The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  On 23 December, he was given a couch to rest his blistered legs upon, ‘but was too riotously inclined to stay long on it’, and was again tied down. Once confined, Greville noted that he was not violent, and ‘as he lay stretched on his bed, he sang’. On Christmas Day, he was again ‘very troublesome and turbulent’. Greville heard that ‘among his extravagances of the moment, he had at this time … taken off his nightcap, and got a pillowcase round his head and the pillow in bed with him, which he called Prince Octavius, who he said was to be new born this day’.151 There were occasional episodes of calmness. On the 26th, he managed to play backgammon with Dr Willis, ‘very much in his usual style’. To the watching Greville, ‘it appeared … singular that he should play the game with tolerable correctness … and yet at the same time, his conversation should continue so wrong and incorrect’.152 Greville was concerned by the frequent ‘indecency and incorrectness’ of the king’s speech. Its continuance, even in his quieter phases, only confirmed his opinion of the grim reality of George’s true condition. The king’s health was, he believed, ‘in a more precarious state than it has yet been since the attacks commenced’.153

  Given the king’s volatile condition, it seems extraordinary that two weeks earlier, Willis had agreed to George’s repeated request to see the queen and their youngest daughter. Only her faith in Willis’s judgement could have persuaded the apprehensive Charlotte to meet her husband again for the first time since the traumatising events of early November. Lady Harcourt’s account of what happened when the meeting took place on Saturday the 13th was tellingly brief. ‘The scene was a most affecting one; he showed strong marks of tenderness, he parted from them with the greatest reluctance.’154 From within the heart of the opposition camp, Lady Elizabeth Foster recounted a fuller version of events. She too had heard that the scene between the king and queen was ‘most affecting. He kissed her hand passionately and said he held what was dearest to him in the world. The queen pressed his hand but could not speak. The king let the queen go, on Willis saying he had promised to do so – he pressed the Princess Amelia in his arms, who cried very much and was frightened.’155 Gilbert Elliot’s version was much bleaker. He had been told that as soon as the king’s youngest daughter was within his reach, ‘he caught her up in arms and swore that no power on earth should ever separate them again. The girl was terrified, and so were the bystanders; and they could not get the child away until they promised to bring the queen. She was brought accordingly, and the king behaved in exactly the same way – catching fast hold of her, and swearing that nothing should ever part them again. The king fell into fits and they were obliged to separate them by main force.’156

  There seems little doubt that, whichever of the accounts was true, the meeting with her father was distressing for Amelia. She had not seen him since his arrival at Windsor at the end of October, when he had collapsed into hysterics upon climbing out of the carriage to meet her and three of his younger daughters. At best, he must have appeared to her as a much-diminished figure: thin, uncertain, with none of the authority he had always displayed so confidently in her presence. At worst, he was violent, angry and uncontrolled.

  For her mother, however, the meeting was, if possible, even more troubling. Charlotte’s response to it was not recorded by any of the diarists, perhaps because she chose not to reveal her feelings publicly; but her husband was unable to act with similar discretion. As the king’s every action was witnessed by others, it was soon apparent how disturbing he had found her visit. During the night that followed, even Lady Harcourt conceded he had been ‘extremely turbulent, as much as any night since his illness’.157 Significantly, when Greville returned from a short break away from attendance, he found a new obsession preoccupying the king, one which seems to have been provoked by his brief meeting with his wife.

  On 18 December, George spoke for the first time ‘of a Windsor Castle duchess’. A few days later Greville observed that ‘the queen was now in no favour’. Since the clear onset of the king’s illness in October, Charlotte had been threatened, abused and isolated. She had been drawn into party politics in a way that frightened and worried her. Her sons had allied themselves with the king’s professed opponents and schemed, as she saw it, to remove him from power. She had sought at every turn to do the best she could to protect his interests and promote his welfare in the face of a terrifying malady that no one could either diagnose or cure. Now she was to undergo what was surely her greatest trial – a public humiliation of the most wounding kind, as her husband declared that he did not and had never loved her; that he preferred another and would marry her if he could.

