The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  Even by these formidable standards, Princess Elizabeth was an exceptionally prolific letter-writer, but, as she explained to Lord Harcourt, the volume of her correspondence demonstrated the strength of her feelings for him and his family. Nothing gave her so much pleasure as to see his handwriting on a note. ‘You may believe with what joy I seized my letter,’ she wrote to him in 1795, delighted ‘that you had not forgot one who is most thoroughly attached to you. This friendship, or attachment, call it what you will, began at ten years old and has increased with my years.’4

  Even the king, who rarely wrote an entirely personal letter to anyone outside his family, was an occasional contributor to the stream of correspondence that flowed between Windsor, Kew and Oxfordshire. The depth of his trust in the relationship was illustrated by his willingness to venture a most unlikely epistolary style. Twenty years before, Henry Fox had observed that ‘the king is not much given to joke’, and humour had not come much more easily to him in the intervening time. Nevertheless, confident of a sympathetic hearing from the Harcourts, George was prepared to try his hand at some mild and ponderous satire. Writing to Lord Harcourt in the guise of ‘Timothy Trenchard’, he posed as an antiquarian collector, offering the earl, who had a taste for ancient objects, ‘invaluable relics of antiquity left to me by such an acknowledged virtuoso as Mr Sebastian Periwinkle … to whom they had been bequeathed by Mr Peregrine Pilkington’. He hoped the pieces might ‘find a retreat in the magnificent museum I understand Your Lordship is about to erect’. A second letter followed, from ‘Your Lordship’s most obsequious, humble and devoted servant, Marmaduke Spooner’.5 The date, 1 April 1796, is a clue that perhaps George thought everyone was entitled to a little amusement on April Fools’ Day, even a king.

  For the princesses, the Harcourts, who had no children of their own, came almost to occupy the role of surrogate parents, Lady Harcourt in particular often casting herself as a doughty defender of their interests. Only Lady Charlotte Finch enjoyed a similar level of unqualified and absolute affection in their minds. But the beating heart of the relationship was unquestionably the bond between Lady Harcourt and the queen. They would be intimates for nearly forty years, with only Charlotte’s death putting an end to an attachment that other blows and misfortunes did nothing to erode. When they could not meet in person, they kept up a correspondence in which all the joys and miseries of their lives were reflected, rejoicing and consoling with one another, sharing news of pleasure and happiness alongside darker times of sickness, sadness and loss.

  With no one else, except her much-loved brother Charles in Mecklenburg, was Charlotte as frank and unguarded as she was with Lady Harcourt. In her, she found an intellect she respected, an aristocratic status which approached but did not threaten her own, and a disinterested, sustained affection which encouraged her to cast off the identity of queen and adopt the unfamiliar one of friend. ‘I should like to tell you something,’ Lady Harcourt once wrote to her, ‘but pray, never let the queen know it.’ ‘Oh no,’ replied Charlotte, ‘she can have no business with what passes between us in our private conversation.’6

  None of her other letters captures so completely the flavour of the queen’s life at this time, her enthusiastic devotion to self-improvement, her belittlement of her own ‘poor abilities’ and the easy intimacy of her shared interests with her husband. In a note of 1786, she thanked Lord Harcourt for a drawing he had sent her. She planned to copy it ‘in my own humble way’, although she had no hopes that it would turn out as well as his. ‘The king says it is the shabbiest way of drawing in the world,’ but she was not discouraged.7 Her correspondence also illuminates the ‘sportive wit’ that was such a distinctive element of Charlotte’s character when she was in good spirits, the ‘innocent archness’ that is so glaringly absent from the tone in which she wrote to her sons. In one letter, she describes at some length a visit she and the king made to Portland Island in Dorset, where the inhabitants had a rather free-and-easy attitude to matrimony. ‘They never marry till the intended wife is a mother, and there is hardly any instance of their forsaking them; but if the man forsakes her, it is no disgrace for another to marry the lady in question. I am told in some parts of Oxfordshire it is the same; will you allow that my dear Lady Harcourt? I think I hear Lord H say, “Oh, that is too bad.”’8 One scribbled note reflects Charlotte at her most playful and engaging: ‘Adieu, greatest haste for dinner is on the table. I am off to eat chicken to appear more beautiful when I see you next; but in case it does not, believe me, handsome as chicken can make me, or ugly as I am, yours.’9

