In a further article, Timothy Peters and co-author Allan Beveridge moved towards a different interpretation of the illness. Examining some of the early material collected by Sir George Baker, they concluded that the king had probably suffered initially from ‘recurrent episodes of obstructive jaundice’.75 This may have triggered some of his initial agitation, but for Peters and Beveridge, George’s later behaviour is best understood as primarily a mental condition. They attribute it to late-onset ‘bipolar disorder with recurrent manic episodes’, arguing that the king’s successive bouts of illness were often linked to periods of extreme stress in his public life.76 In this reading, the ‘royal malady’ was indeed, as was widely maintained at the time, a psychiatric rather than physiological disorder.
If, even now, there is such disagreement about the causes of the king’s condition, it is hardly surprising that George’s doctors were baffled and confused by his wildly fluctuating state. If the disease was porphyria, they could have done very little to control it. It still has no cure, and is treated by careful management of lifestyle; significantly, avoidance of stress is seen as an important contributor to the wellbeing of patients. In the late eighteenth century, there was nothing that could have been done for the king, except perhaps to leave him alone and hope for spontaneous recovery, as the severity of the attack receded. If his illness was a recurring psychiatric disorder, given the state of contemporary understanding of mental health, a do-nothing approach might also have been the best prescription for George’s care. Instead, as they sought to make sense of a sickness that seemed to respond to none of their remedies, the king’s doctors subjected him to months of painful and humiliating treatment that could deliver no effective result.
At Windsor, the Prince of Wales was now in charge. ‘Nothing was done but by his orders,’ noted Fanny Burney mournfully. Almost his first action was to place the house under a kind of informal exclusion zone. To avoid the spread of damaging speculation and gossip, he directed that no one was to be allowed entry who was not already in residence. No exceptions were made. Even Lady Harcourt, one of George and Charlotte’s oldest and most trusted friends, was denied admission. When Leonard Smelt, another of the king’s inner circle and once the prince’s tutor, was also turned away, he was so angry that he went straight back home to Yorkshire. ‘From this time commenced a total banishment from all intercourse out of the house,’ recorded Fanny, ‘and an unremitting confinement within its walls.’77 She herself was one of the confined, and barely went outdoors.
Kept away from his family, and denied the opportunity to see his friends, George’s world too had become much smaller since 5 November. The doctors visited regularly, but more as perplexed observers than to offer coherent advice. The daily management of the king was left in the hands of his pages and his equerries: Mr Digby, Colonel Goldsworthy, General Harcourt (the brother-in-law of Lady Harcourt) and the soldier and former MP Robert Fulke Greville.
Greville, unusually for a man entirely free of literary pretension, kept a detailed diary during the gruelling months of his attendance on the king. He spent more time with him than anyone else during the worst of his disorder, and his journal consistently provides the most illuminating insights into George’s shifting state of mind and body. Greville was a straightforward, unpretentious character of the kind the king liked best. He was an aristocrat, the third son of the Earl of Warwick (in her journals, Fanny Burney called him ‘Colonel Wellbred’). He was passionately fond of horses and riding and, like the king, took an informed interest in agriculture. He probably would have described himself – approvingly – as a simple man, but his diary reveals a thoughtful, independent and subtle mind. He knew the king better than any of the medical attendants now around him, and consequently understood how profound had been the change in the very essence of his personality. He was often sceptical of the value of the treatment he saw George endure, but appreciated more than most how wild and unmanageable he could be, and how necessary it was to take some measures to control him. Like everyone else, he was puzzled by the vertiginous speed of the king’s decline, and by the extreme swings in his mood; but even in the blackest moments, he never lost a sense of affection for a man whom, in happier times, he had clearly liked, and who had clearly liked him.
