The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  In June, the king took his wife and daughters to recuperate at Weymouth. None of the royal women had wanted to go, terrified that his behaviour would be subject to unwelcome public scrutiny. Elizabeth had written to Willis in despair at the very idea. ‘Oh, consider the precipice we stand upon … here we can keep a secret … but at a public water-drinking place, the thing’s impossible, and was he to expose himself there, I firmly believe we should die of it, for what we go through now is almost more than we can stand.’98 In fact, the king behaved perfectly well during his time by the sea. Glenbervie saw him in July, and although he thought him ‘very much altered indeed, with … an emaciated face and his clothes hanging about him’, also saw that he took care to avoid ‘any unnecessary hurry’ and ‘every thing of fatigue’ so that he felt himself ‘gradually gaining ground’.99 ‘I have been a very unhappy man for the last four months,’ the king assured a concerned courtier calmly; ‘however, it is all over now.’100

  A year later, Glenbervie saw him again at Weymouth, ‘in the hottest of dog days, at a very crowded play, where two tolerable female performers danced a sort of dumb show duet to the tune of “God Save the King”, the audience standing up and humming in chorus. The king remained seated, attentive to his own applause, but not unbecomingly so.’101 It may have seemed as though the equilibrium of royal life, disturbed yet again by the jolt of the king’s illness, had been restored to a kind of order – but this was not the case.

  At the beginning of January 1804, the king was attacked by painful symptoms of gout. At a party held for the queen, ‘He was too lame to walk without a cane,’ observed Lord Malmesbury, a guest at the event, ‘and his manner struck me as so unusual and incoherent I could not help remarking on it to Lord Pelham.’ Pelham, who was playing cards with the queen, noticed that her attention was not on the game: ‘her anxiety was manifest, since she never kept her eyes off the king, during the whole time the party lasted’. By the end of the month, ‘it could no longer be concealed that the king had a return of his old illness’.102

  For a fortnight, the royal physicians attempted to cope with the king’s relapse. By mid-February, when it was apparent that his mind was as impaired as his body, Addington sent for the Willises. However, when they arrived at the Queen’s House, they were refused entry by the Dukes of Kent and Cumberland. The dukes explained to Addington that their father had, after his last illness, extracted ‘a solemn promise and engagement’ from them both, by which they undertook ‘to use every means in our power to prevent anyone of the Willis family from being placed about him’. Forcing them upon him would, they thought, ‘be productive of an irritation of mind from which the worst consequences might be apprehended’; but significantly, it was not only their father’s health which they feared would suffer from the return of the Willises. ‘We are fully convinced that if it were persisted in, another evil of the greatest magnitude would in all probability ensue – no less a one than His Majesty taking up a rooted prejudice against the queen.’ The dukes believed no argument would ever persuade the king that Charlotte had not agreed to the Willises’ presence during his previous illness. The king was right – it was indeed at Charlotte’s behest that he had spent an extra month confined at Kew under the humiliating supervision of the detested doctors. He was determined this should never happen again, and extracted a binding commitment from his sons to prevent it. As a result, the dukes were resolved to avoid ‘the consequences to be apprehended from such a calamity’ in which ‘the destruction of the peace of the whole family would be involved, more especially the female part of it’.103 Reluctantly, Addington capitulated, and Dr Simmons, physician to St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, was appointed in place of the Willises.

  The king’s illness followed a pattern similar to the attack in 1801. For forty-eight hours he seemed close to death, and for some weeks afterwards remained in an extremely unsettled state. As ever, his condition pressed hardest on his wife and daughters; the princesses felt very severely the burden of supporting their mother, whilst also comforting their disturbed father. ‘The king never left us till half past seven,’ wrote Mary to her eldest brother on 13 February, ‘and such a day I never went through in my life.’ Amelia had been sent away, as ‘she had not been strong enough to bear such scenes of misery’.104 The queen’s nerves were ‘shot to pieces’, confided Elizabeth to Lady Harcourt, adding that she herself had ‘never quitted my mother’s room morning, noon, nor night … I am told I am very much altered, look twenty years older … [but] if my father gets well, what care I for my looks?’105