  ‘In his more disturbed hours,’ Greville confided to his diary, ‘the king has for some time spoke much of Lady Pembroke.’ Elizabeth Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, was one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting and a close friend of the royal family. She had endured a difficult marriage to a serially unfaithful husband, and was nearly fifty – the same age as the king – at the time of his illness. In his clearer moments, George suspected that he had spoken about her in an unguarded manner, using phrases of which he would normally be ashamed. On 27 December, Greville noted that ‘he had said very feelingly to one of his pages that he hoped no one knew what wrong ideas he had, and what wrong things he had said respecting her. He observed … that in his delirium he must have said many very improper things and that much must have escaped him then which ought not to, and that he must try and find out what had slipped from him.’158

  For all his good intentions, his behaviour, once his grasp on reality given way, was very different. The next day, Greville was surprised to meet Willis as the doctor made his way upstairs to invite the queen to visit her husband. Greville doubted this was a good idea, but Willis was adamant it would do no harm. On his assuring an anxious Charlotte that ‘he was sure HM would receive her well’, she was eventually persuaded to come down. The visit was planned to last no more than a quarter of an hour, and on these terms, the queen went in, accompanied by Willis. Greville and the others standing outside in the anteroom could hear the king’s voice, ‘but without hearing his conversation – and at times he appeared to us to be crying’. The meeting lasted nearly an hour, and was brought to an end only when two of Willis’s men went into the room, ‘and the queen was released, not quite without difficulty’. Willis later insisted to Greville that ‘the king received the queen with much kindness. He sat down by her while he spoke to her and often kissed her hand and he cried very frequently.’ Greville was sceptical, noting that most of what passed ‘was in German, not a word of which does Dr Willis understand’. He watched with sympathy Charlotte’s valiant attempt to make a dignified exit from what had clearly been a difficult encounter. ‘It was painful to see the poor queen coming out of the king’s apartment unattended, through the anteroom where there were many attendants. As she passed, Her Majesty seemed to make an effort to look up and by her countenance show us that she was not overcome.’ She needed all of her courage to do so. The king soon eagerly recounted his own version of what had been said to his doctors and attendants. ‘It was such as was improper for her to have heard,’ wrote Greville sadly. ‘In substance, it was that he did not like her, that he preferred another, that she was mad and had been so these three years, that he would not on any account admit her to his bed till the year 1793 for reasons he then improperly explained and such-like extravagant and wild conversation.’159

  It is hard to know exactly what triggered the king’s impassioned declaration of dislike for his wife. It was true he blamed the queen for many of the most painful aspects of his situation. He believed she had been complicit in the plot to bring him to Kew, and still resented her leaving Windsor without his permission. He was convinced, with some justification, that the pre-eminence of Willis, and the free hand he enjoyed in placing him under painful and humiliating restraint, was due to Charlotte’s unwavering support of the physician. Greville thought she did not know much of what was done to the king in the name of t
reatment; but knowledge of her ignorance would probably not have lessened her husband’s anger against her. Most woundingly, George considered she had deserted him, left him to suffer alone when she should have been loyally at his side. His isolation from his family weighed heavily upon him; by the end of December, he had seen his wife only twice in eight weeks.

  Whatever the causes, he continued to rail against the queen in terms increasingly bitter and forceful. He pulled off the wall a painting by Zoffany she had commissioned for him. When in January she sent him ‘a fine bunch of grapes from the hothouse’, the king’s first question on receiving them was to enquire who they were from. ‘He was told by the queen. He asked what queen, and if it was Queen Esther who had sent them.’ Esther was his name for Lady Pembroke, whom he now described as his true wife. ‘The page answered that it was Her Majesty the Queen, upon which he said that he would not receive them and ordered them away.’ Although he later relented and ate the grapes, ‘he talked much of Lady Pembroke as usual – much against the queen – and dwelt on a great variety of subjects with great inconsistency and incoherence’.160

