The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  The king’s behaviour continued to fluctuate wildly. On the 3rd, Greville overheard ‘very high words’ between Willis and the king which he discovered arose from ‘his having spoke improperly of the queen and having refused to see her’. Nevertheless, Charlotte arrived in her husband’s apartments as arranged, this time accompanied by the Princesses Augusta and Elizabeth. They found their father ‘high in spirits’ and talking incessantly. ‘Piquet was attempted but did not go very smoothly. Afterwards, HM proposed singing … The king on this occasion himself joined in heartily in “Rule Britannia” and “Come Cheer Up My Lads”.’174

  The following day, the visitors were the queen and Princesses Mary and Sophia. Their father ‘behaved with more calmness and propriety than he had on the preceding night’.175 Lady Harcourt found the queen that evening ‘more delighted than I have ever seen her after any of her visits … Twice she believed he was going to say something wrong, but he put his hand upon his mouth said “Hush”, and then in a moment spoke properly … Our spirits and hopes are very much revived.’176 Two days later (‘a day of indulgence’) the king was allowed to use a knife and fork and to shave himself, which he did very carefully, shaving his head as well as his face, to prepare himself for wearing a wig again.177

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  In the world beyond Kew, the political process had ground steadily onwards. Pitt’s delaying tactics had been very effective; but for all his political dexterity, he was aware that for him, and for his administration, time was running out. On 30 December, advised by Fox, the Prince of Wales had stated his intention to accept the regency even in its restricted form. Much of January had been spent in further interrogation of the physicians, instigated by the opposition, who still hoped to engineer a declaration of the continuing seriousness of the king’s state. The Regency Bill was finally published on 6 February.

  The parliamentary process duly began, but Fox had left it all too late. In the second week of February, the king’s health began to improve with a speed no one could have predicted. His constipation was finally cured, and even his familiar patterns of speech returned. An evening spent with his wife and Princess Amelia passed off, Greville noted, extremely well, the king serenading his family on his flute as they arrived in his apartments. Willis was overjoyed, telling Greville how good it was ‘to hear the king repeat his usual singular expression (so usual to him on all occasions formerly) of “What! What! What!”’, which he had heard the previous day. Everyone had noticed the absence of the king’s familiar verbal tic during his illness, and though even the loyal Greville could hardly regard it as ‘a grace in language’, he too was glad to hear it again, ‘as it may be presumed a forerunner of returning reason and as such should be hailed with welcome’.178

  Even the sceptical Dr Warren was impressed by the obvious improvement, telling Greville on the 11th that he had just come from the king and that ‘not the least impropriety had escaped him during the interview’. Greville, who seems always to have harboured a well-concealed sympathy for Warren, thought his attitude more generous than that of Willis, who was ‘sneeringly triumphant on the excellent bulletin of the day’.179 Nothing now could deflate the buoyant sense of hope that had at last taken hold at Kew. ‘The old doctor is jumping around the house and cannot command his joy,’ Lady Harcourt told her husband, ‘we are all in high spirits.’ The queen too dared to display a little cheerfulness: ‘Oh, I never saw the king so well since his illness began, as he is this evening.’ This, Lady Harcourt enthused, ‘was the queen’s joyous exclamation as she entered the room after her visit last night, to which she added, “There has not been a look or a word unlike himself.” The princesses spoke of him in the same manner.’180

  On the 12th, the Regency Bill passed the Commons, although it appeared increasingly redundant day by day. The following week the king was well enough to see the Lord Chancellor, who, in the course of a lengthy interview, found him ‘rational and collected’. He spoke of ‘foreign politics in a hurried sort of way’, but not, Thurlow thought, with sufficient agitation to suggest he was still ill. As a result, the Lord Chancellor made a very significant decision. Two days later, as the Regency Bill was about to begin its final reading in the Lords, Thurlow brought proceedings to a halt, declaring the king’s recovery made them ‘wholly unnecessary’.181 This effectively put an end to his long confinement.