  It was Charlotte who managed and oversaw the relationship between the two families. She was a tireless issuer of invitations, regularly summoning the Harcourts into the royal presence in a whimsical tone. ‘Odds bodikins, Lord Harcourt, the king orders me to say he is of the opinion your presence in Windsor would be very agreeable to him and to us all.’10 She also arranged the visits which the royals made to the Harcourts. As etiquette required, they invited themselves. ‘We propose storming your castle at Nuneham on the 18th of this month,’ wrote Charlotte in 1784. ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ she insisted, ‘for we are all good friends and well-wishers to the owners of the castle.’11

  The young princes and princesses adored Nuneham, and were delighted by the prospect of time spent agreeably away from home. When, in 1785, the king agreed to Lord Harcourt’s suggestion that they stay the night there, Princess Augusta was ‘so completely happy when I found we did not go back till the next day that my spirits rose mountains high in half a second’.12 She later wrote a long letter to Lady Harcourt, in an almost novelistic style, that captured some of the excitement she and her siblings felt at being allowed a rare change of scene. ‘“Dear Augustus,” said Ernest, “think how amazing good it is of Lord Harcourt; he has promised that I shall sleep alone. I have seen my room, it has a yellow damask bed … I suppose it is a great favour to let me have it. I fancy strangers in general are not allowed to sleep in it.” “Say what you please,” said Augustus, “Lord Harcourt has given me a much better room. I have a view out of the window; and what signifies a damask bed when one has not a fine view?” … Adolphus said, “I suppose none of you has seen my room? I have got a tent bed in it. I should have you dare speak against a tent bed. It puts me in mind already that when I am an officer, and then I am encamped against the enemy, I shall have one just like it” … And so,’ concluded Augusta, ‘we went on all day long; and I am sure we shall never hear the end of it, it was the most perfect thing ever known.’13

  Their parents enjoyed themselves just as much. Thanking Lady Harcourt for ‘the numberless civilities we received during our stay at Nuneham’, Charlotte wrote that ‘were I to say all I think upon that subject, my sincerity might perhaps be suspected, therefore I will in only a few words tell you that you did contrive to make us all feel happy, which’, she admitted, ‘is a thing but seldom attained’.14 Her words might stand as a judgement, not just on a single visit, but on their attachment to the Harcourts as a whole.

  This new confidence in venturing upon a friendship outside the family may have also reflected the growing sense of satisfaction the king and queen felt in their more settled domestic arrangements. The building programme which George had begun at Windsor in the late 1770s was now approaching the completion of its first phase. The Queen’s Lodge was finished, and in 1781 her daughters and their household moved into the Lower Lodge, designed to accommodate all the younger sisters until they were considered mature enough to join their mother. Mrs Cheveley, who nursed the dying Octavius with such devotion, was cheerfully enthusiastic about their new quarters: ‘Our house (you may say, how we apples swim) is charming – there is not a bad room in it.’ She particularly appreciated its minimalist modernity: ‘This house does not in the least resemble your old mansions, that have closets innumerable, and furniture that you cannot move for – there is perfect freedom in this respect, and nothing can obstruct your purpose but a few chairs and a very few tables.
’15

  Once fully established at Windsor, the king and queen asked the occasional, specially favoured guest to share what Charlotte called ‘their sweet retreat’. The Harcourts were regular invitees, and in 1785 they seized the opportunity to add another sympathetic presence to their small list of friends. Mrs Mary Delany – whom they had met at Bulstrode, where she had lived for many years at the invitation of her friend the Duchess of Portland – had often been asked to join royal entertainments, concerts and suppers, usually in the company of the duchess. Both George and Charlotte felt great affection for the dignified and scholarly Mrs Delany, and when the duchess died suddenly in 1785, they decided to absorb her into their own household.

