and copies printed.
[50] Book iv. ch. 2.
[51] Diary and Letters, 1892, i. 454.
[52] The verses from which these quotations are taken appeared in the Morning Herald for 12 March, 1782. Long attributed to Sir W. W. Pepys, they are now given to Dr. Burney. But, as regards his daughter, they only express a general feeling.
[53] Memoirs of Dr. Burney, 1832, ii. 323.
[54] Autobiography, etc. of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale), 1861 (2nd ed.), i. 147 et seq.
[55] This was the bitterness of the sick bed; and it is wholly irreconcilable with the regard expressed in Johnson’s last communication to Mrs. Piozzi and his gratitude “for that kindness which soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched.” Luckily for her, he did not burn all her letters, for her not-undignified answer to his first rough remonstrance was found by Miss Hawkins amongst his papers, and returned to its writer. As already stated, it is printed by Hayward (Autobiography, etc., 1861 (2nd ed.), i. 240-1, No. 4).
[56] Other people think so still. Mr. Bryce (Studies in Contemporary Biography, 1903, i. 127), speaks of Briggs and Miss Larolles as “so exaggerated, as to approach the grotesque.” Nevertheless, as is often the case, Briggs has been more satisfactorily identified with a living model than any other of Miss Burney’s characters. In Mrs. Ellis’s “Preface” and Notes to Cecilia, she shows conclusively that, designedly or undesignedly, Briggs reproduces many of the traits of a personage already mentioned in these pages, Nollekens the sculptor. (See ante, , and J. T. Smith’s Nollekens and his Times, 2 vols. 1828.)
[57] 6th December, 1785.
CHAPTER VI. THE QUEEN’S DRESSER
On the 6th of July, 1786, the Public Advertiser announced that— “Miss Burney, daughter of Dr. Burney, is appointed Dresser to the Queen, in the room of Mrs. Hoggadore, gone to Germany.” The last three words were premature, for further notifications, with much pleasing and ingenious variation of Mrs. Haggerdorn’s name, made it clear that the lady in question only took leave of the Queen on the 13th, and retired to her native Mecklenburg on the 17th. She is described in the public print aforesaid as Her Majesty’s “confidential companion and dresser”; but in the Court Register she figures as one of two “Keepers of Robes,” the Senior Keeper being a Mrs. Schwellenberg (or Schwellenbergen), who, with Mrs. Haggerdorn, had accompanied the Queen from Germany five and twenty years earlier. To Mrs. Haggerdorn’s post, with some modification of duties, Miss Burney now succeeded, entering upon her office on the 17th July. As — for lack of repairs — Windsor Castle had been for some years uninhabitable, the Royal Family were at this time domiciled in two temporary buildings, described indifferently by topographers as “mansions” and “barracks.” These had been built for the King by Sir William Chambers. The larger, the Upper or Queen’s Lodge,[58] so called from its occupying the site of a former Queen Anne’s Lodge, was appropriated to Queen Charlotte, King George and the two elder Princesses — the Princess Royal and the Princess Augusta. It stood to the south east of the Castle, almost facing the South Terrace. Behind it was a large walled garden, where Herschel exhibited newly discovered comets to the Court; and at the end of this garden was the second or Lower Lodge, allotted to the younger branches of the Royal Family. Both these structures were of stuccoed red brick, with embattled copings. They were draughty and cold in winter. Miss Burney’s apartments, a bed-room and a large drawing-room, were on the ground-floor in the Upper Lodge. The drawing-room looked on the Round Tower and the Terrace; and was probably at the eastern corner, as she speaks of its opening at the farther side, from the windows, to the Little Park, which lay to the north and east of the Castle. The bed-room (which was entered from the sitting-room) looked into the garden. Immediately above her were the rooms of her colleague, Mrs. Schwellenberg. Fanny describes her quarters as “airy, pleasant, clean and healthy,” “delightfully independent of all the rest of the house,” and as containing “everything I can desire for my convenience and comfort.” Mrs. Delany was not fifty yards away; and she could readily obtain access to the South Terrace by a special flight of steps. At Kew, to which Their Majesties frequently migrated, she had also her special accommodation, rather contracted, after the fashion of the place, but “tidy and comfortable enough”; and at St. James’s Palace she occupied rooms, one of which looked over the Park. From other indications, it appears that she had her special man-servant; and, in common with Mrs. Schwellenberg, the use of a carriage. Her salary was £200 a year.
