The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  A few hours later, the king sent for Baker ‘to scold him, as he said, for giving him a medicine that always disagreed with him. His Majesty spoke with so much more warmth and displeasure than usual’ that Baker was completely taken aback.23 He confided to his diary how shocked he was by the king’s ‘very unusual manner’, of which ‘I had not the least expectation. The look of his eyes, the tone of his voice, every gesture and his whole deportment, represented a person in the most furious passion of anger. One medicine had been too powerful; another had only teased him without effect. The importation of senna ought to be prohibited, and he would give orders that in future it shall never be given to any of the royal family.’ Angrily repeating his complaints over and over again, the king kept Baker for nearly three hours and sent him away so concerned that the doctor wrote immediately to Pitt, ‘and informed him that I had just left the king in agitation of spirits bordering on a delirium’.24

  The next day, the king seemed calmer; but the queen was now very worried about her husband’s condition. She asked Baker to urge him not to travel up to London for the levee as she knew he intended, but to stay and rest at Kew. George ignored the doctor’s advice. ‘I shall go to St James’s to show I am not as ill as some have thought,’ he wrote on the 24th.25 If it was intended ‘to quiet the fears of the people’, the king’s appearance in London was not a success. ‘It was remarked that he looked ill,’ reported Lady Harcourt, ‘and that his skin appeared muddled, as if there was an eruption under it that wanted to come out.’26 His dress was untidy, his speech hurried and agitated. The first minister was among those shocked by his looks, as the king did not fail to notice. He admitted that he no longer felt capable of attending to public business and instructed Pitt not to send him the usual dispatches for a week. He hoped to feel better soon.

  Few shared his optimism. William Grenville, a member of Pitt’s administration, confessed to his brother that he and his Cabinet colleagues were now seriously worried by the king’s worsening condition. ‘We put as good a face as we can upon it; but I cannot but own to you that I think there is still ground for a good deal of alarm.’ His failure to rally so long after the original attack did not, in Grenville’s opinion, bode well. The physical symptoms were bad enough; but other aspects of his behaviour gave even more cause for alarm. ‘Part of the king’s disorder is an agitation and hurry of spirits which gives him hardly any rest … independently of the king’s great dislike of its being known that he is ill, we have the strongest reasons of policy … to wish that idea not to prevail.’27

  Any serious hopes the government entertained of keeping the more unsettling aspects of the king’s illness secret were doomed. Throughout October, anyone who had dealings with him could not fail to notice a significant alteration in his behaviour. He was peevish and irritable. He had also become unstoppably voluble. ‘He now talked so much more than usual, and spoke to everybody on strange varieties of subjects. His incessant talking became at last so remarkable that it was thought necessary to recommend His Majesty to be a little more silent,’ wrote an observer.28

  One night during this period, he waylaid Fanny Burney in a corridor at Kew. There she ‘had a sort of conference with His Majesty, or rather, I was the object to whom he spoke, with a manner so uncommon, that high fever alone could account for it; a rapidity, a hoarseness of voice, a volubility, an earnestness – a vehemence rather – it startled me inexpressibly’. She was at pains to stress that he was not a threatening figure: he behaved ‘with a graciousness exceeding all I have ever met with before – it was almost kindness!’, but the speed and eccentricity of his conversation puzzled her. She met him again the next day, and found him no better. ‘He stopped me and conversed upon his health for near half an hour with that extreme quickness of speech and manner that belongs to fever.’ He told her that he hardly slept ‘one minute all night’. He was desperate to convince Fanny that he was not really ill. ‘Nobody speaks of his illness,’ she noted, ‘nor what they think of it.’29 Although his physical symptoms had subsided, and he seemed well enough to undertake the journey to Windsor, nothing could dent his worrying loquacity.

