The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  From the moment the offer of a place at court was made, she understood that the stimulating life she currently enjoyed was utterly incompatible with the demands of her potential new role. ‘The attendance was to be incessant – the confinement to court continual – I was scarce ever to be spared for a single visit from the palaces, not to receive anybody but with permission – what a life for me, who have friends so dear to me, and to whom friendship is the balm, the comfort, the very support of existence!’25 Her horror at the prospect was so apparent that Leonard Smelt, the court official who brought the news of the offer, was shocked by her unenthusiastic response: ‘I saw in his own face the utmost astonishment and disappointment at this reception of his embassy.’ He was ‘equally sorry and surprised; he expatiated warmly upon the sweetness of character of the royal family’, and asked Fanny to consider the honour done in preferring her ‘to the thousands of offered candidates of high rank and birth’ who were eagerly supplicating for places. He then played his trump card when he suggested that ‘in such a situation … you have the opportunity of serving your particular friends, especially your father – such as scarce any other could afford you’.26 Charles Burney had long hoped for royal recognition, and perhaps even an official post. He was enthusiastically in favour of the scheme, believing, as did Mr Smelt, that it promised great advancement, not just for Fanny, but for the whole Burney family. Fanny knew then that there was nothing to do but surrender to the inevitable. Only to her sister could she express the depth of her alarm at what awaited her. ‘I am married, my dear 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.’27

  She could call on only one resource that might make this unwanted new life tolerable. When the doors of the court closed behind her in July 1786, she turned her author’s eye on the world she now so reluctantly inhabited, capturing meticulously its habits, its tone, its preoccupations large and small, as well as the characters with whom she was now destined to spend all her waking hours. The five years she spent at court were very far from being the happiest of her life, but they did produce a literary work that has as much to say about friendship and happiness, about suffering and loss and the conflicting calls of duty and feeling, as any of her bestselling novels.

  The letters and journals Fanny wrote whilst she was a member of Charlotte’s household catch, better than any other account, the rhythms and requirements of court life: the exhausting journeys between Windsor, Kew and St James’s, which both Fanny and the queen undertook armed for the formality of the Drawing Room with their hair already dressed and their elaborate clothes wrapped in paper, to protect them from the dust of the roads; the order of the days, which began with chapel and ended with a concert (‘usually of Handel’), and which, for the queen, were interrupted by laborious changes of outfit to suit the occasion. In theory, the position to which Fanny had been appointed was little more than that of a dresser – she was not aristocratic enough to be given a more high-status role – and although the queen clearly wanted her for her company rather than her skills, her job required her to assist daily at the long and complicated process of the royal toilette. It was Mrs Thielky, a German woman, who did most of the actual work. ‘She hands the things to me, and I put them on,’ wrote Fanny in the earliest days of her attendance. ‘’Tis fortunate for me I have not the handing of them! I should never know which to take first, embarrassed as I am, and should run a prodigious risk of giving the gown before the hoop, and the fan before the neck-kerchief.’28

  Both Charlotte and Fanny professed to find the business of dress tedious and time-consuming in equal measure. The queen, Fanny observed, ‘equips herself for the Drawing Room with all the attention in her power … and is sensibly conscious that her high station makes her attire a matter of public business’. But Charlotte paid little attention to its details, reading the newspapers whilst her hair was being powdered, and ‘never refusing herself the satisfaction of expressing her contentment to put on a quiet undress’.29 She was particularly devoted to the greatcoat, an item of clothing which was not a coat at all, but an informal dress that buttoned down the front, and about which Fanny was persuaded by Charlotte to compose a very bad poem, hymning its comfortable virtues. Fanny was more direct than the queen in her dislike of ‘my toilette – that eternal business – never ending and never profiting! I think to leave the second syllable out for the future.’30