  Charlotte gave her a small house in Windsor, a short walk away from the Queen’s and Lower Lodges, and a pension of £300 per year. Seeking to deflect any suggestion of charity, she wrote with gentle persuasion, urging the proud, elderly lady to accept it: ‘You may not possibly be aware that I am among the heirs of the duchess. She has left her well-beloved Delany to my charge and friendship; and I hope you will grant me the privilege of fulfilling this, the last part of her will, and settle in the house I have ordered and where I shall often be able to see you.’16 George and Charlotte furnished her new home down to the very smallest items, instructing her ‘to bring with her nothing but herself and her clothes, as they insisted on fixing up her habitation with everything themselves … even to sweetmeats, pickles, etc.’17 On the day Mrs Delany took possession, the queen visited her to establish the terms under which she hoped their relationship would be conducted. ‘She repeated in the strongest terms her wish, and the king’s, that I should be as easy as they could possible make me, that they waived all ceremony, and desired to come to me like friends!’

  They were as good as their word. In the space of a fortnight, reported Mrs Delany incredulously, ‘their Majesties have now drunk tea with me five times!’ Just as they had insisted they would be, their visits were ‘paid in the most private manner, like those of the most consoling and interested friends’.18 For the rest of her life, members of the royal family were rarely absent from her house, arriving without announcement or formality and eagerly entering into all her domestic pleasures. In return for allowing her royal patrons limitless access to her home, Mrs Delany was frequently invited to join them in theirs. More than any other friend – even more than the Harcourts – she was allowed into the intimate heartland of the family at its most relaxed and informal. ‘I have been several evenings at the Queen’s Lodge,’ she wrote in 1785, ‘with no other company but their own most lovely family. They sit around a large table, on which are books, work, pencils and paper. The queen has the goodness to make me sit down with her, and delights me with her conversation, which is informing elegant and pleasing beyond description; whilst the younger part of the family are drawing and working, etc., etc., the beautiful babe Princess Amelia bearing her part in the entertainment, sometimes in one of her sister’s laps, sometimes playing with the king on the carpet.’19

  These were scenes whose calm serenity owed something perhaps to the absence of George and Charlotte’s eldest son, who rarely, if ever, appeared in them. As soon as he had an establishment of his own in the early 1780s, he avoided Windsor as much as he could. Years later, his younger brother Ernest echoed his feelings, declaring bleakly that ‘nothing is so terrible in my eyes as a family party’.20 But if the contentment chronicled so lovingly by Mrs Delany had been achieved only by the exclusion of those family members most likely, at least in the jaundiced opinion of their father, to disrupt it, that did not make it any the less delightful to those who witnessed it first hand. Mrs Delany had nothing but praise for the life she saw played out so engagingly at Windsor. Her genuine and unremitting admiration for the king and queen’s attempts to create a private world based on rational pleasure was, however, to have an impact far beyond her own circle. It was to inform the writings of the woman whose portrait of that world, and of those who inhabited it, remains one of the most lively and influential pictures of George and Charlotte’s court.

  *

  ‘I was led to think of Miss Burney first by her books,’ the queen told Mrs Delany, ‘then by seeing her, then by hearing how much she was loved by her friends; but chiefly by her friendship for you.’21 Fanny Burney had met Mrs Delany in the wake of her career as a successful author. She had published her novel Evelina anonymously in 1778. Its tale of an orphan later revealed to be an heiress was told with wit and brio, and contained some lively satires of fashionable life. Dr Johnson thought it a better work than those of both Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, and his approval helped make it a bestseller. Once her identity was revealed, Fanny entered eagerly into bluestocking literary circles, where she met distinguished women including Elizabeth Montagu and Hannah More. Her second book, Cecilia, appeared in 1782, to equal acclaim. Like Evelina, it preserved beneath its surface gloss and polish a strongly moral message, contrasting the value of genuine feeling with the hollow fripperies of fashionable life, which no doubt commended it to Charlotte, who read it as soon as it was published.