  In the midst of this climate of foreboding, ‘the queen grows more and more uneasy’. Fanny was not sure what to make of Charlotte’s oscillations between anxiety and glacial composure. ‘She alarms me, sometimes for herself, at other times has a sedateness that wonders me still more.’30 In the week to come, all Charlotte’s formidable powers of self-control would be tested to the utmost, but, as no one seemed to know what was wrong with her husband, or what to do about it, the long-delayed return to Windsor finally took place on 25 October. When the royal party arrived, all those who had assembled to greet the king were horrified by his disturbed state. ‘As the coach drew up to the door,’ wrote Lady Harcourt, ‘the king saw his four youngest daughters waiting to receive him, and was so overcome that he had a hysteric fit.’ The sight of their father, usually so assured and so dignified, in a state of extreme agitation was not what they, or any of those around them, had been expecting. ‘His children and attendants were all struck with the alteration in his looks, and he said to Colonel Goldsworthy, one of the equerries who had always had a great share of his confidence and favour, “I return to you a poor old man, weak in body and mind.”’31 This was the first occasion that the king acknowledged that his illness went beyond the purely physical, and ‘from this time’, wrote Lady Harcourt, ‘he allowed that his disorder was nervous’.32

  This confession was especially hard for a man who, as Lady Harcourt recalled, ‘had always laughed at the idea of nervous disorders’. She herself had ‘often been the object of his pleasantry upon this subject’; Lady Harcourt’s mother had suffered from ‘nervousness’, a term which the king dismissed, telling Lady Harcourt that ‘“You may talk of them as you please, but the complaints you call nervous appear to me to be only to a greater or lesser degree, insanity.” Of what really deserved that name, he had a greater horror than any person I have ever conversed with.’ He had, Lady Harcourt recalled, ‘almost expressed a wish for the death of persons for whom he has had a regard, from the apprehension that such a dreadful calamity was hereditary in their family’.33 This deep-seated revulsion at the very idea of insanity can only have made the king’s next few days even more terrifying to him, as his inability to control his actions became increasingly pronounced. On Sunday the 26th, he went with his family to the service at the chapel at Windsor. ‘Just before the sermon started, he seemed to have lost all power over himself, embraced the queen and the princesses and then burst into tears.’ The royal pew was an enclosed one, and no one outside it could see the king’s distress; but his daughters were, as usual, witnesses to his disturbed and desperate behaviour. The king said to Princess Elizabeth: ‘You know what it is to be nervous, but was you ever as bad as this?’ When she was fifteen, Elizabeth had endured a series of debilitating ‘spasms’ which had laid her low for many months. She had made a full recovery, and her symptoms had been very different from those her father displayed, but she knew what was expected of her. ‘With great presence of mind,’ observed Lady Harcourt approvingly, ‘she answered, “Yes,”’ and gradually the king calmed down.34

  The queen was now worried enough to ask Sir George Baker to attend the king without having sought his permission to do so, a considerable step for a woman in whom deference to her husband’s wishes was so deeply ingrained. The doctor watched George closely during a concert, and observed that ‘he talked continually, making frequent and sudden transitions from one subject to another’, but he noted there was ‘no incoherence in what he said, nor any mark of false perception’.35 Clinging on to this sliver of good news, the queen tried hard to keep up some semblance of normal life. On the 28th, she went with the king to visit their old friend Lady Effingham. During their stay, Charlotte thought she had observed ‘particular agitation’ in his behaviour, and his talking continued at the same frantic pace as ever. On the 29th, Baker arrived to take another look at his
patient, discovering him again at a concert, but enjoying it far less than he had on the previous occasion. Music was no longer the pleasure it had always been for him: ‘It seems to affect my head; it is with some difficulty I hear it.’ He now confessed to Baker ‘that his vision was confused, that whenever he attempted to read, a red mist floated before his eyes, and intercepted the objects’.36

  In the face of such confusing symptoms, Baker had little to say. He was sure the king was no longer feverish, although he continued to attribute his distracted behaviour to delirium. His lameness and general physical debility were, he hoped, the consequences of ‘an unformed gout’, which had yet to reveal itself and settle recognisably in a distinct part of the body. A diagnosis of gout would, at this stage, have been regarded as a great relief, but Baker looked for its familiar presentation in vain. He was uncertain but still emollient, assuring the worried queen that ‘the king was certainly very ill, but that there was nothing that alarmed him’.37