  The boredom of court life is a constant theme that runs throughout Fanny Burney’s diaries. The requirements of her post, as she describes them, do not sound particularly onerous in themselves – a few hours in the morning, most of the afternoon free, back in waiting again in the evening, with a requirement to be present at the end of the day to undress the queen before bed, a process which took about half an hour to complete – but the days were long. Fanny rose at six, and Charlotte rarely retired before eleven or twelve o’clock at night. Fanny told her sister she was exhausted, falling asleep ‘the moment I have put out my candle and laid down my head’.31 The mental enervation she suffered was, however, far more distressing to her. ‘I have a place of nothing really to do but attend.’ Her days contained very little to stimulate or surprise. One of the tasks she was charged with was to prepare – or ‘cook’ – the queen’s snuff. ‘It is a very fine scented and mild snuff, but it is required to be moistened from time to time, to revive its smell.’ Fanny was pleased to be told by the Princess Royal that she had managed it well – ‘Mama says the snuff is extremely well mixed; and she has sent another box to be filled’ – but the comparison with the life she had given up must have been particularly poignant at such moments.32

  Even more uncongenial to her was the requirement to spend her free hours with people not of her choosing. Dinner was served each day at five, and it was made clear to Fanny that she was expected, without exception, to take that meal with Mrs Schwellenberg, the queen’s favourite. By the time Fanny met her, she was an old woman in poor health with a bad temper and a high expectation of having all her wishes obeyed. She quickly reduced Fanny to a state of cowed, mute victimhood, bullying her and belittling her in company. ‘In her presence,’ Fanny wrote, ‘little i as am one annihilated.’33

  It may have been exactly such shrinking self-abnegation that Mrs Schwellenberg found so exasperating, and which provoked her to bait and taunt Fanny so relentlessly, although stronger personalities than hers were rebuffed by the force of her selfishness. On one memorable occasion, in a carriage crowded with courtiers, Mrs Schwellenberg insisted on having the window open, although dust was blowing into Fanny’s eyes. Not even the forceful intercession of Mr Smelt could persuade Fanny’s persecutor to draw up the window, and she sat suffering all the way to London. However, as writers will, Fanny had her revenge, crafting so successful a portrait of Juliana Schwellenberg as a comic grotesque that it overshadowed every other description of her, and became the defining picture of who she was. Fanny portrays her as an eccentric, insensitive bore, her German accent emphasising her indifference to the finer feelings of those in her company, a woman of strange tastes and ridiculous foibles. Mrs Schwellenberg kept a number of frogs as pets in a box – perhaps a sign of her own loneliness and boredom – which, as Fanny reported, she presented guilelessly to the inspection of the king’s equerries, blind to the suave irony with which they greeted her unlikely passion. ‘“I can make them croak when I will … When I only go to my snuffbox, knock, knock, they croak all what I want.” “Very pretty indeed,” exclaimed Colonel Goldsworthy.’34

  For Fanny, it was the company of the equerries, of whom Colonel Goldsworthy was the most senior member, which made the empty hours of confinement in Mrs Schwellenberg’s parlour just about tolerable. These male attendants, usually military men, joined her at the tea table every day, and their bantering liveliness brought some much-needed cheerfulness and colour into her life. Colonel Goldsworthy was the brother of Miss Martha Golds
worthy, the much-tried sub-governess of the princesses’ household. His loyalty and attachment to the royal family was, Fanny thought, equalled only by his laconic accounts of the misery he liked to pretend he endured in serving them. He was a favourite of the king’s, which ensured he was always included on the punishing daily rides George enjoyed in the countryside around Windsor. The king’s indifference to the weather, combined with the austerity of his tastes, made them rather challenging experiences. As the colonel explained to Fanny, rainy days were particularly unrewarding. ‘“Here Goldsworthy,” cries His Majesty; so up I comes to him, bowing profoundly, and my hair dripping down to my shoes … “Here, Goldsworthy, I say,” he cries, “will you have a little barley water?” Barley water in such a plight as that! Barley water! I never heard of such a thing in my life! Barley water after a hard day’s hunting!’35

  For all the pleasure Fanny took in delineating their characters, both Mrs Schwellenberg and the equerries were only supporting actors in the unfolding drama of court life. The central character, on whom so much of Fanny’s concentration focussed, was, without doubt, the queen. The two women, as they may perhaps have recognised, had much in common. Both were small and slender, and neither was regarded as conventionally good-looking. They were quite close in age, Charlotte being only eight years older than Fanny, although the queen’s regal title, dignified air and status as wife and mother made her seem much more mature than the unmarried, acutely self-conscious novelist.