  In 1785, Charlotte expressed to Mrs Delany a wish to meet the author in person. Fanny thought this news was ‘rather fidgeting intelligence’, but it was an event which she knew could not be infinitely postponed. She was a regular visitor to Mrs Delany’s Windsor house, and she knew it was likely she would eventually meet the queen there. For all her celebrity, Fanny was intensely shy – indeed, it was a quality she rather admired in herself. As some of her more critical friends observed, her somewhat ‘showy retreats’ from attention often attracted greater attention than more conventional behaviour might have done, and her attempts to avoid meeting the royal family illustrated her ability, whether conscious or not, to back into the limelight. She did all she could to avoid the encounter, on one occasion simply running away when she heard ‘the thunder at the door’ that signalled the king and queen’s arrival. Even the saintly Mrs Delany ‘was a little vexed’ at this, but Fanny’s elusiveness seems only to have whetted George and Charlotte’s appetite to meet her. Next time there was no escape, and Fanny was duly introduced to them.

  The king was kind to her, although he found her whispered answers hard to hear. He was undaunted by her hesitant manner, and when he and Charlotte met Fanny again, this time on the terrace at Windsor, George boldly leant in towards her bonnet to catch her hesitant words. For all her nervous apprehension, when she came to set down her account of the meeting, the writer in Fanny triumphed over the ingénue, and she captured exactly the distinctive staccato rhythms of the king’s speech as he interrogated her about the origins of Evelina:

  ‘But what – what? How was it?’

  ‘Sir,’ cried I, not well understanding him.

  ‘How came you? – how happened it? – What? What?’

  ‘I only wrote it, sir, for my own amusement – only in some idle hours.’

  ‘But your publishing? Your printing – how was that?’

  ‘That was only sir, because …’ The ‘what’ was repeated with so earnest a look that forced to say something, I stammeringly answered – ‘I thought, sir, it would look well in print!’22

  The queen’s questioning was more delicate than the king’s. Judging correctly that the best way to win Fanny’s heart was to praise the moral purpose of her books, Charlotte did much to calm and soothe the apprehensive novelist, who concluded after their encounter that she had found the queen ‘a most charming woman … her manners have an easy dignity, with a most engaging simplicity’.23

  Fanny met the queen several times after this, and seems not to have suspected that Charlotte’s interest in her went beyond appreciation for her literary skills. The queen was in fact quietly assessing Fanny’s suitability for a place in her household. She soon made up her mind, deciding that Fanny was exactly the kind of intelligent, bookish woman that she liked to have about her, a worthy successor to the much-missed Mary Hamilton. In the summer of 1786, Fanny was invited to
take up the place of Second Keeper of the Robes, which carried with it a salary of £200 a year as well an obligation to live full time at court.

  Fanny was horrified. For all her much-vaunted shyness, she enjoyed an active style of life that was neither retiring nor unrewarding. The Burneys came from solid, middle-class provincial stock, studded with clergymen and naval officers; there was also a strong musical tradition in the family which gave it a more expansive, intellectual, almost bohemian tone. Fanny’s father, Dr Charles Burney, began life as a teacher of music and in later life he became a well-regarded writer, critic and musicologist. As a young girl, Fanny had worked alongside her father as his assistant whilst he laboured to produce his life’s work, A History of Music. The family lived in Soho, not far from Leicester House, where the king had lived as Prince of Wales. There they moved with relish and enjoyment amongst cultural circles in which talent was always considered more important than social status or respectability. As Fanny later explained to the queen, ‘my acquaintance hitherto, I frankly told her, was not only very numerous, but very mixed, taking in … most stations in life’.24

  Actors, musicians and opera singers were regular visitors to the Burney home, as were artists, writers and literary lions. She knew Samuel Johnson and James Boswell (whose obvious brash ambition she did not admire), as well as Richard Sheridan and Edmund Burke. David Garrick was a great family friend. It was a cosmopolitan world, in which Italian opera performers and French philosophes were all welcome. When her sailor brother returned from a voyage to the southern oceans with Captain James Cook, he brought with him the Tahitian islander Omai, whose stately bearing and winning personality made him a much-sought-after guest at London parties; he too was a favoured regular at the Burney dinner table. Fanny was also a happy member of a lively circle of female friends and relations, making extended visits to their homes; she enjoyed domestic life, and was particularly devoted to her sisters and their children, taking deep and unaffected pleasure in their company.