  The king, however, was not convinced; he kicked his foot against his heel, arguing that ‘they make me believe I have the gout, but if it was gout, how could I kick the part without any pain?’38 Lady Harcourt thought he had drawn his own conclusions about what was happening to him, ‘for much of his conversation seemed as if he intended to prepare the queen and princesses for some fatal event’.39 He made a new will, and began to set his papers in order. The queen urged him to take courage, declaring that ‘she thought everybody ought to bear up under their afflictions, and that she had a confidence in God not inflicting more than we are able to bear’. In response, ‘he took her round the waist and said, “Then you are prepared for the worst.”’40

  The queen’s spirits must have been cast down by the king’s pessimistic sense of what was to come. She was also made increasingly anxious by the central role she had begun to play in her husband’s disordered mind. On their first return to Windsor, the king had told Lady Effingham that although he took all the medicines prescribed for him, it was to his wife that he looked for real improvement. ‘The queen is my physician, and no man need have a better; she is my friend, and no man can have a better.’ Fanny Burney, who witnessed this passionate affirmation, found it very moving; but an avowal that Fanny found ‘touching’, expressed as it was ‘in his hoarse voice and altered countenance’, might just as easily have seemed unsettling in its single-minded intensity. The queen’s misgivings about her husband’s behaviour could only have been made worse by the events of the night of 1 November. When Fanny arrived at Charlotte’s bedroom to undress her, the king was already there, as insistent and anxious as ever. ‘He was begging her not to speak to him when he got to his own room, that he might fall asleep, as he felt great want of that refreshment. He repeated this desire, I believe, at least a hundred times, though far from needing it, the poor queen never uttered one syllable!’ The ‘kindness and benevolence of his manner’ made no difference at all to the queen’s frozen, mute response; nor did his declaration that he ‘had no wish but to set the queen at rest’.41 Charlotte now seemed paralysed with shock at the man her husband had become.

  On 2 November, the king went out for an airing in his carriage with Royal and Augusta. It was at this moment, in this distracted condition, that he explained why he had not sought husbands for them and promised to make amends by taking them to Hanover as soon as he was better, where they could choose any princely partners they wished for themselves. ‘There was nothing improper in what he said,’ maintained Lady Harcourt, implying that perhaps improper things had been said before now, ‘yet he spoke with a degree of eagerness that was very disturbing to the princesses.’42

  An atmosphere of heightened tension engulfed the entire household. ‘We are all here in a most uneasy state,’ wrote Fanny Burney. The king had given up any pretence at keeping ‘the punctuality he used to observe in respect of hours’. Meals went uneaten on the table; ‘the drinking coffee and the concert were deferred beyond their usual time, nor could he be prevailed upon to go to bed before two o’clock in the morning’. On eventually retiring, his attention always focussed on Charlotte. ‘When he went to the queen’s room, he was particularly anxious to see that all the doors were locked,’ wrote Lady Harcourt, who added obliquely that ‘precautions had however been taken, and two pages attended in the passage to go in if necessary’.43

  The following day, 3 November, was Princess Sophia’s eleventh birthday, but her mother was in no state to celebrate anything. ‘The queen is almost overpowered with some secret terror,’ wrote Fanny, appalled to see Charlotte’s much-tried self-control slipping away from her. ‘I am affected beyond all expression in her presence, to see what struggles she makes to support serenity. Today, she gave up the conflict when I was with her, and broke into a violent fit of tears. It was very, very terrible to see.’44 Hour after hour the queen walked up and down her room, without uttering a single word. The king’s very appearance had become a source of horror to her. She told Lady Harcourt that ‘his eyes she could compare to nothing but blackcurrant jelly; the veins in his face were swelled, the sound of his voice was dreadful; he often spoke till he was exhausted, and the moment he could recover his breath, began again, while the foam ran out of his mouth’.45

