The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  Then, against all expectations, the king suddenly changed his mind. In November 1788, Royal and Augusta were driving in a carriage, taking the air with their father, when he made an announcement that startled them with both its implications and its candour. ‘He expressed his concern that he had not secured proper matches for them, but alleged as reason the pain the idea of parting from them always gave him.’ Now, he insisted, everything would be different: he would travel to Hanover the following spring, ‘and make his court there as gay as possible to draw all the young princes of Germany to it. He told the Princess Royal in particular that if it was not a misalliance, he would consent to her marrying any one of them who was likely to make her happy; for the happiness of his daughters was of more consequence to him than the extent of their husband’s dominions.’

  It was everything the sisters must have hoped to hear for many years; but they could not bring themselves to exult in their good fortune. The king, usually so healthy, had been ill throughout the summer, his actions and speech becoming unpredictable and erratic. Although ‘he behaved to them in the kindest manner’ as George delivered his plan, his voice was hoarse, he was extremely agitated, and ‘he spoke with a degree of eagerness and rapidity that was distressing to the princesses’.121 As they travelled back in their carriage, it was plain to both of them that he was a very sick man.

  CHAPTER 11

  An Intellectual Malady

  LIKE LORD HERVEY BEFORE HER, Fanny Burney thought the royal family had little true understanding of what it was like to be ill. ‘The fatigues of a court attendance are so little understood by them,’ she confided to her journal in 1788, ‘that persons known to be able to quit their rooms and their bed are instantly concluded to be qualified for all the duties of office.’1 Her own frequent indispositions were, she thought, greeted with a wounding lack of sympathy by those around her – especially the queen. Charlotte did indeed find the many ailments that beset the female members of her household frustrating. Determinedly healthy herself, she found their continual parade of fevers, headaches and ‘lowness of spirits’ extremely trying. Fanny, who took her health very seriously, was most offended at any implication of self-indulgence she sensed in the queen’s remarks. ‘Illness here … has been so unknown, that it is commonly supposed it must be wilful and therefore meets little notice till accompanied by danger or incapacity of duty,’ she wrote tartly, before adding her own explanation for behaviour that so contradicted her usual vision of the natural condescension of her employers. ‘This is by no means from hardness of heart – far otherwise – there is no hardness of heart in any one of them; but it is prejudice and want of personal experience.’2

  Like the queen, George was rarely unwell. He had quickly recovered from a bout of chickenpox in 1761. Four years later, he had been ill with chest pains and a recurring fever which, for a few months, refused to respond to treatment. Tuberculosis was suspected, and his condition had been sufficiently threatening to trigger plans for a regency if he did not rally. Since his recovery he had been as healthy as it was possible for a middle-aged man to be in the eighteenth century. Now aged fifty, he attributed his wellbeing to his ascetic lifestyle, telling an observer who commented on his careful diet that he simply preferred eating and drinking sparingly to ‘growing feeble and diseased’ through overindulgence.

  His sudden sickness in the summer of 1788, therefore, took everyone – including the king – by surprise. On 12 June, George told his first minister, William Pitt, that he was too ill to leave Kew and come to town, having suffered ‘a pretty smart bilious attack’ that had caused him severe pain. Writing some weeks later to her brother Augustus in Göttingen, Royal stressed ‘how ill our dear Papa has been. His complaint was very disagreeable and indeed alarming for the time that it lasted; the spasm beginning at three in the morning and continuing till eight in the evening.’3 Sir George Baker, the royal doctor, had been summoned – a measure in itself of how ill the king felt, for, as he told Fanny Burney, he ‘had a detestation of all physicians’ and was extremely averse to consulting them.

  No one, least of all Sir George, had any idea what had caused the king’s sudden indisposition. ‘It is supposed,’ wrote the queen, ‘that the dryness and the heat of the season has occasioned these violent attacks, for everybody has been troubled with this complaint.’4 Once the initial spasm had subsided, Baker had little to offer, either as cure or preventative. The best he could suggest was a trip to Cheltenham to take the waters there, which were thought to be particularly effective in curing bilious complaints. The king was persuaded and, with his usual economy, borrowed a house from Lord Fauconberg, and on 12 July set off for the first real holiday he had taken in nearly thirty years. He had no doubt that ‘the efficacy of the waters, the salubrity of the air … and above all the exercise of riding and good mutton will do what may at present be wanting’.5