After a week, she began to realise her position and to draw up “a concise abstract of the general method of passing the day.” Concise though it be, it is too detailed to be reproduced entire, but must be further summarised as follows: — She rose at six, awaiting her first summons, which generally came at half-past seven, after the Queen’s hair had been dressed by Mrs. Thielky, her wardrobe-woman. Then, with Mrs. Thielky’s aid, she dresses the Queen, Mrs. Thielky’s office being to hand Fanny the things as they are required, — a fortunate detail, since, as she says, she might run “a prodigious risk of giving the gown before the hoop, or the fan before the neckerchief.” By eight the dressing is ended, and the Queen, with the King and Princesses, proceeds to the King’s Chapel to prayers, while Fanny goes to breakfast, dawdling meanwhile over a book — for the moment, Gilpin’s Observations on the Lake District, which Mrs. Delany has lent her. At nine she meditates upon her next immediate business, which generally resolves itself into questions of costume. This done, she is generally her own mistress until a quarter to twelve, occupying the time, if it be not absorbed by the aforesaid questions of costume, in writing or walking. At a quarter before one the Queen usually dresses for the day, when Mrs. Schwellenberg, as well as the “inferior priestesses,” is present. The Queen is powdered by her hairdresser, during which time she reads the newspaper. “When she observes that I have run to her but half dressed, she constantly gives me leave to return and finish as soon as she is seated. If she is grave, and reads steadily on, she dismisses me, whether I am dressed or not; but at all times she never forgets to send me away while she is powdering, with a consideration not to spoil my clothes, that one would not expect belonged to her high station. Neither does she ever detain me without making a point of reading some little paragraph aloud.”
After a short time Fanny is again summoned, and her further attendance, transferred to the state dressing-room (“if any room in this private mansion can have the epithet of state”), lasts until about three, after which she sees no more of the Queen until bed-time. At five, dinner en tête-à-tête with Mrs. Schwellenberg follows in the eating-room, after which coffee in that lady’s apartment takes until eight. At eight, descent once more to the eating-room, when the Equerry in Waiting, together with any friend invited by the King or Queen, arrives for tea, which takes till nine. “From that time,” — continues Fanny— “if Mrs. Schwellenberg is alone, I never quit her for a minute till I come to my little supper at near eleven. Between eleven and twelve my last summons usually takes place, earlier and later occasionally. Twenty minutes is the customary time then spent with the Queen: half an hour, I believe, is seldom exceeded. I then come back and after doing whatever I can to forward my dress for the next morning, I go to bed — and to sleep, too, believe me: the early rising, and a long day’s attention to new affairs and occupations, cause a fatigue so bodily, that nothing mental stands against it, and to sleep I fall the moment I have put out my candle and laid down my head.” To these details, it is only necessary to add that the summonses in question were made by a bell (which seems at first to have given Fanny a good deal of annoyance); and that it was also a part of her duties to mix the Queen’s snuff, — a task which she is recorded to have performed extremely well.