  At their first encounter, Fanny had been struck first by the queen’s accent, which she found ‘a little foreign, and very prettily so’, and then by her manners, which she thought had ‘all the fine high breeding, which the mind, not the station gives’.36 As she grew to know her better, it was the breadth and penetration of Charlotte’s intellect which formed the basis of the admiration Fanny felt for her, and which she never ceased to respect. She had known the queen was learned, but had not expected her to be quite so acute. ‘For the excellency of her mind, I was fully prepared,’ Fanny wrote shortly after her arrival at court, ‘but the depth and soundness of her understanding surprised me.’ She had hoped to find ‘good sense’ in the queen, but was unprepared for the power of her curiosity about aspects of the world from which her royal role would always exclude her. Charlotte had applied her intelligence to fill in the gaps left by the secluded nature of her life, and Fanny paid unqualified tribute to what she had achieved. ‘In the course of this month, I spent much time quite alone with her, and never once quitted her presence without fresh admiration of her talents.’37

  A scholarly woman herself, Fanny recognised a like-minded spirit in the queen, and it is in her depiction of Charlotte as literary enthusiast that she comes most alive. ‘The queen, when in my room, looked over my books,’ wrote Fanny, ‘a thing pretty briefly done as I have scarce any of my own, but a few dictionaries and such works as have been given by their authors … I believe she was a little disappointed, for I could see by her manner of turning them over that she expected to discover my own choice and taste in the little collection I possessed.’38 The queen loved to discuss her literary preferences, offering her opinions with a freedom she rarely ventured elsewhere. She was surprised to hear that Fanny had not read Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, although it was not a book Charlotte could recommend. For her, its equivocal moral message – it was alleged by its critics to sanction suicide – negated all the undoubted beauties of its style, concluding: ‘It is done by a bad man for revenge.’39

  Alongside her avid consumption of books, the queen also enjoyed literary gossip, asking the well-informed Fanny if it was true that ‘Boswell is going to publish a life of your friend Dr Johnson’, or if a character she had noticed in the Observer was based on the bluestocking Mrs Montagu.40 Fanny, who came to believe that the queen’s real intention in employing her was to have her act as her informal ‘English Reader’, was often asked to assess books and advise on their suitability. She had no hesitation in blacklisting Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother, which the queen had borrowed from Lord Harcourt. Fanny was appalled to discover that the plot revolved around incest between mother and son. ‘Dreadful was the whole! Truly dreadful! A story of so much horror, from atrocious and voluntary guilt never did I hear!’ She would never be able to read Walpole’s books in the same way again, and was only thankful she had prevented the queen undergoing the same ordeal.41

  In their shared love of literature, grounded in respect for books and their authors, Fanny understood that her status was equal, if not superior, to Charlotte’s. Indeed, she had access to knowledge and experiences which the queen could never enjoy. As a result, there were moments when Charlotte deferred to her, acknowledging her primacy in a world where she could never be more than a distant spectator. This was not the case in other aspects of their relationship, and in these a sense of unease and discomfort on Fanny’s part is much more apparent. She hated the element of ‘service’ that was inseparable from her role, and much resented its outward manifestations. More than anything, she detested being summoned to the queen by a bell. ‘A bell! It seemed so mortifying a mark of servitude. I always felt myself blush, though alone, with conscious shame at my degradation.’42

  Life at court often seemed to her a series of small humiliations, all of which combined to infantilise her and reduce her freedom of action. On the first occasion when she was obliged to ask the queen for permission to visit a friend, she found it ‘inexpressibly awkward’. A little later, when Mme de Genlis, whose reputation was now so tarnished, had expressed a wish to open a correspondence with her, Fanny felt obliged to seek the queen’s advice on what to do. Charlotte, assuring her that she had been right to speak to her, advised her not to write. Fanny had no real quarrel with the queen’s judgement, but was inwardly furious at the suspension of her right to decide for herself. ‘I got behind her chair,’ she told her sister, ‘that she might not see a distress she might wonder at; for it was not this application itself that affected me, it was the novelty of my own situation, the new power I was calling forth over my proceedings and the all that I was changing from – relinquishing – of the past – and hazarding for the future.’43