  By May, he was no better. Edward, Duke of Kent, noted that his father was hurried and restless, and that ‘a great coolness of manner towards our mother is predominant, and a general asperity towards the whole family on the subject of his confinement frequently shown’.106 Mrs Harcourt, now back in England with her soldier husband, confirmed Edward’s bleak assessment. She observed that ‘the king was apparently quite well when speaking to his ministers or those who kept him in a little awe; but that towards his family and dependants, his language was incoherent and harsh, quite unlike his usual character’. Dr Simmons, she thought, could not control him, unlike the Willises, ‘who had this facility to a wonderful degree and were men of the world’. With no one to discipline his actions, the king turned the household upside down: ‘he had dismissed and turned away and made capricious changes everywhere, from the Lord Chamberlain to the grooms and footmen’. All this ‘had afflicted the royal family beyond measure; the queen was ill and cross and the princesses low, depressed and quite sinking under it’.107 Most unlike his normal abstemious self, the king developed a voracious appetite. He had also begun once more to draw up extravagant architectural designs, planning building after building to replace existing royal homes with no consideration for the expense involved. His unpredictable whims and manic energy reduced his wife and daughters to exhaustion. ‘God knows, I am more wretched than I can express,’ confessed Amelia to the Prince of Wales, ‘and I can see no end to it. Could an extinguisher fall upon the whole family, I think, as things are, it would be a mercy.’108

  George was in no condition to undertake his usual summer sojourn in Weymouth, but he was determined to go; it is a measure of the collective inability to defy him that he got his way, despite the well-placed misgivings of his family. From the minute of their arrival, the king’s behaviour attracted curious and increasingly disapproving attention. Sir Robert Wilson, a visitor to the resort, kept a critical account of the king’s actions, describing them with a combination of prurience and relish. He noted that the king vacillated between ‘being sometimes very intelligent and communicative, at other times sullen or childishly trifling’. He was particularly shocked to observe that ‘his original propriety is a fugitive quality’.109

  George’s new-found willingness to engage in suggestive sexual banter came as a great shock to those around him. On 1 October, he went on an excursion on the royal yacht with three of his daughters and one of their ladies, a Mrs Drax. Wilson heard that the king had ‘commenced the conversation … by observing, “Mrs Drax, you look very well, very well indeed dear lovely Mrs Drax, how I should love to stroke you.”’ As everyone on board the Royal Charlotte knew, ‘stroke’ was then a colloquial term for sexual intercourse. ‘The officers of the ship and many of the sailors who heard the speech, which was attended with particular emphasis and strength of voice, could scarcely contain themselves.’ Sir Robert, clearly something of a prude, was shocked to find that ‘the speech of the king was not misunderstood by any even of the youngest of the ladies’, including, presumably, the three princesses.110

  From the beginning, the king’s illness had been characterised by what his son Edward called ‘a variety of shades, some of these highly unpleasant’.111 The courtier George Villiers told William Pitt that he had personally witnessed ‘what is quite wrong, particularly at the stables yesterday before the grooms, indecent and obscene beyond description’.112 Colonel Macmahon, a friend of the Pr
ince of Wales’s, said he had been told by the princes themselves that their father ‘gives loose to every improper expression, and is so violent in his family, that all dread him’.113 As in 1788, the king certainly seemed to be in the grip of a strong sexual impulse. He again wrote love letters to Lady Pembroke, the object of his obsession in his first bout of madness. She was now, like him, approaching old age, but still as dignified as ever. ‘In favour of his taste, she is the handsomest woman of seventy I ever saw,’ admitted Lady Bessborough.114 Colonel Macmahon heard that the king wished ‘to take Lady Pembroke into keeping … but that if Lady P declines his offer (which he has made through Dundas his apothecary) he will then make it to the Duchess of Rutland’.115 An ever-growing number of aristocratic female courtiers were cited as having attracted his less than honourable attentions. ‘The king frequently threatens to keep a mistress,’ wrote Sir Robert Wilson, ‘and several times has declared that since he finds Lady Yarmouth will not yield to his solicitations, he will make love elsewhere.’116 Lord Essex reported in November that George had now set his sights upon a woman closer to his daughter’s age than his own. ‘I hear Lady Georgiana Bulkeley is supposed to be a favourite, for in this subject he still continues to be absurd and to talk as much nonsense as ever … he calls Lady Georgiana Venus, and I find there is a party of the princesses against her.’117

