Opposition to the king’s administration moved out of Parliament and onto the streets, where working men, inspired by events in France, formed societies to challenge the entire basis of the constitutional settlement. These radical movements were often underpinned by an ideological opposition to the very existence of kingship. For their most extreme members, it was not only the institution of monarchy that came under attack, but the person of the king himself. In his pamphlet King Killing, published in 1795, the radical bookseller Richard Lee argued that the assassination of kings was not murder, but ‘a patriotic duty’. There was nothing sacred or untouchable about the person of a prince; his murder was, Lee declared, entirely justified as ‘the infliction of terrible justice by the people’.74 This was the same year in which George’s carriage had been attacked as he went to open Parliament. Two years later, a former British Army officer, Edward Despard, and a small number of conspirators were charged with plotting to assassinate the king en route to Parliament; their group was infiltrated by informers, and Despard was tried and hanged.
George’s response to the challenges – both personal and political – he faced in the final decade of the century was constant: he never wavered in his conviction that firm and decisive action was as necessary in the war against political radicalism at home as it was against the revolutionary armies abroad. He was personally courageous in the face of genuine threats to his own safety, and was also tireless in his attempts to rally the propertied and the anxious to the loyalist cause. He showed himself to the public – in the south of England at least – attending reviews of troops and inspecting local yeomanry exercises. He personally congratulated the commanders of successful naval actions, rewarding admirals on their quarterdecks and ensuring enterprising officers were duly promoted. He led the procession of Naval Thanksgiving held in St Paul’s in 1797, receiving a better reception from the London crowds than he had two years before. He took a deep interest not only in the strategic prosecution of the war, but also in the administration of military matters, commenting on issues as abstruse as the proposed reform of the dockyards or the commissioning of captains in the West Indies stations.75
As a result, at least amongst those who felt they had a stake in the existing order, the tide of opinion turned steadily in George’s favour. The monarchy was increasingly seen as a totem of order and continuity, a counterbalance to the insecurities and chaos of France exemplified by the horrors of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. The rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, who became First Consul in 1799, and was crowned emperor five years later, also shifted the nature of the conflict in Europe, making it less a battle of ideologies and more a struggle of national powers in which it was easier for most Britons to decide where their loyalties ultimately lay. The transformation is nowhere better demonstrated than in a comparison between two satirical prints made by the master of the form, James Gillray. In 1795, Gillray had drawn the king, sitting unmoved in his coach, assailed on all sides by missiles, including a dead cat, whilst his coachman Pitt drives over the shattered figure of Britannia; the crowd waves a French flag inscribed ‘Peace and Bread’. The image could be read as one of royal imperturbability in the face of danger; but it also suggests an indifference to the plight of suffering subjects, and a willingness to trample over traditional rights in the service of self-preservation. In 1803, George appears very differently. Gillray portrays him as Jonathan Swift’s King of Brobdingnag, a giant image of benign authority, holding a tiny Napoleon in his hand, inspecting him with a spyglass. George, uniformed, grizzled and hefty, regards the newly crowned emperor with relaxed contempt. The king is now the embodiment of all the virtues that will eventually ensure a British victory: immovable, stoic; dismissive of the gimcrack, gaudy pretensions of a strutting enemy.
The consolidation of George’s role as the personification of British patriotism did not arise from his own exertions alone; he was the beneficiary of a shift in attitudes brought about by political forces operating far beyond his power. He had never been an original philosophical thinker, nor a strikingly imaginative politician; but his exacting, solid qualities now appeared far more attractive than they had done at any time in the previous three decades. His sense of endurance and application, his limitless capacity for detailed, bureaucratic work, his willingness to identify with the hopes and aspirations of the unsophisticated heartland of the nation he ruled all earned for him a degree of general approbation.
But then, just as his reputation was thrown into positive relief by changing times, he stumbled, reviving for his family terrifying memories of the ordeal that had threatened to overwhelm them in 1788, and which they had prayed never to have to endure again.