&
nbsp; From the above account, it may be gathered that attendance on Queen Charlotte was by no means the most onerous of Miss Burney’s functions. Occupying chiefly the middle of the day, it could only have been on Wednesdays and Saturdays (when there were special duties) that it extended to more than four hours, besides which Her Majesty seems to have been laudably solicitous, at all times, to spare her new and very untried attendant. But in Fanny’s carte du jour there is decidedly an “intolerable deal” of Schwellenberg. Six mortal hours of daily intercourse with this estimable lady, in addition to collaborating with her in what Fanny calls “the irksome and quick-returning labours” of the royal toilette, must have been a cruel penance, only made bearable by Mrs. Schwellenberg’s frequent absences on sick leave. Had Mrs. Schwellenberg been a Mrs. Delany, it would not have mattered so much. But she was simply a peevish old person of uncertain temper and impaired health, swaddled in the buckram of backstairs etiquette, captious, arrogant, ignorant, and accustomed — like Mrs. Slipslop — to console herself for her servility to her betters by her rudeness to those beneath her. She was blindly devoted to the Royal Family; but of taste and education she had nothing. Novels and romances she professed to regard as “what you call stuff”;[59] and the only book she was known to favour was Josephus, which was “quoted to solve all difficulties.” Her chief enthusiasm was for a pair of pet frogs which croaked when she tapped her snuff-box. “When I only go so . . . knock, knock, knock, they croak all what I please,” she would cry in an ecstasy; and she never wearied of dilating upon their “endearing little qualities” and their healthy appetite for the live flies caught for them by M. de Luc. Although she had been a quarter of a century in England, she still spoke a broken jargon, irresistible to the mimic. She was without conversational gifts, yet she could not endure a moment’s silence; she was without resources or power of attraction, yet she was furious at the least suspicion of neglect. Moreover, she seems to have lived in perpetual apprehension of obscure impending spasms, which could only be dissipated by cards. And Fanny hated cards. In moments of irritation, the old lady was capable of the meanest petty tyrannies; in her hours of ease, her amiability to her “good Miss Bernar” was as profuse as it was unpalatable. Several of her objectionable acts are narrated in the Diary; but it is needless to recall them; and the situation was obviously complicated by a perhaps intelligible jealousy on the part of the elder woman. Years afterwards, when the Diary was first published, the Duke of Sussex thought that its writer was “rather hard on poor old Schwellenberg”; and it is not impossible that Miss Burney may have somewhat heightened her delineation of a character which afforded so many inviting aspects of attack. Yet, though “Cerbera” or “La Présidente” — as Fanny calls her — may not have been as black as she is painted, it would be hopeless to attempt to decorate her with wings; and there can be little doubt that the happiest hours of the Junior Keeper were those when her untuneable colleague was safely laid up in London or Weymouth with the gout.
Fortunately for Miss Burney all her associates were not of the Schwellenberg type. Miss Planta, English teacher to the two elder Princesses; Miss Goldsworthy (familiarly “Goully”), the sub-governess; Mme. la Fite, who read French to the Queen; and Mme. de Luc, the wife of the fly-catcher, were all amiable enough. And several of the successive Equerries in Waiting, if not actually qualified to regale Mrs. Haggerdorn’s successor with that “celestial colloquy sublime,” to which Lord Macaulay makes reference, were at least English gentlemen, with pleasant idiosyncrasies of their own, not wholly unworthy of study. There was Miss Goldsworthy’s brother, Colonel Philip Goldsworthy, a wag in his way, who relates how the King ineffectually endeavoured to make him carouse on barley water after a hard day’s hunting; and who gave a dismally picturesque account of winter service in the ill-constructed Queen’s Lodge, where there must have been as many distinct and several draughts as there are smells in the City of Cologne. There is the “Colonel Welbred” of the record, — Colonel Fulke Greville, — quiet, polite and undemonstrative; there is Colonel Manners, a good-humoured, careless rattle, who says whatever comes into his head, and thinks he might manage to sing the 104th Psalm if he could only keep from running into “God Save the King”; there is the “Jessamy Bride’s” handsome husband, Colonel