  The king also sought satisfaction rather closer to home. Glenbervie recorded that George rode out two or three times a week to call upon the Princess of Wales in her exile at Blackheath. She told Lady Glenbervie that she dreaded his visits, claiming that her father-in-law persistently tried to seduce her, that ‘the freedoms he took with her were of the grossest nature’.118 On one occasion ‘he made such a violent attempt on her person that it was with the greatest difficulty she escaped being ravished by him’. He had thrown her down ‘on one of the sofas, and would certainly have ravished her, if, happening to be without a back, she had not contrived to get over it on the other side.’119

  The Princess of Wales was not always the most reliable of witnesses, but during his illness the king had clearly lost all sense of which women were legitimate objects of desire, and which were not. Glenbervie heard rumours that the king could not always be trusted to behave appropriately even with the closest female members of his family. For a while, he had not been allowed to travel alone in a coach with the queen ‘or any other of the ladies, a circumstance which seems to confirm the very many well-authenticated reports concerning one particular symptom attending his disorder’.120 The Marquess of Buckingham heard that whenever the king went out on an airing in a coach, he was only ever accompanied by one of his sons, ‘the queen and princesses following in another carriage, having found it impossible to control the king to any propriety of conduct in their coach’.121 The Duke of Kent saw it as evidence of his father’s improving state of health that by June he again possessed enough self-control to ensure that ‘to all my sisters, [he was] particularly kind, but in a proper and not in an outré way’.122 But as late as December 1804, Sophia admitted all was still far from well, confiding in her friend Mrs Villiers that her father was ‘all affection and kindness to me, but sometimes an over-kindness if you can understand that, which greatly alarms me’.123 At the very time when it was first rumoured she had been impregnated by her brother, Sophia was fending off the unwelcome attentions of her sick and delusional father. No wonder she described herself as ‘wretched’.

  As his illness drew him into ever darker places, the king turned on his wife with the same passionate rejection that had marked his behaviour to her in 1788. He abused her to the Princess of Wales, explaining that he had determined to part from her ‘and had made arrangements accordingly’.124 He declared ‘before his sons and the princesses that … he’ll never have connexion more with her’. In fact, it was the queen who seems to have put an end to whatever sexual relations had survived the king’s sickness in 1801. Now she was implacable. ‘I have never been able to ascertain the cause of the queen’s great disgust for the king since his last illness,’ mused Sir Robert Wilson, ‘for disgust it amounts to, but no doubt she must have very good reasons to resist nature, her duty, the advice of physicians and the entreaties of ministers, for all have interested themselves in the matter.’125 Even on the night of their wedding anniversary, in September, ‘when it had been presumed that the king would be allowed to sleep with the queen, which hitherto had not been the case’, she refused to allow him into her rooms. ‘The precautions are, first the occupation of the bedchamber by the two German ladies at an early hour. When the queen retires, two or three of the princesses constantly attend her, and stay until the king leaves the apartment.’126 Malmesbury heard the same story. In his account, Charlotte ‘never says … a word; piques herself on this discreet silence; and … locks the door of her white room against him’.127 Sophia, called upon to undertake the uncomfortable task of acting as the queen’s chaperone, hated the horror of the situation – and resented her mother deeply for involving her in it. From a position of limitless reverence for her father, whose behaviour to her seems to have done nothing to diminish him in her eyes, Sophia had no doubt the queen should have done her duty and submitted to her husband’s demands. She could not bear to sit in her mother’s bedroom and hear the king dismissed. ‘Will you believe she keeps us there and at last says, “Now sir, you must go for it is time to go to bed” – My God … how can she refuse him anything?’128 Her mother’s heart, she thought, must be ‘as hard as stone’. It was not, she insisted, that ‘I am insensible to [the king’s] faults, but I know what he was. And how can I love him less when I reflect that this sad change arises from the will of God?’129