It began, as it had done before, with a chill. On 15 February 1801, George was visited by the new first minister, Henry Addington, who found him ‘with a severe cold upon him, and almost total loss of voice’; a few days later, Addington called again and found the king ‘wrapped up in a long black velvet cloak’. He also noticed that ‘his manner was more hurried, and his countenance more heated than usual’.76 By the 19th, he was worse. ‘Bad accounts from the Queen’s House,’ commented Lord Malmesbury. ‘The answer at the door is, the king is better but it is not so – he took a strong emetic on Thursday and was requested to take another today, which he resisted.’ Malmesbury was worried. ‘God forbid he should be ill!’77 No one wanted to put a name to their fears, but everyone felt them, especially those closest to the sufferer himself. ‘The prince yesterday, after seeing the king, said to the queen he was heated and feverish; the queen, with warmth, hastily said, “He is not. He has not been feverish.”’ Glenbervie thought everyone was in a state of wilful denial. ‘Not a hint of his state of mind, of his ever being mad in his life, or the Catholic question having ever existed.’78
In fact, as suggested by Glenbervie’s reference to ‘the Catholic question’ in the same breath as the king’s madness, everyone in the political world knew the king had spent the previous few months in a condition of extreme and all-consuming anxiety. He had been horrified by the declared intention of his then first minister William Pitt to remove, at the earliest possible opportunity, historic restrictions imposed on Catholics that prevented their holding major public office in Britain. The recent Act of Union with the Parliament of Ireland made it impossible, Pitt believed, to sustain a policy that excluded so many British subjects from full participation in political life. The king, however, was implacably opposed to the measure, believing that it violated his coronation oath to uphold and protect the Established Church of England. Pitt would not back down and, in the midst of a ferocious controversy, offered his resignation on 3 February 1801, which two days later the king felt obliged to accept. It was the end of a political partnership that dated back to 1784. Without his valued first minister, George was utterly bereft. Pitt left office on 5 February; the king’s illness began a few days later. For most observers, the two events were closely linked. ‘Fatal consequence of Pitt’s hasty resignation,’ noted Malmesbury gloomily.79
By 22 February, the king had deteriorated even further. The true extent of his illness could no longer be denied, and Thomas Willis was again summoned. He found the king in a very bad state, ‘in the height of frenzy fever, as bad as at the worse period when he attended him in 1788’.80 ‘It is now known that the king is deranged,’ wrote Glenbervie in his journal. On the same day, at a private concert, the Prince of Wales was overheard declaring that ‘my father is as mad as ever’. His brother William took a similar view. ‘Well, we shall have it all our own way now,’ he assured a shocked courtier, ‘for he is not only mad but dying.’81
At the end of the month, death indeed appeared the most likely outcome of the king’s worsening condition. Malmesbury did not think a Regency Bill would need to be drawn up, as ‘the case was different’ from that of 1788. ‘There was no room to fear a lasting derangement of intellects; he would either recover or sink under the illness; and the physicians said that at his time of life, the probability
of one of these events happening much sooner than in 1788 was very great.’82 On the evening of 3 March, it looked as if it was all over. The king’s fever increased and he fell into a coma, with his teeth clenched, unable to swallow. The doctors were so certain he was dying that the queen, the Prince of Wales and the princesses were summoned to take their leave of him.
Then, in the midst of the crisis, he started to rally. Thomas Willis had given him ‘a strong dose of musk’ to stimulate his nerves; the politician Henry Addington, who had replaced Pitt as first minister, had recommended the use of a pillow stuffed with hops to bring on sleep, a favourite remedy of his father, a country doctor of the old school. Both claimed success for their own remedy. By 5 March, the king could sit up and even feed himself.