  ‘A smaller party for a royal excursion cannot be imagined,’ wrote Fanny Burney as she packed for the trip. The queen and her three eldest daughters were to accompany the king. Fanny and Miss Planta travelled with them; few other members of the household were invited. Even so, their departure was not achieved without the upheaval that was inseparable from all royal journeys. ‘We were all up at five o’clock,’ wrote Fanny, ‘and the noise and confusion reigning through the house and resounding all around it, from the quantities of people stirring, boxes nailing, horses neighing and dogs barking, was prodigious.’6 Once begun, the route westward was an adventure in itself. News of the excursion generated great interest amongst those living on its route, and Fanny noted that the crowd ‘waiting for the king and queen to pass was immense and almost unbroken, from Oxford to Cheltenham’. The many spectators were, she observed approvingly, remarkably well behaved: ‘So quiet, so decent, so silent … How unlike a London mob!’ In more populated places, the curiosity of eager sightseers was even more intense. ‘All the towns through which we passed were filled with people as closely fastened to one another as they appear in the pit of a playhouse. Every town seemed all face.’ Fanny’s goodwill did not, however, extend to the spontaneous musical tributes that accompanied the travellers, and which owed more to enthusiasm than skill. As the sister and daughter of musicians, her judgement was merciless. ‘All the way upon the road, we rarely proceeded five miles without encountering a band of most horrid fiddlers, scraping “God Save the King” with all their might, out of tune, and all in the rain.’7

  When the royal party finally arrived at Cheltenham, Fanny was astonished to discover that Lord Fauconberg’s house was really very small for such grand occupants. The queen was unperturbed, showing Fanny to her room ‘in excellent spirits’. When Fanny commented on its lack of space, Charlotte assured her that she had seen nothing yet. ‘“Oh, stay,” cried she, laughing, “till you have seen your own before you call it little!”’8 Once squeezed into their accommodation, the family soon established the orderly routine the king and queen enjoyed. At six in the morning, the king and Royal went to the wells to drink the famous waters (Fanny tried them only once, finding that more than enough). Afterwards, George and Charlotte, together with the three princesses, promenaded together on the gravelled public walks that were at the heart of the town’s sedate social life. The king then took a morning walk, which he followed with a lengthy ride in the surrounding countryside. At four, he sat down to dinner and then ‘strolled out, like a citizen, with his wife and daughters, on the public walks after seven; and by eleven at night, everything was as completely hushed at Fauconberg Lodge than as at any farmhouse’.9 Sometimes the royal family stayed up late enough to attend Cheltenham’s small playhouse, much to the gratification of the locals. One night, the royal couple saw Mrs Jordan, the celebrated comic actress, perform; the king enjoyed it so much that he sent a present backstage to thank her for the pleasure she had given him. They did not know then that one day, through her long liaison with their third son William, she would provide them with ten illegitimate grandchildren.10

 
Venturing beyond Cheltenham, George and Charlotte saw, for the first time in their lives, something of the country over which they reigned. The king’s travels had previously been very circumscribed, taking him mainly across the southern English counties, for naval business at Portsmouth and the Nore (a base in the Thames estuary) and for military reviews on the southern plains. He visited Oxford twice, perhaps because it was so close to the home of the Harcourts in Nuneham Courtenay. The roads he knew best were those that linked Windsor, Kew and London. He never reached the north, Wales, Ireland or Scotland. But now George sought to extend his limited experience, exploring Worcester, where he and Charlotte attended the Three Choirs Festival, and Tewkesbury and Gloucester, where they inspected the cathedral. Not all their trips were to seek out culture or visit antiquities; George was equally keen to observe at first-hand evidence of industrial prosperity. ‘I am this instant returned from seeing the most beautiful sight I ever saw,’ he wrote eagerly to Pitt, ‘namely, the clothing country near Stroud; above 40,000 people were assembled and they all confess the trade is now brisker than the oldest person remembers.’11 So unusual were these royal journeys that the press covered the king’s movements with unprecedented and enthusiastic detail. ‘There is nothing, however minute and unimportant, that His Majesty does at Cheltenham but what the newspapers report to us daily,’ observed Anthony Storer, a politician of Whiggish sympathies, ‘so that we now know more about how he passes his time than if he were living at Buckingham House. He eats cherries, it is found out, like other men, but walks further than most.’12 Readers could also discover that George ordered bats and balls sent down to Cheltenham so that his servants could play cricket and keep themselves fit. The first royal holiday had, it seems, ushered into being the first royal news reporting.

  The king told Sir George Baker that he felt better for his visit. ‘The waters certainly agree, they only give good spirits and appetite.’ They also delivered a more intimate outcome. ‘He finds’, George confided to his doctor – his use of the regal third person contrasting with the personal nature of the information – ‘that a pint and a half of the water is the proper quantity to give him two openings … he finds himself in better spirits and has never been obliged to take the rhubarb pills.’13 A few weeks into the trip, everyone around him thought the king completely recovered from his brief episode of illness. Fanny Burney noticed he had ‘a flow of spirits quite unequalled’ during his stay. She thought his decision to construct ‘a portable wooden house’, designed to accommodate his visiting son Frederick, for whom there was no room within Fauconberg Lodge, seemed eccentric and noted that it was pushed forward by the king with an almost manic intensity. But whatever was to be asserted in retrospect, Lady Harcourt was firm that she had seen nothing untoward in the king’s behaviour at Cheltenham. ‘Living with him as I did, in the most unreserved intimacy from six in the morning to eleven at night … I can most solemnly affirm that I never saw the least symptom of mental derangement, and that the king was invariably good-humoured, and often declared that from the beginning of his reign, he had never known such happiness as he then experienced, from the conviction of being loved by his people.’14

