The queen, deep in despair, blamed Heberden and his short-lived liberal dispensation for all that had happened, and, in the absence of any credible alternative, reluctantly placed Dr Robert Willis in sole control of her husband’s welfare. Halford and the physicians were downgraded and stripped of much of their authority, the council stipulating that they were never to have any communication with the king except in the presence of the Willis brothers. Under their prescription of isolation and inaction, the king disappeared from public and private life. He occupied his own suite of rooms in one of the lower levels of Windsor Castle, furnished with a number of harpsichords, which he played with great gusto. To attend him, he had the Willises and their keepers – and, of course, the company of the dead. In October 1811, he complained to Halford ‘of the noises made by the people of his imagination standing about him, and endeavoured to close his ears against such seeming disturbance’. The doctors were allowed occasional encounters with their nominal patient; once the indefatigable Heberden attempted to read him a newspaper, in the face of Willis’s scornful disapproval. The king paid little attention, but still Heberden held to his conviction that ‘the present medical treatment and management applied to His Majesty’s case are fundamentally and practically wrong’.22
Heberden’s protests made no difference. By the end of 1811, detached physically and mentally from the world, George III’s active life was effectively over; not just as king and a public man, but also as a husband, as a father, and as a self-determining individual. As Princess Augusta wrote sadly to Lady Harcourt, not even his family could reach him now. ‘In all his other illnesses, he was rejoiced to see us and vexed beyond measure when we left him … But this time, he had just the same satisfaction of pouring out his complaints or telling his schemes to us or anyone else.’ He made no distinction now between his loving daughters and strangers, ‘not caring in the least for the individual to whom he was speaking, and wished us good-bye without the smallest unconcern’. She had not seen him ‘but at a distance’ for three months, ‘and now probably I shall never see him again, for under his present melancholy state, I would not see him for worlds; as I cannot serve him, I could do him no good, and he would not know me’.23
The sisters attempted to keep up their spirits, but in such dark days this was difficult. They diligently passed on accounts of the king’s health to their brothers and trusted friends, chronicling the quiet and the bad times, the latter marked by ‘a great deal of very unpleasant laughing’, or ‘a great deal of violent action in stamping with feet upon the floor’.24 Sometimes, Elizabeth confessed, there seemed nothing to hope for but the king’s release. ‘I live in agony and dread its ending suddenly with my father; though his is, I believe the only instance that would not cause me horror; for when well, no man’s life was ever more perfect than his.’ She thought of little else. ‘My head is so full, and my whole thoughts absorbed in this one subject, that it quite kills me.’25
The queen found it almost impossible either to rest or to come to terms with what was happening. ‘My mother is in a constant state of anxiety,’ wrote Elizabeth, ‘very, very nervous and full of fidget in wishing to do her duty in every way.’26 Charlotte attempted to do as she had always done and submit to the unpredictable, sometimes inexplicable dictates of Providence, ‘which alone directs all for the best’.27 She did all she could to overcome the revulsion at her husband’s state that had haunted her since his first illness. In July 1812, she agreed to visit him in his secluded quarters. He had just recovered from ‘a very alarming storm’ of disturbed behaviour and she had no idea what to expect. ‘I found him very quiet in appearance, thoughtful, but excepting asking for his shoes, no other word passed his lips.’28 Even when he was calm, George was unreachable. The sight of him sent Charlotte into despair. ‘I think my mother very much altered,’ Elizabeth noted, ‘at times very low and often complains in her bowels.’29
Depressed and fearful, the queen’s sense of duty, which had seen her through so many difficult years, now faltered; she could not bring herself to behave with understanding to her disturbed and unfathomable husband. ‘I went down to visit the king with the queen,’ Princess Mary told the regent; ‘it was shocking to hear the poor king run on so.’ Charlotte’s ‘unfortunate manner’ often made things far worse:30 ‘An unguarded word by the queen may bring on a thousand unpleasant things,’ observed Mary. After one particularly agonising encounter, Elizabeth asked Halford to speak to Charlotte and, as a medical man, urge her to be ‘more gracious and soothing to the king when he is reasonable’.31 This had no effect; Mary believed her mother was simply incapable of showing the generous, affectionate behaviour which might help ‘the king to make up his mind to his long confinement’. Part of the problem was ‘her extreme timidity’, but Mary also identified a more powerful character trait: the emotional detachment that had resulted in an inborn deficiency in her mother for ‘warmth, tenderness, affection’. She thought that Charlotte would always honour her obligations, but she could not do so with any real loving kindness. In that respect, ‘she always contrives to fail, not only by the king, but, if I may say so, by us all’. This was, as Mary knew, a harsh judgement, but one which had to be faced. If their mother was incapable of supplying the tenderness their stricken father needed, the princesses must provide it instead. And it might be better if they did so alone, releasing the king from encounters both he and the queen found painful.