  Fanny was particularly angry with her own collusion in the abdication of her independence. She understood the value of what she was surrendering, yet she seemed compelled to ask Charlotte to take more and more control over every aspect of her life. She desperately sought the queen’s approval, even at the cost of losing the small freedoms that were left to her. She was eventually driven to ask Charlotte for absolute clarity on the subject of who was permitted to visit her at court, although she must have known what the answer would be. Shortly afterwards she was called on by Mr Smelt, with a list of restrictions and directives: ‘That I should see nobody at all, but by appointment … That I should see no fresh person whatsoever, without an immediate permission from the queen … That I should never go out without an immediate application to her,’ and, most significantly, that with the exception of her father and brothers, ‘to have no men – none!’44

  Fanny’s response to this progressive extension of control rarely extended to direct criticism of the queen. Only once did she acknowledge real anger. Thinking she was not needed, she arrived late and flustered for her attendance upon Charlotte, who was not amused. ‘The queen, a little dryly said, “Where have you been, Miss Burney?”’ When informed she had been walking in Richmond Gardens with Mr Smelt, Charlotte looked even more displeased. Despite herself, Fanny bridled. ‘What republican feelings were rising in my breast,’ she admitted, ‘until she softened them down again’ by asking her in a more normal voice ‘to look at Lady Frances Howard’s gown and see if it was not pretty’. Soon she was ‘all smiles and sweetness’ again.45

  In general, it was these smoothly benign qualities, the cheerful graciousness of the queen, that Fanny preferred to emphasise. ‘O sweet queen!’ she once declared, in an epiphany of feeling. Throughout Fanny’s journals, Charlotte is repeatedly prais
ed for her gentle concern, her unaffected kindness, but, above all, for the unalloyed ‘sweetness’ of her character. She is a ‘sweet woman’, ‘unremittingly sweet and gracious’, who ‘converses with the sweetest grace imaginable’. This was not simple self-deception on Fanny’s part; Charlotte was indeed capable of very winning behaviour. Like her eldest son, the queen could be extremely charming, understanding exactly what would please and exerting herself to win over susceptible hearts and minds. When she presented Fanny with a bunch ‘of the most beautiful double violets I ever saw’, she knew it was the kind of simple, personal gesture that would delight her, as indeed it did. Fanny declared that she valued the bouquet far more than an earlier present of an expensive gown, which had been delivered through the tactless hands of Mrs Schwellenberg, and which, with its humiliating suggestion of poverty, had wounded Fanny’s pride.46 When left to herself, Charlotte handled these matters much better.

  Charm and sweetness had their place in the queen’s character, but they were only one aspect of a much tougher, more complicated personality. Fanny, who lived with her in such close proximity for so many years, must have known this, and she did not lack the literary skill to create a more rounded identity for the queen. Something of a believable Charlotte occasionally bursts through her descriptions; the general image, however, is calm, rational and beneficent – a vision of female royalty very close to the model at the heart of the king’s family project, but somehow not entirely convincing as a depiction of a real woman. This was a portrait from which the sharper edges had been purposefully and skilfully softened. In doing so, Fanny may have been motivated by discretion; she considered herself bound by a bond of trust not to reveal aspects of royal life which would have been painful to the family; the good relationship she enjoyed with Charlotte and her daughters long after she left her employment at court is testimony to the rigour with which she observed that rule. But there may also have been less conscious motives involved. Perhaps the shame of her subservient position – ‘I have always and uniformly had a horror of a life of attendance and dependence’ – did not seem as difficult to bear if the submission was made to a person of exceptional moral worth.47 It was easier to serve an idealised paragon than a woman with the human mix of good and indifferent qualities that make for a flawed but ultimately more credible character.