  Greville thought his antipathy towards Charlotte proved how far he still remained away from recovery. ‘Since this illness has been upon him, he has in general spoke unkindly of the queen, and nothing proves him less like himself than this. He said this evening that he never liked her, that she had a bad temper and that all her children were afraid of her.’161 Greville was sure that ‘when such expressions are let loose, he knows not what he says’, but it is impossible not to consider that the campaign of insult and rejection directed by George against Charlotte represented something more than random, delirious ravings. Could the voicing of thoughts usually so strictly and determinedly policed suggest a deeply suppressed resentment against the narrowness of his emotional experience? No one was more committed than the king to the principle that by doing his duty he had obliterated at a stroke all his other desires. Since he renounced Sarah Lennox in his early twenties, he had never allowed himself to consider the possibility that he might have acted differently, that he might have had other women besides his wife. Significantly, in the last days of his illness he confessed to the Lord Chancellor that he had been thinking a great deal of ‘an attachment he had had in his youth’. Thurlow advised him that it was far too late, at the age of fifty, to be thinking about such things, and the king never mentioned it again. But perhaps his tirades against Charlotte were an expression of his unacknowledged frustration with the consequences of choices he had made when very young and had never reneged upon in twenty-seven years of meticulously faithful marriage.

  On 12 January, he told Greville that he was planning to visit Lady Pembroke, and had ‘filled his pockets strangely, with two or three pairs of stockings, a couple of nightcaps and a pair of drawers’.162 When he played cards with Willis he referred to her as the Queen of Hearts and declared, ‘Oh, if the queen should fall to the king.’ On the back of his cards he wrote: ‘Oh dear Eliza ever love thy prince, who had rather suffer death than leave thee.’ He sang love songs which Greville was sure referred ‘to the history of Eliza’.

  On the 16th, Greville arrived in the middle of the morning at the king’s apartments. It had been a difficult night, with the king ‘very angry and abusive to those with him, and at whom he was swearing much’.163 ‘The violence was not abated’ at eleven o’clock, when Greville took a short break. When he returned, he was astonished to discover ‘that the queen and two of the princesses were actually with the king in his apartment. Never was information more unexpected than this was to me at this time.’ Greville knew that ‘both in the early as well as in the latter part of the morning he had been speaking improperly of the queen’, and he dreaded to think what had occurred in his absence. The king, Greville discovered, had received a letter from his son Adolphus and had asked that the queen and his daughters be allowed to read it with him. ‘Upon this, Willis agreed to the suggestion and the interview took place.’ Just as he had on the occasion of the queen’s disastrous last visit, Willis maintained ‘that the king had behaved with the greatest propriety and affection to the whole party and that the queen had, by the king’s desire, played a game at piquet’. ‘I was not doomed to be long cheered by this welcome report,’ wrote Greville resignedly. The king had gleefully explained to one of his pages what had really happened. ‘He told him that the queen had consented that Lady Pembroke should come to him, and that this he had promised before his daughters.’ The queen’s humiliation was now complete. Her husband had repudiated her in front of her children. A few hours later, George asked Greville to find a book for him. ‘He desired me to go and look for Paley’s Philosophy, in which I should find, he told me, that though the law said that a man might have but one wife, yet that Nature allowed more.’164

  The female diarists made no comment about the king’s outspoken and lacerating attacks on his wife. Fanny Burney simply noted on 10 January: ‘my poor royal mistress now droops’.165 On the 15th, Lady Harcourt wrote that the queen ‘has been very low and very far from well’, and thought her so ill that she begged her to seek medical advice, to no avail.166 Despite all she had to bear, Charlotte did not buckle. ‘She has a strong mind and a strong judgement,’ commented Lord Harcourt approvingly; and she did not shrink from continuing to perform what she thought was her duty. It was on her official birthday, 18 January, that the king insisted on seeing her, with three of the princesses – but, as Fanny Burney laconically observed, ‘it was not a good day’.167 Even the ever-hopeful Willis admitted that throughout the morning, ‘the king was never more disturbed in his life’. By evening, when the queen and her daughters arrived, he was a little calmer, although his behaviour was still excited. In a cruel echo of the musical evenings that had occupied much of the family’s time when he was well, ‘the king proposed catch singing. The queen, Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth were pressed to take part, and Dr Willis was obliged to join in.’168