  George’s doctors could not explain the sudden improvement in his condition, any more than they could account for its mysterious onset. If his complaint was porphyria, his return to better health marked the end of a particularly severe episode of the disease, but it did not mean that he was cured. If the problem was purely psychological, his recovery signified his emergence from a prolonged manic phase; that too, however, offered no guarantee that it would not recur. With either diagnosis, George’s improvement would be best understood as the regressive phase of a deep underlying condition, rather than permanent freedom from sickness. For now, his subjects, with a mix of puzzlement and relief, concentrated only on the good news – especially as the speed of his improvement seemed to accelerate every day.

  On 19 February, for the first time since his arrival at Kew, the king left his rooms of his own accord, and went upstairs to take tea with his wife and daughters. Princess Augusta wrote to Miss Goldsworthy that he had stayed two hours with them. ‘I am so happy that I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw him; he was so exactly what you and all our friends could wish.’182 On the 24th, he met his first minister for the first time since Pitt had attempted to persuade him to leave Windsor for Kew. Perhaps neither of them had expected to see each other again, at least not as king and minister. Pitt observed that the king ‘spoke of his disorder as a thing of the past, which had left no other impression on his mind other than that of gratitude and a sense of what he owed to those who had stood by him’.183 On the 25th, the physicians’ bulletin declared the king entirely free from complaint. The following day, in his first public act since November, George put an end to the issuing of bulletins. His illness was now officially over.

  In practice and in private, however, the king’s recovery was altogether more gradual. He was still being regularly dosed with a tartar emetic, thus preventing, so Willis believed, the accumulation of any remaining malign humours. The metallic-tasting substance was put in his food and drink, in his milk and even in his bread and butter. It was hardly surprising that George did not yet feel ready to resume his duties fully. He told Greville ‘it was his wish to keep quiet, as things were going on so well, and he was recovering so fast’. He knew, he said, that ‘I have no child’s play before me.’184 The king was as good as his word. In his first letter to Pitt since October, he laid out his plans for a complete alteration in behaviour that he believed was vital to preserve his health: ‘I must decline entering into a pressure of business, and indeed, for the rest of my days, shall expect others to fulfil the duties of their employments and only keep that superintending eye which can be effected without labour or fatigue.’185

  Gradually, George began to show himself outside the apartment in which he had been confined for so long. He met Colonel Digby in the library, and greeted him affably, even demonstratively. ‘He quitted his papers, leaned himself back, extending his arms, and came forward with great glee, and said, “Ah Digby!” and took me by the hand and kissed me.’186 By the third week of February, the king had seen his watchmaker, his astronomer, and the gardener who looked after his exotic plants, from whom he was horrified to hear that all the labourers at Kew had been laid off during his illness and had not been paid. And there remained one interview that promised to be far less pleasant, but which could not much longer be delayed. At some point, he would have to meet his eldest sons.

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  The Prince of Wales and Frederick, Duke of York, had been attempting fruitlessly to see their father for some time. They had ‘gone repeatedly to Kew’, wrote Gilbert Elliot, ‘desiring to see the king; but were constantly refused on one pretence or another, although the C
hancellor and many other strangers were admitted’.187 Finally the prince wrote to the queen demanding that he and his brother be given access to their father, or supplied with documents from the physicians explaining why this was impossible. Faced with such a direct challenge, the queen capitulated and a meeting was arranged for 23 February. Willis said that ‘he was not anxious, having prepared the king’s mind’. He had told him ‘of the intended regency, and what day it was finally to have been passed’. The king maintained that he was satisfied and was ready to bear anything ‘vexatious’ that he might now need to be told; but his political instincts had not entirely deserted him – in the same conversation, he told Willis that he fully understood how difficult ‘had been the struggle’ and added ‘had they crushed you, Doctor, they would have crushed me – we must have fallen together’.188

