Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  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 needlewor
k, 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 propo
sed 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.