  When the time came to leave, none of the party wanted to go home. ‘Melancholy, most melancholy was the return to Windsor,’ declared Fanny Burney on 16 August. She had enjoyed herself and did not look forward to the resumption of the old routine, ‘destitute of all that could solace, console or delight; replete with whatever could fatigue harass and depress!’15 The queen, too, was sad to depart, telling Augustus ruefully that ‘we are now returned from Cheltenham after a stay of nearly five weeks, and never did schoolboys enjoy their holidays equal to what we have done our little excursion’.16

  Once back at Windsor, it was soon obvious that whatever good had been done for the king at Cheltenham was quickly ebbing away. In September, he confessed to Pitt that he did not feel himself and was again under the care of the doctors. He was well enough to celebrate Royal’s twenty-second birthday on 29 September with a concert and supper, which went off, Lady Harcourt loyally maintained, very cheerfully; but soon she too had heard that the king was ill again, this time complaining of a stubborn rash. Lady Harcourt recounted that on 12 October, after a day’s hunting, ‘he told Princess Elizabeth, from whom I had these particulars, that the rash upon his body was gone in, but that were some remains of it on his arm, which he showed her. She told me it looked very red, and in great weals, as if it had been scourged with cords. She advised him to take some care, but he disregarded the caution.’17 Against all advice, on 15 October, the king went to London to hold the levee at St James’s Palace. ‘He ate no dinner, as was frequently his custom on levee days,’ noted Lady Harcourt, ‘and having had no nourishment but a cup of coffee and a dry biscuit (his common breakfast) at nine in the morning, he went in the evening to the Hanoverian ambassador’s … there he ate several pears but nothing solid.’ The next day, the king was even more neglectful of himself. ‘Early in the morning when the dew was very strong upon the ground, His Majesty walked round Kew and Richmond gardens, and being afraid when he returned that he should hardly be in town time enough for the queen and princesses to be dressed for the Drawing Room, he only pulled off his boots, which were so wet that the water ran out of them, and without changing his stockings, got into the coach.’ The consequence of such thoughtlessness was, to eighteenth-century eyes, entirely predictable. ‘That night he was seized with spasms in his stomach and bowels which gave him the most excruciating pain.’18

  The opposition Whig politician Sir Gilbert Elliot heard a similar account of the king’s illness, which he reported to his wife in terms far less respectful than those of Lady Harcourt. He too knew the story of the pears, the dew and the wet stockings, but he described what happened next in far greater detail. On returning from the levee, the queen ‘wished him to take some cordial, but Georgy boy liked his own way’ and refused:

  He was unwell all evening, and went to bed at his usual hour. About one in the morning, he was seized violently with a cramp or some other violent thing in the stomach, which rendered him speechless, and in a word, was ‘all but’. The queen ran out in great alarm, in her shift, or with very little clothes, among the pages, who were at first retiring out of respect, but the queen stopped them and sent them instantly for the apothecary at Richmond, who arrived in about forty minutes, during which the king continued in the fit, and speechless.

  Like the queen before him, the apothecary ‘tried to make him swallow something strong, but the king … still liked a bit of his own way, and rejected, by signs, everything of that sort. They contrived, however, to cheat him, and got some cordial down in the shape of medicine, and the fit went off.’19

  Sir George Baker, who arrived the following morning, transcribed his own impressions into his diary: ‘I found the king sitting up in his bed, his body being bent forward. He complained of a very acute pain in the pit of the stomach, shooting to the back and sides and making respiration difficult.’ The king told Sir George that he had ‘of late been much troubled in the night by cramp in the muscles of his legs’ and that ‘he was lame, especially on first going out in the morning’. Baker did what any of his contemporaries would have done faced with a case such as this, and administered a purgative, a copious amount of castor oil and senna. But ‘the effect of this being too much’, he then gave him laudanum to counteract it. Baker noticed that there was also ‘some yellowness in the eyes, and urine bilious’.20 The king was now considered too ill to travel and the household’s planned departure from Kew to Windsor was postponed.

  Fanny Burney had heard that the king was ill, but could get no clear information about his condition. She could see that the queen was uneasy, ‘but she talks not of it’. As the days passed and the stay at Kew was extended again and again, life there became increasingly uncomfortable. The attendants’ clothes had been sent to Windsor against their expected arrival and, as Fanny remarked, ‘as to books, there are not three amo
ng us’. In such miserable circumstances, Fanny could think of only one thing to occupy her increasingly anxious thoughts. ‘I have just begun a tragedy. We are now in so spiritless a situation that my mind will bend to nothing less sad, even in fiction.’21

  The king himself was aware that he was not improving, and found his official duties increasingly beyond his strength. ‘I must admit,’ he told Pitt, ‘I have been so thoroughly fatigued by the medicines that continued active all night that it has required several hours for my reading my papers.’22 He still hoped for the best, but on 22 October his condition took a new and alarming turn. Sir George Baker attended him and prescribed his usual purgative. He was completely unprepared for what came next.