  It was on 5 November – ‘O dreadful day!’, as Fanny Burney called it – that the storm which had been brewing since mid-October finally broke over the family’s heads. At noon, the king went out in a carriage with the Princess Royal. Fanny watched him leave from her window. He seemed cheerful and smiling; ‘but he gave so many orders to the postillions, and got in and out of the carriage twice with such agitation’ that she grew more worried. When she arrived at the queen’s rooms, she found her spirits ‘worse and worse’. Charlotte had been ‘greatly offended by some anecdote in a newspaper – the Morning Herald – relative to the king’s indisposition. She bid me burn the paper,’ and ruminated on who could be sent to tell the editor how close to treason he approached.46

  In the evening, Fanny dined alone with Miss Planta. Neither had much to say. ‘A stillness most uncommon reigned over the whole house. Nobody stirred, not a voice was heard, not a motion.’ Then, at seven o’clock, Fanny’s servant came to tell them that ‘the music was all forbid, and the musicians ordered away! … I could not understand this prohibition; all seemed stranger and stranger.’ Finally, Mr Digby – Fanny’s favourite equerry – came in and asked her if she knew what had happened, ‘whether I was yet acquainted how bad all was become, and how ill the king … Oh, my dear friends,’ wrote Fanny, ‘what a history!’47

  Gradually she pieced together an account of what had taken place while she and Miss Planta had eaten in anxious silence. Earlier that evening, the royal family had gathered for dinner. The Prince of Wales and Frederick, Duke of York, had come down from London to join them, perhaps hoping to assess their father’s condition at first hand. Lady Harcourt heard that the king had raised the emotional temperature from the outset by telling the duke with great feeling ‘that he loved him so well it was not in his power to refuse him anything except where the Prince of Wales was concerned; and that though he had been ill used by him, he was his son and should always love him’. As the king’s loud and uncomfortable declarations rolled on and on, his wife and children sat horrified around the table, with no idea what to do next. The Prince of Wales, Lady Harcourt said, was so upset ‘that he was almost convulsed, and Princess Elizabeth was obliged to rub his temples with Hungary water; but neither this, nor the whole party being drowned in tears appeared to have the least affect upon the king’.48 From Digby, Fanny Burney heard even more distressing details that Lady Harcourt had perhaps tactfully omitted from her story. ‘The king, at dinner had broken forth into positive delirium, which had long been menacing all who saw him most closely; and the queen was so overpowered as to fall into violent hysterics; all the princesses were in misery, and the Prince of Wales had burst into tears.’49 The prince later told Lord Jersey that his father had thrown him against the wall in a paroxysm of r
age.

  The queen’s tribulations had not stopped with dinner. Lady Harcourt described how she had left the ghastly dining table, ‘having put a constraint on herself beyond what she had the strength to support’, and when she reached the privacy of her room, she collapsed. Soon the king arrived in pursuit of her. Her lady-in-waiting attempted to tell him that she was ill and could not see him, but George would not be deterred, declaring that he would take care of her himself. ‘Presently,’ reported Lady Harcourt,

  the king proposed moving Her Majesty into the drawing room where he made a sort of bed upon one of the sofas, and placed her upon it; he then fixed where each of the princesses should sit, and ordered all candles, except two to be put out. Sometimes he hung over the queen with the kindest solicitude, at others he talked to his children with the most paternal fondness, yet in all he said and did, the strongest marks of a deranged mind were visible … it was not until past twelve that he could be prevailed upon to let the queen retire to her apartment.50

  Allowed at last to go to bed, the queen summoned Fanny Burney, who had been waiting over two hours for the call. ‘My poor royal mistress! Never can I forget her countenance – pale, ghastly pale she looked.’ Charlotte sat unmoving and silent, waiting to be undressed. Fanny was herself so nervous that she could do little to help, ‘my shaking hands and blinded eyes could scarce be of any use’. Eventually the queen spoke. ‘“How cold I am,” she cried, and put her hand on mine; marble it felt! And went to my heart’s core!’51 The ladies could hear the king talking in the bedroom adjoining Charlotte’s. ‘He would not be further removed.’ Fanny was now dismissed, with Miss Goldsworthy, ‘by the king’s direction’, appointed to stay with the queen.