The news of his recovery was greeted with spontaneous relief. Glenbervie watched with astonishment ‘the crowds on foot, on horseback and in carriages who press through all the avenues to see the bulletin’ that announced the king’s improvement. ‘They are prompted by various motives, but I really believe love, affection and pity for the king predominate.’ He recounted a story that poignantly illustrated what the king had endured in his two weeks of confinement. On the very morning of the celebrations, ‘when the king was dressing … and the page had laid his ordinary dress by him, he turned to Willis and said, “Must I put on the [strait] waistcoat?” and Willis replied, “I trust in God, sir, that it will not be necessary.” What can be so affecting?’83 A year later, Glenbervie was to hear darker accounts of the king’s treatment at the hands of the Willises. ‘The king cannot bear the name of any of the family, and he ascribes the weakness which he now complains of in his limbs to their severity during his illness.’ Their ‘only medicine was the strait waistcoat and they generally employ that improperly’; it was also said that they beat him ‘most violently’.84 But no one – not least the king himself – wanted to cast a shadow across the apparently rosy prospect of his steady progress to complete recovery.
On 6 March, the king wrote to senior members of the Cabinet declaring himself entirely well again. He received in reply, Malmesbury reported, a letter from Pitt, ‘which was dutiful, humble and contrite and said he would give up the Catholic Question’. ‘Now my mind will be at ease,’ responded the king. The next day he met the Duke of York, who found him ‘looking pale and ill, but perfectly collected’. The king, who had determinedly forgiven his second son for his behaviour at the time of his previous illness, was sufficiently in control of himself to tease the duke about his obvious apprehension. ‘Frederick, you are more nervous than I am; I really feel quite well, and I know full well how ill I have been.’ He went on to enquire about the queen’s health, ‘and expressed great solicitude lest she and the princesses should have suffered a great deal of uneasiness on his account. “They certainly did, sir,” replied the duke, “but the only uneasiness now remaining on their minds … [is] lest Your Majesty should, as you get well, not take sufficient care of yourself.” Much affected, the king declared, “You may depend upon it … Be assured, I will be more careful for the future.”’85
Sadly the duke’s cheerful vision of the welcome awaiting the king as he prepared to re-enter family life could not have been further from the truth. The reappearance of her husband’s mania had awoken all the fears Charlotte had suppressed for nearly thirteen years, and she now dreaded his return to her presence. As in 1788, she was terrified of being left alone with him. When Thomas Willis met her on 12 March, she was in a desperate state, ‘greatly distressed’ and adamant that ‘she wished not to remain so long with the king. It was more than she could sustain,’ she told Willis, who recorded in his notes that ‘she appeared to despair’.86 But now that the king was officially cured – he had resumed state business some days before – she had no choice but to take her place by his side.
She did so with extreme reluctance. When the royal couple, together with Princesses Mary and Amelia, went on an excursion to Battersea, it was a difficult experience for them all. The king was irritable and excited. Princess Elizabeth told Willis that the queen endured ‘a hard time of it’ in the coach whilst the king vented his anger on everyone around him. On her return, Charlotte told Willis that if she was obliged to accompany her husband in the coach again, she would not see him in the evening.87 Willis conceded that the king was very voluble, and that he concentrated his attentions on his wife, which Willis accepted she might find ‘irksome and distressing’; but he could offer her no respite. The king was much offended by Charlotte’s obvious anxiety in his presence, ‘talked much of German coldness’ and deeply resented any attempt she made to avoid his company.88 The doctors did all they could to encourage her to spend more time with her husband, but she would not be persuaded, and in early April Glenbervie heard that ‘the queen is sometimes two days without seeing him’.89