In its very first pages, Greville’s diary captures with stark clarity just how disturbed the king had become. He slept very badly, rarely more than two or three hours at a time, and never stopped talking. He had occasional moments of clarity, but these were inevitably succeeded by acute confusion. ‘I saw him this night sit up and eat his posset, and afterwards take his draught,’ he wrote on 11 November. ‘The former he ate well, and seemed as composed as ever, but the ramblings continued and were more wild than ever, amounting, alas, to an almost total suspension of reason – No sleep tonight – The talking incessant throughout.’78 On the 12th, the king was quiet in the morning, but by eleven o’clock, ‘he became more loud and his voice more exerted than I had ever heard it, and he became much agitated and the subjects changed. He now talked much of Eton College, of the boys rowing, etc., but everything he mentioned was with great hurry and exertion.’ This lasted for two hours, at the end of which, ‘in a violent perspiration, he called to have the windows opened and complained of burning’.79
Later in the day, lying on his bed, he seems to have suffered convulsions: ‘HM had a violent struggle, jerking very strongly with his arms and legs, but made no attempt to rise.’ Afterwards, Greville noticed he was almost himself for a while, ‘asking if he might have clean linen … and on one of his pages offering to assist him in putting on his flannel waistcoat, he said, “No, sir, I can do that myself when I have the use of my own hands.”’80
On the 13th, encouraged by such episodes of lucidity, even the cautious Greville began to wonder if the king was indeed improving. ‘He awoke with more composure and recollection than he had obtained since his illness and remained for a longer time so. He drank his tea and ate his bread and butter with appetite – he knew everybody and conversed rationally with all. He arranged his watches and seemed more cheerful and more like himself, and we all entertained hopes of much good and amendment.’ But as the night came on, his delirium returned. The king woke at two in the morning, ‘and alas, at waking, his ramblings returned, and dampened our eager hopes’.81
Even the slenderest grounds for optimism were earnestly seized on by Fanny Burney when they filtered back to her apartments at the other end of the house. When yet another doctor was added to the ‘medical tribe’ in attendance, Fanny lost no time in buttonholing him. The new man, Sir Lucas Pepys, was what Fanny called ‘a hoper’. He gave her ‘such unequivocal assurances of the king’s recovery’ that she ran immediately to the queen’s rooms to pass on the good news. She found few takers for her encouraging information. ‘I waited in the passage where I met Lady Charlotte Finch, and tried what I could to instil in her mind the hopes I entertained; this however, was not possible; a general despondency prevailed throughout the house, and Lady Charlotte was infected with it very deeply.’ When at last she saw the queen, she could do nothing to lighten her mood. Her positive account ‘was received most meekly by the most patient of sorrowers’.82
The queen was right to be cautious. On the 15th, George’s condition was worse again. Greville no longer believed he was getting any better, partly because the king now insisted he was fully restored to health. ‘He has spoke much of his recovery, observing (poor man) that he has been very ill, but that he is well now, and says that he has been light-headed.’ But his behaviour contradicted his words. He spent the day issuing hollow and confusing orders, in a parody of his usual regal role, telling Colonel Goldsworthy ‘to go to Eton to order the boys a holiday on account of his recovery – To prepare the queen for the firing of the guns at twelve o’clock on the same occasion, and ordering the Dettingen Te Deum to be sung in church, etc., etc.’83 Later in the evening, ‘sensible (without prompting) that he was talking very fast’, in an attempt to
slow himself down, he decided to make use of the royal third person. ‘“The king did so” – “the king thinks so” – etc. This correction he thus explained, “I speak in the third person as I am getting into Mr Burke’s eloquence, saying too much on little things.”’84 General Harcourt told his wife that the king ‘spoke without ceasing from one o’clock this morning, and when Warren told him he ought not to do so, he said, “I know that as well as you, it is my complaint, cure me of that and I shall be well.”’85 By 18 November, his voice was rasping and he had developed ‘a catch in his throat’, but still his conversation rolled unstoppably on, ‘one subject succeeded by another before the one begun was finished’.86