Gwyn; there is Major Price; there is the Queen’s Vice Chamberlain, the Hon. Stephen Digby (“Colonel Fairly”), grave, scrupulous, diffident, gentle, sentimental, and “assiduously attentive in his manners.” He is at present married to Lord Ilchester’s daughter, by whom he has four children; but is soon to be a widower. Lastly, absorbing many pages of the record, is “Mr. Turbulent,” otherwise the Rev. Charles de Guiffardière or Giffardier, the Queen’s French reader, a farceur of the first order, who, apparently to indemnify himself for the penitential monotony of his past relations with Mrs. Haggerdorn, — a molluscous personage whom he contemptuously styles “the Oyster,” — indulges Miss Burney with the most fantastic disquisitions, flights of rodomontade and mock adoration. Macaulay roundly writes this gentleman down “half witted,” which is too sweeping; while the charitable Croker opines that he was laughing at Fanny. Miss Burney’s own later verdict upon “Mr. Turbulent” is, that he was “here and there a little eccentric, but, in the main, merely good-humoured and high-spirited.”[60]
In thus bringing some of the personages of the Diary before the reader, it has naturally been necessary to anticipate. The narrative of Miss Burney’s life at Court is excessively minute; and the chronicle, interesting as it may be in its place, does not always concern what is the prime object of this volume, — the story of her life. One of the first things, for instance, which she has to set down — indeed it happened before she had been three weeks in office — is mad Peg Nicholson’s attempt on the King’s life, an event which, of course, belongs to history. But Miss Burney’s pages add to the story some of those vivid minor details which the daughter of Mnemosyne forgets. She shows us the admirable composure of King George amid his terrified and tearful household; she shows him cheerfully insisting on the usual terrace walk with a single equerry, — on the usual evening concert. But “nothing was listened to,” — says Miss Burney of this latter,— “scarce a word was spoken; the Princesses wept continually; the Queen, still more deeply struck, could only, from time to time, hold out her hand to the King, and say ‘I have you yet.’” To this we may oppose another and more smiling passage. A few days later came the birthday of the little Princess Amelia; and Fanny’s account gives a good idea of one of the popular “terracings” above referred to. “It was really a mighty pretty procession,” she says. “The little Princess, just turned of three years old, in a robe-coat covered with fine muslin, a dressed close cap, white gloves, and a fan, walked on alone and first, highly delighted in the parade, and turning from side to side to see everybody as she passed: for all the terracers stand up against the walls to make a clear passage for the Royal Family, the moment they come in sight.” Then followed the pleased King and Queen with the remainder of the Princesses, — the Princess Royal, the Princesses Augusta, Elizabeth, Mary, Sophia, and their attendants; then, at a little distance, Major Price, the Equerry in Waiting, bringing up the rear to keep off the crowd.
Miss Burney was on the terrace with Mrs. Delany, who had been carried in her chair to the foot of the steps. At sight of Fanny’s companion, “the King instantly stopped to speak to her. The Queen, of course, and the little Princess, and all the rest, stood still, in their ranks. They talked a good while with the sweet old lady, during which time the King once or twice addressed himself to me. I caught the Queen’s eye, and saw in it a little surprise, but by no means any displeasure to see me of the party. The little Princess went up to Mrs. Delany, of whom she is very fond, and behaved like a little angel to her: she then, with a look of enquiry and recollection, slowly, of her own accord, came behind Mrs. Delany to look at me. ‘I am afraid,’ said I, in a whisper, and stooping down, ‘your Royal Highness does not remember me?’ What think you was her answer? An arch litt
le smile, and a nearer approach, with her lips pouted out to kiss me. I could not resist so innocent an invitation; but the moment I had accepted it I was half afraid it might seem, in so public a place, an improper liberty; however, there was no help for it. She then took my fan, and having looked at it on both sides, gravely returned it to me, saying, ‘O, a brown fan!’ The King and Queen then bid her curtsey to Mrs. Delany, which she did most gracefully, and they all moved on; each of the Princesses speaking to Mrs. Delany as they passed, and condescending to curtsey to her companion.”
Complete Works of Frances Burney Page 706