However, on 16 April, all Charlotte’s attempts to put some distance between herself and her husband were overturned when, with the tacit approval of his doctors, the king ‘crept upstairs to the queen’. He was now so well, Willis declared, that ‘there was no objection to his sleeping above stairs in the queen’s apartment’.90 Charlotte never told anyone what took place when the king joined her in the privacy of her rooms – she confessed to Willis that the king ‘had sworn never to forgive her if she relates anything that passes in the night’ – but whatever happened, it was clearly too much for her to bear. Three days later, acting on her mother’s wishes, Princess Elizabeth wrote to Thomas Willis asking him and his brothers to return and take the king under their care again. Willis did not need to be invited twice; but he sought to legitimise his actions by appealing to Addington. The first minister refused to accept responsibility for the king’s possible detention, and referred Willis back to the queen. It was a measure of Charlotte’s desperation that she, usually so cautious and tentative in pursuing any course not sanctioned by her husband, was willing to authorise Willis’s actions, ‘only requesting that she might not be named or be supposed to know anything that was intended’.91
On 20 April, the Willises entered the house in Kew where the king was staying and effectively took him into custody. ‘I spoke to him at once of his situation, and the necessity there was that he should be immediately under control again,’ wrote Willis; ‘His Majesty sat down and … looking very sternly at me, exclaimed, “Sir, I will never forgive you while I live.”’92 The queen told Willis she was ‘very thankful’ for what he had done, telling him ‘it is not to be conceived what I have endured for the last five nights’.93
If her own experiences had not been enough to convince Charlotte that all was far from well with the king, his attitude to their errant daughter-in-law confirmed her worst fears. The Princess of Wales, living in increasingly eccentric isolation in Blackheath, was still the object of the prince’s passionate detestation. She had, as a result, few friends among her female relations, who mostly took his side in the destructive battles that erupted periodically between them; and her imprudent friendships with unsuitable men had not endeared her to the king. She was, therefore, as she told Glenbervie, ‘very much surprised’ to find her father-in-law arrive without warning at her villa on 18 April. She assumed he had come to visit his five-year-old granddaughter but, as he explained, it was she and not Princess Charlotte he had come to see. He began by declaring ‘his entire approbation of her conduct and his affection for her’, adding that he had thought about her a great deal during his illness. He had resolved to visit her as soon as he was well, to assure her ‘that she would in future find the greatest kindness from all his family, with the exception of one, he was sorry to say’.94 In a final flourish, he assured the bemused princess: ‘I shall always regard you as a sixth daughter’. (The Princess Royal, lost to marriage in far-off Germany, perhaps no longer qualified as a proper daughter in the king’s mind.)
The king knew his visit would cause disquiet among his wife and daughters. On his return, he ‘bid them guess where he had been’. Everyone imagined he had gone t
o see his granddaughter; but the king soon put them right. ‘I have been to see the Princess of Wales and I was determined none of you should know till I had been there.’95 The queen saw clearly that the king’s sudden embracing of the princess’s cause could only make his already sour relations with their eldest son even worse. But she was also fearful that his new-found interest in his daughter-in-law might conceal a more predatory intent. Princess Elizabeth confided to Willis that the king was ‘most extraordinary about the princess – you do not know how he torments and plagues Mama about it’. He ‘was very full of taking the Princess of Wales over to Hanover’, saying ‘he would take her away by stealth’. Caroline herself, who relished anything dramatic or exciting, added to the family’s sense of foreboding by telling Elizabeth ‘she would never reveal what had passed’ when the king came to Blackheath. It was hardly to be wondered at that, as a result, the queen was ‘frightened to death’, and welcomed her husband’s renewed confinement at Kew.96
Even when he was securely under Thomas Willis’s eye, Charlotte tried to regulate the degree of intimacy she was expected to extend to her husband. If she and her daughters agreed to walk with him, she said they should not be required to attend him in his rooms as well, and was ‘extraordinarily angry’ when Willis failed to enforce this. She complained when the king smuggled letters out to her, and Princess Elizabeth was instructed to write to Willis, telling him ‘not to suffer’ any more such missives to leave his apartments. For nearly a month the king made the best of it, bizarrely conducting public business from inside his informal place of detention, but, by 19 May, he had had enough. He informed the Lord Chancellor that ‘unless he were, that day, allowed to go over to the house where the queen and his family were, no earthly consideration should induce him to sign his name to any paper, or do one act of government whatever’.97 Faced with the imminent implosion of the entire machinery of government, Willis and the queen capitulated. The king left the apartments where he had been closeted for a month and went to rejoin his family. It was Charlotte’s fifty-seventh birthday.
The Strangest Family Page 66