  Almost the first question the king asked, on emerging from his confusion, had been about the conduct of the princes – ‘what his sons had done’ – but he had ‘acquiesced in the propriety of not dwelling on such subjects at present’. As he recovered, the full extent of their actions was revealed to him only gradually; Charlotte once hurried him out of a room to prevent him seeing the newspapers and pamphlets that covered her tables.189 Yet he could not have been unaware of the queen’s bitter, pent-up anger towards both her eldest sons, nor have been totally ignorant of its cause. He had probably not yet heard some of the worst gossip about their behaviour, but as such stories were avidly exchanged around the court, it would have been surprising if none of the rumours had reached his ears. Although they had demanded the meeting, it seems unlikely that the princes looked forward to it with anything but apprehension. Perhaps it was a combination of fear and shame that made them, in defiance of all etiquette and decent consideration, arrive over two hours late for it.

  The king had tried hard to compose himself ahead of what he knew would be a difficult encounter: ‘he made a pause, and after being silent for a few seconds, he took his handkerchief from his pocket, and wiping his eyes with it, said, “it was a maxim of his ancestors of the House of Brunswick never to shed a tear”’.190 Mrs Harcourt heard that whatever had been the king’s intentions, weeping was certainly in evidence once he was face to face with his sons. ‘He caught the princes in his arms with great affection. Both shed tears. He said he always loved them, and should always love them.’ Somewhat unconvincingly, the Prince of Wales declared it ‘the happiest day of his life’. The king, however, was careful not to venture into sensitive territories, and made no mention of any specific actions taken during his enforced absence from public life. The prince confirmed the tactful blandness of the meeting, telling Greville that their talk had been general. The brothers stayed only half an hour; Mrs Harcourt thought ‘they were evidently surprised at the king’s perfect self-possession’.191 Other, more hostile observers thought they were not pleased by their father’s apparent recovery. ‘They went off,’ reported one commentator, ‘quite desperate … and endeavouring to drown their care, disappointment and internal chagrin in wine and dissipation.’192

  Nothing illustrates quite so clearly the limitations of George and Charlotte’s earnest intentions to rewrite the pattern of Hanoverian family history as the behaviour of their eldest sons during the king’s illness. For all their efforts, the crisis revealed a family split along the fault lines of inheritance and succession, exactly as it had been for generations. George and Frederick were seen at their best during the onset of the king’s illness in October the previous year. Gilbert Elliot, admittedly a friendly witness, described the prince’s actions at that point as ‘exemplary’. The prince and his brother both visited Windsor to see their stricken father; the king himself acknowledged that his eldest son had wept on seeing him so ill.193 Frederick wrote regularly to his brother, sending bulletins on the king’s condition that suggest genuine concern for his welfare. Yet both seemed unable to resist the temptation of sharing the most distressing and intimate details of the king’s behaviour with their friends and political allies. ‘The prince and the duke came with this account,’ concluded the Duchess of Devonshire, having listed a catalogue of the king’s bizarre and violent actions, which opened with the declaration that ‘the king is as mad as ever’.194 Having helped feed the hunger for gossip and speculation, it was unsurprising that the princes soon became the targets of it themselves. Lurid stories circulated, asserting that the Prince of Wales had smuggled his friends into the king’s sickroom to hear his ravings, or that he had spied on him through a hole in the wall.195 The brothers were said to have regaled their drinking companions at Brooks’s club with anecdotes of their father’s illness, the prince making full use of his talent for mimicry to imitate his delirium. ‘If we were together,’ wrote William Grenville to one of his correspondents, ‘I could tell you some particulars of the Prince of Wales’s behaviour towards the king and queen within these few days that would make your blood run cold.’196