Mary suggested that she and her sisters ‘might go down two at a time, we might do both the king and queen good and save the queen much fatigue, and it would enable us to speak kindly of her to the king, and agreeably so of the king to the queen, repeating all that could do good, and give comfort to both’. By such means, Mary hoped the princesses might keep something of their parents’ shattered partnership alive. ‘I fear we can never make them a real comfort to each other again, as all confidence has long gone, but I am sure they have a great respect for each other; and the queen loves him as much as she can love anything in the world. I am clear that it is in the power of their daughters, if they are allowed to act, to keep them tolerably together, so far as to make no complete separation, which I own I dread now, if great care is not taken.’32
Mary’s scheme was approved by the queen’s council. Charlotte made no protest; her visits to the king grew increasingly rare, whilst her daughters shouldered the burden of keeping him calm and content. Their actions may have removed one cause of emotional tension; but in doing so, they inadvertently gave rise to another. Charlotte cannot have been unaware that the princesses had displayed a sense of duty and affection far more powerful than her own. They had risen to the challenge where she had stumbled. An unwelcome sense that she had been tried and found wanting nurtured in Charlotte a volatile mix of guilt and humiliation, a prickly sense of aggrieved virtue that did not put her in the best state of mind to deal with the events that were to follow.
In January 1812, the physicians were again asked to give evidence to a parliamentary committee on the king’s condition. All were far less hopeful now than they had been at the beginning of the attack. Baillie thought a recovery ‘highly improbable’, Willis ‘all but impossible’. As a result, the temporary regency, its probationary year now expired, was made permanent, and the prince, after a lifetime of expectation, was confirmed in the exercise of all his father’s powers. At nearly fifty, he was king now in all but name. For the regent, the severity of his father’s illness clarified his position, releasing him from years of uncertainty and impatience. For his sisters, there was no such resolution. Halford had commented in October 1811, that ‘there was not the smallest chance of the king’s recovering his reason, but that he might live for a long time’. In such a situation, what were his daughters to do? Were their obligations to their sick father absolute? Did the future hold nothing for them but perpetual half-mourning, the rest of their lives spent in an ever-deepening seclusion? Or did his incapacity offer them at last, as it had done their eldest brother, a sad kind of
emancipation? If the king did not know them, how could they be essential to his comfort? After so many years of denial, might they not discreetly seek out slightly richer, more varied lives for themselves?
In the shadow of the ‘great calamity’ of what would prove to be their father’s final illness, the princesses sought to redefine the nature of their lives, to grasp a measure of independence that had hitherto been denied them. In this, they were bitterly opposed by their mother, acutely conscious of her own humiliation, and terrified by the implications of her daughters’ determination to free themselves from her control. Where they might have been united in grief, mother and daughters instead found themselves at war.
