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
9
Retrograde Motion
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
Fanny Burney Page 27