  It seems undeniable that once the prospect of a regency loomed, the attitude of the princes towards their father did indeed shift. They veered away from solicitude and towards grasping a political prize that would, they believed, wipe out both their huge debts and their sense of powerlessness. Their ambition and self-interest trumped any emotional obligation they felt towards their father. But if both were on this occasion deficient in filial loyalty, that was perhaps a reflection of the king’s inability to show paternal warmth and affection towards his adult children. There may also have been an element of horrified gleefulness in the brothers’ response. For their entire lives, the king had been presented to his sons as the living embodiment of the high moral standards to which it was their duty to aspire. From their shared cradle, he had been held up to them, particularly by the queen, as a model of integrity against which they were to measure their own attempts to live a proper and useful existence. The sons’ defects, they were insistently assured, were all the more apparent when contrasted with the king’s peerless sense of duty and purpose. Having endured a lifetime of lectures on his virtues, it would have required the selflessness of saints not to have experienced some secret satisfaction when his much-vaunted self-control so publicly and spectacularly deserted him. Their father, it turned out, could swear, curse and fight like other men. Like his sons, he too lusted after women, some of them unsuitable, unavailable and inappropriate. Like his sons, he was also revealed to have ambivalent feelings about the queen. His moral superiority had once made him impregnable; his sickness revealed to his eldest sons a vulnerability in which they were neither sufficiently generous nor sympathetic enough to see anything but their own advantage.

  Although the king was disappointed by the response of his eldest son to his troubles, he was probably not surprised. His expectations of the Prince of Wales were already low, and sank steadily by the year. In return, it seems unlikely that the prince felt much genuine or consistent affection for the king. A sentimental romantic, he liked the idea of loving his father; the actual practice of it he found almost impossible. George surely hoped for a better return from his much-loved second son. Frederick was the only one of the princes for whom he asked during his illness – with the exception of the dead Octavius. Yet even his favourite seemed to preserve an emotional distance from his suffering father. Whilst in Germany, Frederick had often acted as the king’s advocate, urging better behaviour on the Prince of Wales. Once back in England he had given up all attempts to act as his brother’s keeper, often outdoing him in excess, particularly at the gambling table. As his conduct became more dissolute, Frederick’s attitude towards his father hardened. Perhaps he was ashamed he had failed to live up to the king’s high opinion of him; perhaps, like his brother, he was seduced by the vision of a life no longer dominated by the long shadow of that difficult, disappointed man. Certainly Frederick responded very coolly to the king’s predicament, writing with calm dispassion to his brother Adolphus that their father was ‘a complete lunatic’.197 The king told Francis Willis that he would rather have been
obliged ‘to his Frederick than to any other individual’ during his illness, but the possibility of throwing in his lot with his beleaguered parents never seems to have occurred to the Duke of York. His lifelong position as the best-loved son did nothing to stop him allying himself with the Prince of Wales when sides came to be taken. The bonds between the two eldest brothers were, in 1789 at least, stronger than those that linked York to the king.

  It was some time before even the semblance of good relations between the princes and their parents was restored. Charlotte was widely reported to be more resentful than the king towards their sons. During the meeting on 23 February, whilst the king embraced the princes, Elliot described the queen’s behaviour as far less conciliatory. She was observed to be very angry, ‘walking to and fro in the room with a countenance and a manner of great dissatisfaction; and the king, every now and then went to her in a submissive and soothing sort of a tone’.198 In March, the situation deteriorated even further. Elliot heard that the Prince of Wales ‘had had a smart tussle with the queen, in which they came to strong and open displays of hostility’. In what was clearly a fraught exchange, all the repressed resentment of the last few months came pouring out. The prince told his mother that she had ‘connected herself with his enemies, and entered into plans for destroying and disgracing him and all her children and that she had countenanced misrepresentations of his behaviour to the king’. Stung into a rebuke, Charlotte ‘was violent, lost her temper, and the conversation ended, I believe, by her saying that she would not be the channel of anything that either he or the Duke of York had to say to the king, and that the king did not mind what either he or the Duke of York either did or said or thought’.199