*
It was an argument about money that precipitated the rift between the queen and the princesses. At the end of 1811, the regent turned his thoughts to practical matters. His precarious financial situation was, as ever, uppermost in his mind. He hoped to increase his allowance from the Civil List, and wrote to the first minister, Perceval, demanding that £150,000 be found to recompense him ‘for regency services’. This was a quite staggering misreading of the political situation. After almost twenty years of global warfare, the economy was stagnant. Trade was paralysed by the difficulties of exporting goods abroad, to markets that were either inaccessible or impoverished. In Britain, desperate men formed ‘combinations’, early trade unions, to protect their skills from new technologies that threatened what few employment opportunities remained. In the manufacturing towns of the Midlands, machinery designed to speed up the process of spinning was destroyed by those whose jobs it displaced. Violence, real and imagined, was in the air. The first minister himself would fall victim to the discontent: in May 1812, Spencer Perceval was assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons by John Bellingham, a merchant with an obsessive grievance against the government.
The response of the regent and the queen to the febrile atmosphere of the times could not have been more different. Like many of the worried wealthy, Charlotte suspected that the riots and other political disturbances were motivated by ‘French principles and money’, but, unlike her eldest son, she displayed, as she had in bitter 1790, some sympathy for the suffering of the poor. Like the king, she was a paternalist of a very traditional kind. Naturally thrifty, she prescribed economy and restraint as the best response to economic difficulties, but was horrified by the high price of bread, which she understood was the staple food of the hard-pressed population. She sought out pamphlets and other publications which suggested ways to alleviate their plight, especially those that offered practical solutions to the high price of foodstuffs. She told Lady Harcourt she was ‘most desirous to obtain true information’ about the use of rice flour, which she had heard might offer a cheap alternative to wheat, ‘which would be an excellent introduction for many poor families’.33 It is impossible to imagine her eldest son demonstrating a similar interest in the wellbeing of the very poor. His ill-timed request for more money showed no sensitivity to the straitened circumstances of a population severely tried by war and hunger, and did his already tarnished reputation a great deal of harm. His well-publicised extravagance, which was frequently and damagingly contrasted with the frugal lifestyle of his parents, ensured that his demands met with a hostile response. Perceval told the regent there was no chance at all that the money he wanted would be granted, and added that in the present difficulties he would not advise asking even for a much smaller sum.
Perceval soon made it clear that he had even tougher measures in mind. He believed the severe economic difficulties under which the country laboured meant that sacrifices were required in all aspects of public expenditure. The king’s situation was very unfortunate, but his enforced withdrawal from many of his royal duties meant that reductions could be made in the cost of running his household. The family were horrified, maintaining that a king was a king, even when his mind was gone. Elizabeth argued that the external trappings of royalty were indispensable, securing its place in the public imagination, and contributing to the respect in which it was held. Perceval was unmoved. The size of the king’s establishment must reflect his diminished role, and economies must and would be implemented.
There was only one request made by the regent which Perceval was prepared to entertain. If the king could no longer act as a king, he was equally unable to do his duty as a husband and father; this meant that Charlotte and the princesses were no longer provided for, ‘deprived of the supplies afforded them hitherto by His Majesty’. The regent suggested an allowance for the queen of £50,000 per annum, with £9,000 each for his sisters. Perceval was sympathetic to these ideas, but the queen was not, and declared herself passionately opposed to the whole project. She wrote a long and angry letter to the minister, rejecting the very idea of retrenchment, decrying ‘the principle of extreme economy which seems to pervade the proposed plan’ and ‘the inadequacy of the proposed provision’. She was horrified at the consequences she believed would result for royal employees, especially for ‘the oldest servants, those who are encumbered with families … thrown upon the world without bread for themselves or their families’.34
Charlotte’s concern for her servants was doubtless genuinely felt; but her strongest objections to the changes were rooted in the plans made for herself and her daughters. She was particularly unhappy at the suggestion that her allowance would not be given to her personally, but would be included in the sums put aside for the king. She feared ‘accusations of encroachment’ if she was thought to take too much for herself from their joint fund, and was furious that the princesses were not subject to any such restrictions and would be granted their incomes individually. As she explained to Perceval in her grandest third-person voice, the distinction thus made between herself and her daughters could not be justified. ‘She conceives that the adoption of the principle by which the princesses are set upon an independent footing, furnishes a strong ground for her own claim to a separate and distinct Establishment at the present period.’35 The princesses’ allowances and her own soon became an obsession with her; but, as quickly became clear to everyone, and especially to her daughters, the queen’s resentment was only partly attributable to the way in which the payments were to be made. At the heart of her hostility was the principle of paying the princesses at all. With an income came the prospect of an establishment; and with an establishment came the promise of independence.
