fun with Fischer, the celebrated oboe player, and the various
amusements in which I was engaged, the season was one of gaiety,
mirth, and enjoyment. The well-known bet of five guineas between
Bach and Fischer was made in the presence of his Royal Highness
and of us all. The bet was that Fischer could not play his own
minuet. He was a very nervous man, and after allowing him to get
through a few bars, Bach stood before him with a lemon in his
hand, which he squeezed so that the juice dropped slowly. Then
he bit another so that the juice ran out of his mouth freely.
Fischer tried once or twice to get rid of the water that must,
on such a sight, fill the mouth; but not being able to conquer
the sensation, he was obliged to own himself beaten.… Another
joke was played off upon poor Fischer this merrymaking season,
to this effect: After the concert, which Fischer attended twice
a week at Richmond or at Kew, wherever the King and Queen were,
he used eagerly to seize upon the supper before he went to
London. Upon one occasion, the Prince came in and said, “I have
ordered something that I know you like,” a dish was brought in,
and when the cover was lifted, out jumped a rabbit. Germans have
a particular dislike to that animal in every shape and form;
therefore it is easy to conjecture poor Fischer’s state of mind.
This joke cost him only the loss of his supper, but many nights
succeeded before he could be prevailed on to again enter the
eating-room.
Making a butt of a dependent seems no princely pastime; but this lady has
worse to tell us of the “First Gentleman in Europe’s” amusements at the
age of sixteen. “Much do I lament to add that some of those about the
young princes swerved from principle, and introduced improper company
when their Majesties supposed them to be at rest, and after the divines
had closed their day with prayer.”
The first open scandal about the Prince was his intrigue with the
unfortunate “Perdita” Robinson, who turned many a head beside his by her
acting in _The Winter’s Tale_. We know very little about that episode
except what the lady thinks fit to tell us in her Memoirs. The boy lover,
not yet eighteen, was so closely kept at Kew that for some time he
had to content himself with ardent letters. At length an interview was
arranged under circumstances which suggest that the tutorial turnkeys
must have been in the way of nodding over their port. Lord Malden, who
played Leporello in this amour, brought Perdita to an inn on the island
between Kew and Brentford, to await the signal that should invite them to
cross.
The handkerchief was waved on the opposite shore; but the signal
was, by the dusk of the evening, rendered almost imperceptible.
Lord Malden took my hand, I stepped into the boat, and in a few
minutes we landed before the iron gates of old Kew Palace. The
interview was but of a moment. The Prince of Wales and the Duke
of York (then Bishop of Osnaburg) were walking down the avenue.
A few words, and those scarcely articulate, were uttered by
the Prince, when a noise of people approaching from the palace
startled us. The moon was now rising; and the idea of being
overheard, or of his Royal Highness being seen out at so unusual
an hour, terrified the whole group. After a few more words of a
most affectionate nature uttered by the Prince, we parted, and
Lord Malden and myself returned to the island. The Prince never
quitted the avenue, nor the presence of the Duke of York, during
the whole of this short meeting. Alas! my friend, if my mind was
before influenced by esteem, it was now awakened to the most
enthusiastic admiration. The rank of the Prince no longer chilled
into awe that being who now considered him as the lover and the
friend. The graces of his person, the irresistible sweetness of
his smile, the tenderness of his melodious yet manly voice, will
be remembered by me till every vision of this changing scene
shall be forgotten.
[Illustration: LOOKING UP THE THAMES]
Repeated assignations, she says, followed “at this romantic spot,” where
now the party took courage to continue their walks till past midnight.
Prince Frederick and Lord Malden, we are to know, were always there to
play gooseberry. The lady wore a dark-coloured dress, and the gentlemen
were disguised in greatcoats, except that harum-scarum Bishop, who would
make his companions uneasy by showing himself in an unclerical buff coat,
“the most conspicuous colour he could have selected for an adventure of
this nature.” The tutors having got into their nightcaps by midnight,
one supposes, these moonlight ramblers even ventured on a little music
as the food of love, Frederick being the minstrel whose tones, “breaking
on the silence of the night, have often appeared to my entranced senses
like more than mortal melody.” It is clear that Perdita does not tell the
whole story. Mrs. Papendiek, well up in the gossip of the backstairs,
roundly asserts that two officials who had been about these princes from
childhood, “privately overlooked the domestic vices and irregularities of
their young charge,” and that they smuggled Mrs. Robinson through a back
gate to the Prince of Wales’s apartments.