  As the king’s behaviour continued to be so unpredictable, on 24 January Willis found it expedient to introduce a new form of coercion, ‘a chair fixed to the floor that cannot be thrown down. When shown it,’ Greville reported, ‘the king eyed it with some degree of apprehension.’ The next day, he showed off the contraption, ‘which he called his Coronation Chair’, to one of the doctors. The King of Spain, George said, had been mad but kept his state; ‘only in England could a king be confined in a strait waistcoat’. On the 28th, Willis had him placed in it ‘and gave him a severe lecture on his improper conversation, Eliza, etc.’.169 When the king became ‘loud and impatient under this lecture, Dr Willis ordered a handkerchief to be held before his mouth’ until he became quiet.

  By the end of January, with the king having been ill for more than three months, it seemed as though the queen was finally broken. Her eyes were inflamed, wrote Lady Harcourt, and she spent her days in a darkened room. ‘She is very low, very thin and eats nothing.’170 The princesses were all worried about her. But just as she seemed about to give up, out of nowhere the first signs appeared that the king might at last have begun to recover. Both his vision and his powers of concentration improved enough for him to be able to read again. ‘Shakespeare is what he generally prefers,’ stated Lady Harcourt, ‘and he particularly likes to read King Lear.’ On one of their visits, he told his daughters that although the experience of his illness meant he had some things in common with Lear, ‘in other respects he was not like him, for he had no Goneril, nor Regan, but three Cordelias. Judge how this affected them all.’171

  He had also started to draw again, applying himself to calmly making meticulous architectural plans of buildings, which had been one of his favourite occupations when well. Encouraged by these indications, Charlotte was persuaded to see him again. On 31 January, she brought twelve-year-old Princess Mary to visit her father. Mother and daughter played cards together, whilst the king read aloud to them from the Life of Handel. ‘He then sung parts of some of the choruses, and commented u
pon their different advantages of composition. He became afterwards jocose,’ noted Greville, and at that point ‘it was thought proper to end this visit.’172 He was still, Greville thought, subject ‘to flight and hurry’, but ‘on the whole he behaved as well as he has done at any time since his illness to the queen’. The next night, Charlotte took their daughter Sophia to see him; a few days later, Augusta came too. Greville believed these were some of the best days the king had enjoyed since his arrival at Kew.

  On 2 February, Fanny Burney met him by accident as she walked in Kew Gardens. Catching sight of the king and his party in the distance, she ‘ran off with all my might!’ but the king pursued her, ‘loudly and hoarsely calling after me “Miss Burney, Miss Burney!”’ At first, not knowing ‘in what state he might be’, she continued to run away, until Dr Willis called out that it hurt the king to run. She came to a reluctant halt and ‘forced myself forward to meet him’, thinking this by far ‘the greatest act of personal courage I ever made’. When they spoke, she was surprised to find him so much improved. In his face she saw ‘all his wonted benignity of countenance, though still something of wildness in his eyes’. She was very shocked when ‘he put both his hands round my two shoulders’ and kissed her cheek. ‘Involuntarily, I thought he meant to crush me’; but gradually she realised his intentions were friendly. ‘What a conversation followed! What did he not say!’ The king commiserated with Fanny on her difficulties with Mrs Schwellenberg, insisting she ignore the old woman’s bullying and consider him a friend and protector. He talked about her father, about Handel, about Mrs Delany and, most uncharacteristically, about politics, declaring ‘he was very much dissatisfied with his state officers and that he meant to form an entire new establishment’. Fanny could not deny that his manner was both intense and indiscreet, ‘but upon the whole how inexpressibly thankful I was to see him so nearly himself – so little removed from recovery’.173