Robert Greville observed that, despite all his difficulties, the king had not yet become an abject or broken figure. He was used to being obeyed, and did not easily surrender the ability to exert his will. ‘I think I foresee from late occurrences that HM will ere long give more trouble to his attendants than hitherto,’ wrote Greville gloomily. He thought a struggle for mastery was inevitable. ‘HM, from being somewhat recovered in bodily strength, believes himself to be almost well, and in consequence, now tries to command, and struggles hard for obedience.’ Even getting the king to take a bath turned into a process of negotiation: ‘he proposed terms if he took it’.87 He attempted to regulate every last detail of Greville’s dress and behaviour. ‘He has ordered how I shall be dressed and where stationed in my next watch – I am ordered to be in the room adjoining his own apartment, to be dressed in a plain coat and to be very neat.’ More ominously, ‘he has asked for the Master Key of the Queen’s Lodge and he battles hard and very often to prevail in having it delivered to him’.88
Attempts to shave the king proved equally difficult. The king insisted he would not be shaved; after much argument he finally consented, ‘but when half shaved, he refused to let the other half be finished, unless certain indulgences were granted’. More argument took place, during which the king ‘remained half shaved, a singular appearance as he had not been shaved for upwards of a fortnight’. Eventually the king was persuaded to allow one of his pages, Mrs Papendiek’s husband, to finish the job, though it took him ‘above two hours’.89 In this phase of his illness, as Greville knew better than anybody, managing the king was no easy task.
This was especially so when he was in the grip of the powerful delusions which clouded his mind. In a lucid spell, he described ‘some of the phantoms of his delusion during his delirium – Said he thought there had been a deluge – That he could see Hanover through Herschel’s telescope – That he had thought himself inspired, etc.’90 ‘Sometimes,’ noted Greville, ‘he doubted his own accuracy in what he was saying, and would ask me if such and such things had been so, as, said he, “I have been very much out of order.”’91 On other occasions, he was quietly melancholy. ‘In one of his soliloquies he said, “I hate nobody, why should anyone hate me?” Recollecting a little, he said, “I beg pardon, I do hate the Marquis of Buckingham.”’92 He could also be completely ungovernable, especially towards his doctors. He was said to have flung Sir George Baker’s wig in his face, thrown him on his back, ‘and told him he might star gaze’.93 When Warren once annoyed him, ‘the king advanced up to him and pushed him’. Greville and another equerry stepped in and rescued the doctor, leaving the king furious ‘and foaming with rage’.94
The king’s relations with his physicians now reached a new low. He told Greville that they ‘had been forced upon him, and dwelt on the treatment he had received from the doctors with much sensibility’. Greville attempted to pacify him, explaining that they were acting for his own good, his recovery was dependent on his remaining quiet and calm, ‘and that the trifles that had been withheld from him, and the occasional restraints he had experienced had been measures which had been adopted solely to this point, and they would cease in a very short time’.95
Behind Greville’s careful use of the word ‘restraints’ lurks a multitude of possible interpretations. The MP George Selwyn had heard that on 20 November Warren had been deputed ‘in some set of fine phrases to tell His Majesty that he is mad and must have a strait waistcoat’. None of the diarists close at hand – Fanny Burney, Lady Harcourt or Greville himself – mentions the king being placed in one at this point. This could arise from delicacy – nowhere in her extensive account of the king’s illness does Fanny use the words ‘madness’ or ‘insanity’ – but it is more likely that George had been subjected to the less symbolically significant process of ‘sheeting’ as a method of controlling his agitation. This involved the patient being ‘swaddled with fine linen’, their limbs confined and controlled. It was not likely to have increased the king’s goodwill towards his doctors, who were faced with an impossibly difficult task in attempting to subdue a man who was also their monarch. As Selwyn commented tartly, ‘If it should please God to restore His Majesty to his senses … I should not like to stand in the place of that man who has moved such an address to the Crown.’96