The beautiful actress, who was a poetess, too, _à ses heures_, might well
be dazzled by those shining personalities. The Prince vowed unalterable
love till death; and the most convincing of his _billets-doux_ was a bond
promising to pay Perdita £20,000 at his majority. Perhaps he was sincere
for the moment; but we know what such callow vows come to. When, at
eighteen, he became to some extent his own master, this unhappily married
woman was taken into keeping, and for a time cut a notorious dash before
the footlights of society. After Florizel grew tired of her, Perdita’s
gushing sentimentality did not overlook businesslike considerations. She
let the King buy up the Prince’s letters for £5000; and his bond was
commuted for a pension of £400. But, these profits swallowed up by debts
and extravagant habits, the poor creature fell into bad health and hasty
authorship. Paralysed and harassed, she died in 1800, buried by her own
desire, “for a particular reason,” in Old Windsor Churchyard, where her
tomb may be seen fenced in with spiked railings to defend it from the
body-snatchers that infested those river-side graveyards; and on it may
be read an oft-quoted epitaph idealising the painful facts of her career.
At Richmond lived Mrs. Fitzherbert, the Prince of Wales’s more lasting
flame, to whom he appears to have been honestly, if illegally, married.
When this Prince was launched upon the wicked world, and the Bishop _in
partibus_ had been sent off to finish his education abroad, the royal
pair still had their quiver full of youngsters, who for twenty years came
so fast as to be cue for Horace Walpole’s jesting prophecy that “London
will be like the senate of old Rome, an assembly of princes.” Besides
others who died young, there were the princes afterwards known as Dukes
of Clarence, Kent, Cumberland, Sussex, and Cambridge, and the Princesses
Charlotte, Augusta, Mary, Elizabeth, Sophia, and little Amelia, the
darling of her father. Where all these children were stowed away, one
cannot always make out clearly: we hear of the Princes William and Edward
living with their tutors in what is now Cambridge Cottage, and two of
the younger boys in a house at the top of the Green. Lady Charlotte
Finch, governess to the princesses, had a separate house near the river;
then another is spoken of as the “Princess Elizabeth’s house.” Kew House
itself was a scrimply inconvenient mansion, for which the royal household
made a tight fit even in its state of reduced ceremony. Pictures of it
when it was the Princess Dowager’s villa, show a square, plain front with
two one-storied wings, from which in all thirty-two windows look straight
out upon the lawn. At that time it bore the _alias_ of “The White
House.” Miss Burney describes it as a labyrinth of stairs and passages,
where at first she continually lost herself among the “small, dark, and
old-fashioned” rooms.
It is in 1786 that a search-light comes to be turned upon this
semi-private life by the diary of a then most popular novelist. At
the end of the year before, Fanny Burney had been staying with her
venerable friend, Mrs. Delaney, at Windsor, when one afternoon into the
drawing-room walked, unannounced, a burly man in black with a star on
his breast. Even the short-sighted visitor hardly needed to be told
who he was. As every one in the room drew back out of the way, she was
for slipping off; but the King asked in a loud whisper, “Is that Miss
Burney?” and after good-naturedly giving her time to recover from her
modest confusion, entered upon a conversation of questions, punctuated
with _what, whats_, in which he showed himself very inquisitive as to
how she had come to write and print _Evelina_. The Queen soon followed,
to whom George introduced her by repeating their conversation; and
Miss Burney went to bed enraptured with her new acquaintances. Further
interviews followed, which only increased her admiration, though the
satirist rather than the courtier peeps out in her account of directions
given her for behaviour in the presence of royalty.
Her demeanour certainly gave satisfaction in the royal circle, for a
few months afterwards she was offered the post of one of the Queen’s
dressers, which she accepted after some modest misgiving. We remember
Macaulay’s indignation, “That with talents which had instructed and
delighted the highest living minds, she should now be employed only
in mixing snuff and in sticking pins; that she should be summoned by
a waiting-woman’s bell to a waiting-woman’s duties; that she should
pass her whole life under the restraints of a paltry etiquette, should
sometimes fast till she was ready to swoon for hunger, should sometimes
stand till her knees gave way with fatigue, that she should not dare to
speak or move without considering how her mistress might like her words
and gestures.”
This engagement was certainly a mistake on both sides: Miss Burney
might have found more congenial employment; and the Queen could have
had a better dresser. But Macaulay, after his manner, has rather
over-emphasised the evils of her lot in the royal service. She certainly
took it as a rise in the world, and to her father it seemed dazzling
good fortune. The remuneration offered her, with the chance of further
favour, might well have satisfied even successful novelists of that day,
few among whom would not have jumped at such admission to the skirts of
Court life. Her year’s salary, £200, was almost as much as she got from
her second novel, and far more than the proceeds of her first one; then
Macaulay slurs over the Queen’s generosity in presents. To look at the
matter in no mere terms of pay, literature probably lost little by her
laying down the pen for a time; her best work had been done in _Evelina_;
_Cecilia_ was a falling off; and _Camilla_, written after her experience
of service, did not deserve the pecuniary success won for it, in part, by
royal patronage. In her diary, Miss Burney herself makes little serious
complaint but of the ill-tempered tyranny of her senior colleague, Mrs.