  By the autumn of 1804, it was clear that much of the warmth and affection that had sustained the king and queen’s marriage for over forty years had withered away. The old habits of intimacy that had withstood so many pressures and difficulties finally shrivelled into nothing under the impact of George’s illness. It seems unlikely that they ever slept together again; soon it was apparent that they no longer wished even to share each other’s company. ‘Nothing can be worse than he is with the queen,’ wrote Lord Essex ruefully. ‘That breach is, I believe, never to be healed, beyond the outside appearances.’130

  Even after his slow recovery, the king showed no desire for the old, uxorious way of life. He decided not to return to the Queen’s Lodge at Windsor, where he and Charlotte had lived before his illness, and began to restore the castle itself, creating apartments where ‘he could select his own society’. ‘He sees the queen now but in company,’ recorded Glenbervie, spending most of his time with the Princesses Sophia and Amelia, avoiding the other members of the family, ‘all of whom he suspects of caballing against him’.131 Lord Auckland too had heard that ‘within the family there are strange schisms and cabals and divisions amongst the sons and daughters’. Auckland acknowledged that the king never mentioned the queen with overt disrespect, ‘but he marks unequivocally, and by many facts that he is dissatisfied with her and is come to a decided system of checking her knowledge of what is going forward’. He clearly regarded the new arrangements as permanent, and ordered his library to be sent down to Windsor from the Queen’s House in London. ‘The discontinuance of all residence at the town house’ seemed to Auckland to indicate ‘another mark of separation’. ‘It is a melancholy circumstance to see a family that had lived so well together for such a number of years completely broken up,’ lamented one of Auckland’s correspondents.132

  Charlotte herself made only an opaque comment on her new situation. ‘We are now returned to the castle in our new habitation,’ she wrote to Lady Harcourt, ‘and I will only tell you that I have changed from a really comfortable and warm habitation to the coldest house, rooms and passages that ever existed, and that all idea of comfort is vanished with it.’ Did she refer solely to the underheated rooms she occupied, or was there a nod to the chillier emotional landscape that now surrounded her? ‘I tell myself every moment �
� il faut s’y faire – but oh! Stubborn heart!’ It was hard, she acknowledged sadly, not to give way to ‘melancholy reflections’.133

  It must have been a dispiriting task to survey the bleak outcome of so many years of devotion to the shared ideal of rational, affectionate, family harmony, to see the relationship which she had tended so assiduously, for so long and at the cost of so many other thwarted desires, founder so completely on the unfathomable mystery of her husband’s illness. In the spring of 1805, when the new life had become more familiar to her, Charlotte wrote again to Lady Harcourt, attempting to summon up her accustomed attitude of resignation. It was fortunate, she concluded bitterly, that it was impossible to predict the future, for it was best not to know what unhappiness it would bring. ‘I acknowledge fairly that I have every day more reason to adore Providence for keeping us in ignorance of what is to come, as I am perfectly sure that with our best endeavours to prepare for it, we should miss our aim. For our walk within this twelve month has been in a maze, but n’importe, I will go on, do my duty and endeavour not to forfeit the good opinion of those I love and also the world, for I am not above that.’134 As she so often said, she would put a good face on what could not be changed, and endure, because she could do nothing else.

  What the king thought, as he surveyed the troubled landscape of his family life, riven by dissension, scarred by unhappiness and dragged down by a powerful undertow of unacknowledged frustration, must remain conjecture, as he confided his feelings on the subject to no one. Perhaps he did not allow himself to contemplate the ever-widening gulf between the optimism of his early hopes for a new kind of domestic happiness, and the bleak reality of more recent experience. George had never been a particularly reflective man; he was not given to fluent articulation on big subjects, especially where they touched upon ideas and emotions. The grand family mission had always been for him a project to be lived rather than talked about, and, as it began to founder, he showed no willingness to examine – publicly at least – what had gone wrong. To do so would have involved asking some very uncomfortable questions about his own role in its collapse, and nothing in his character suggests that he would willingly have undertaken such a potentially painful form of self-examination. Instead, like the queen, he sought to put the best possible construction on what had been achieved, concentrating on those aspects of his private world that still offered fulfilment and pleasure, and carefully turning his gaze away from more challenging issues.