Greville certainly believed that the physicians were inhibited by the king’s status in their dealings with him: ‘They appear to shrink from responsibility, and to this time, have not established their authority, though pressed to by every attendant.’ The doctors had failed to take command. Without their leadership and guidance, the attendants were rudderless, subject to every changing order. ‘From those thus appointed,’ complained Greville, clearly stung by the equerries’ mounting sense of inadequacy into uncharacteristic forcefulness, ‘we should have plain and positive directions in an anxious and difficult charge. We ought not to be embarrassed by fluctuating decisions, nor puzzled with a multitude of directions from other quarters … All of us are desirous to do our best for the good and comfort of our dear king, but we must be plainly and properly directed in our course.’97
Nowhere was the disruptive effect of the ‘fluctuating decisions’ – so deprecated by Greville – so apparent as in the management of George’s desire to see his children. The king, who had been visited by none of his family since the terrible night of 5 November, told Greville that he wanted very much to see his daughters, ‘and desired I would look across the garden to the Lower Lodge to see if I could observe any of his children at the windows, expressing at the same time a great anxiety to see them and desired an attendant might be sent to them, to request that they might show themselves before the Lower Lodge, if only for a few minutes’. When the doctors were consulted, they advised against it. Greville thought the decision wrong, ‘but acquiescence to it rested not with me’.98
Then the doctors changed their minds. On 24 November, ‘they thought they would try what effect the letting him see his children in the garden would have’, wrote Mrs Harcourt, the general’s wife. ‘When he was told he was to do so, he at first seemed pleased, but as the time approached, he grew distressed and said – “No, I cannot bear it; no, let it be put off till evening, I shall be more able to see them then.”’ The doctors were told of the king’s sudden reluctance, but decided to let the experiment go ahead anyway. ‘So, instead of stopping the royal family, who were just going into the garden, they let them go on.’
What followed was a psychological disaster. ‘The king seemed to struggle with himself to bear it, but ran to open the windows, which were screwed down. They made a great bustle about his having appeared to wish to break the window to speak to his children,’ continued Mrs Harcourt; ‘surely if he did, nothing could be more natural.’ The king urged one of his gentlemen to ‘go down and beg them to come near; they did so, and he called to them all through the window’. The last time the princesses had seen their father he had been in a state of excited confusion. Now, if anything, he seemed worse – frantic and alarmed. ‘Poor souls, they were all so much affected, and Princess Elizabeth was so near fainting, that they were obliged to go in immediately, but I hope he did not see how much they were agitated; the Princess Royal was quite overcome, and so was Princess Mary; and in truth, they all seemed more dead than alive when they got in the
house. Unluckily,’ added Mrs Harcourt, ‘the king had his nightcap and gown on, which, with his appearance being very pale, made a change in his appearance that could not fail to shock them.’99 She had no doubt who was to blame for the debacle. ‘I know not what the physicians mean by their conduct; they seem to be amusing themselves, as they would with any other singular character, and feel no more for him than they would a dog or a cat.’100
It was hard to find any relief from the oppressive atmosphere that hung so heavily on everyone at Windsor. On 25 November, Fanny met Robert Greville in a corridor. The two diarists ‘condoled on the state of things. I found him wholly destitute of all hope, and persuaded the malady was a seizure for life. How happy for me that I am made of more sanguine materials! I could not think as they think, and be able to wade through the labours of my office.’101 She acknowledged, sadly, that few shared her optimism. Lady Charlotte Finch ‘is no hoper; she sees nothing before us but despair and horror’. Even Colonel Digby ‘now leans to the darker side, though he avoids saying so’.102 All news was bad news. General Harcourt told his wife, ‘I fear we have gone from bad to worse. The whole of yesterday, and particularly in the evening, the king was more agitated and unmanageable than ever; so much so that it was not without difficulty that he could be controlled, and several of the gentlemen in attendance were more than once obliged to be called in.’103 On the same day, the king ‘gave one of his pages a sharp slap on the face, with a violence by no means usual to his natural dispositions’. He was profoundly sorry afterwards, and on going to bed, ‘called for the same page, took him by the hand, and asked his pardon twenty times’.104 Then, in the midst of all this unhappiness and despair, the Prince of Wales decided the time had come to move the king to Kew.
The Strangest Family Page 50