The term ‘establishment’ contained within itself a multitude of meanings. On one level, it related to tangible, practical things: access to an adequate income, occupation of an appropriate home. It also implied something about the social and, indeed, moral status of the possessor. To be ‘established’ was to have taken up a settled position in life, to have fulfilled one’s personal destiny. It was a mark of maturity and brought with it a degree of respect and self-determination. For women, it was nearly always marriage that delivered them an establishment, in the traditional forms of a husband, a family and a household to run. It was occasionally possible for a single woman to enjoy some of the privileges usually granted by the more conventional route of married life. Wealthy widows, protected by an inheritance, were perhaps the most free of all propertied women, their position secured by both law and social position. Occasionally, a spinster might acquire for herself some of the trappings of independence, if cushioned by wealth and in possession of the kind of forceful personality that refused to bow to conventional niceties. A generation earlier, Princess Amelia, George II’s formidable unmarried daughter, had carved out an agreeable life for herself, dominated by card playing and the taking of an occasional lover. But for most unmarried women, even those from aristocratic families, their fate was not unlike that of George and Charlotte’s daughters: a life spent in the family home, ministering to ageing relations, with little status and no self-determination, rarely treated as an adult, whatever their age. An income and an establishment changed all that. It offered the prospect of emancipation from a life of extended infantilism, from the rest
rictions imposed by fathers, brothers, mothers. To be established was to be allowed to make choices: to choose who to see, where to go and what to do, to live as a mature and thinking person. It was, as the queen recognised, an implicit declaration of independence. Her daughters understood that, and for the first time in their lives refused to buckle under the weight of their mother’s passionate displeasure. If they could not emancipate themselves through marriage, they would do so with the help of their eldest brother and an income of £9,000 a year.
In the face of their mother’s anger, the sisters did all they could to stand firm. This was not always easy, especially when they felt they were adding to the burdens of their much-loved elder brother. They worried that the proposals would exacerbate his political difficulties. They knew that the queen had been relentless in her campaign to prevent him approving the plans for the allowances, haranguing the prince on every possible occasion, pursuing him even on his sickbed when he was taken seriously ill. His sisters hated to see him tormented in this way. ‘For God’s sake, don’t let us be the cause of any mischief or distress,’ Mary told her brother. ‘We have so long submitted to a thousand disagreeables, and are so used to our situation, that we are all quite prepared, I assure you, not to be disappointed.’ His peace of mind must come first. ‘We shall be miserable if we hear that you have been vexing yourself, and making yourself ill.’36 Sophia too was sufficiently concerned to write to the regent. In a letter she addressed as coming ‘From the Nunnery’, she shared her sister’s anxiety not to cause him any further trouble: ‘My heart overflows with gratitude for all your noble and generous intentions towards us which, should you succeed or not, our gratitude is much the same. The only thing that frets and worries me, is that your kindness to four old cats may cause you any désagréments with the ministers. I could forfeit anything sooner than we should be the cause of this.’ As the bitterness of her language suggests, Sophia viewed the situation of herself and her sisters in a very poor light indeed. She was unsparing in both her despair and self-hatred: ‘Poor old wretches as we are, a dead weight upon you, old lumber to the country, like old clothes, I wonder you do not vote for putting us in a sack and drowning us in the Thames. Two of us would be fine food for fishes, and as for Miny and me, we will take our chances together.’37
The Strangest Family Page 72