Schwellenberg. Court life soon ceased to be a little heaven below for
her; but she had distractions in royal journeys to Oxford, Cheltenham,
Weymouth, seats at the trial of Warren Hastings, glimpses of great folks,
and even spells of moral flirtation with at least one gentleman of the
household, not to speak of rather troublesome attentions from another
who was a married man. She cannot say too much of the kindness of the
King and the princesses; and if her “sweet Queen” proved sometimes an
inconsiderate mistress, it was from want of thought rather than a hard
heart. The confinement upon which Macaulay lays such stress was no
stricter than that of most domestic ladies, who had not Windsor Park and
Kew Gardens to walk in. Had she been more robust, the novelist might have
lived on to become a second Mrs. Delaney in the royal esteem. But her
health broke down, and after five years’ genteel servitude she retired on
a pension of a hundred pounds.
During these years the Court had its summer head-quarters at Windsor.
Every second week, the “Royals” spent from Tuesday to Friday at Kew,
using this as a half-way house for St. James’s, where on Thursdays the
Queen held her fortnightly drawing-rooms. This was Miss Burney’s hardest
job. She had to be up at six on drawing-room days, with hardly time for
breakfast, to help in dressing the Queen, who put on most of her finery
at Kew, the “tippet and long ruffles” being carried in paper to save
them from dust; then the final touches were added at St. James’s, where,
after the function, the idol had to be undecked--in all, three laborious
attendances and two journeys, from which the tired keeper of the robes
got back to dinner not till nearly seven o’clock, as then seemed a very
late hour.
In winter, when the Court moved to London, there would be no going to
Kew, which indeed was not fitted up as a cold weather residence. When
it came to be occupied for months during the King’s illness, strips of
carpet and sandbags had to be provided to make the princesses tolerably
comfortable. All the luxury of this house was outside, in its spacious
gardens. But the want of state was made up for by the more home-like
life of Kew, though that had also its disadvantages; the ladies and
gentlemen were not free to see their friends where the King and his
younger children might at any time come wandering along the passages and
poking into the small rooms. There was not even a chapel in the house;
and when the Royal Family happened to spend a Sunday here by some chance,
they heard prayers in a private room, through the door of another, where
the chief attendants took their place, the servants being edified in an
outer apartment, which reminds us of the complaint of one of Queen Anne’s
chaplains that he had “to whistle the Gospel through the keyhole.” It was
later that George III. fitted Kew Church with a gallery to serve as royal
pew.
Towards the end of 1788, this routine was painfully broken upon by the
King’s illness, which began during one of his temporary stays at Kew,
prolonged then for more than a week, to the great discomposure of the
household, ill-provided with clothes, or with books in Miss Burney’s
case. The cause of the attack was said to be His Majesty’s sitting in wet
stockings; but for some time back signs of strangeness had been noted in
him, who had enough to disorder his mind in the conduct of his eldest
sons, and in his brooding over the loss of the American Colonies. Miss
Burney’s diary gives a vivid picture of those wretched days at Kew, when
no one felt sure what to say, and some, like herself, hardly knew what
to think of the rumours that filled the house. The King was noisy and
voluble beyond his wont, talking himself hoarse in his assurances that
there was not much the matter with him, mingled with complaints that he
could not sleep. More than once Miss Burney found the Queen in tears.
Charlotte had good reason for anxiety: she must have been aware of the
character of a similar attack near the beginning of the reign, which had
passed off so quickly that it could be hushed up.
By October 25, George seemed so much better that he moved to Windsor,
where his restlessness and weakness grew worse again. He obstinately
insisted on going out to hunt as usual in the November weather, yet he
had to confess that all at once he had become an old man. A few days
later there was a terrible commotion in the family. It leaked out that
at dinner the King had broken into positive delirium, seizing his eldest
son by the collar and pushing him against the wall. The Prince is said
to have burst into tears, while the Queen had a fit of hysterics. Her
husband could with difficulty be persuaded to spend the night in a
separate room, from which all night long she heard his ravings, now no
secret to any one in the house.
The King’s death being looked on as imminent, the Prince of Wales at
once took command of the misery and confusion at Windsor. His heartless
conduct during his father’s illness is matter of history, as also
the bitter struggle between his faction and Pitt’s Ministry on the
Regency question, the former maintaining the very unwhiggish doctrine
that royal authority should pass, in the circumstances, into the Heir
Apparent’s hands, while the Tories would make him Regent only with the
sanction of Parliament, and under restrictions. The rabble was now on
the King’s side; and all respectable persons, not being partisans or
place-hunters, were disgusted by the profligate Prince’s conduct. The
doctors attending the King had been threatened with popular violence if
his illness proved fatal. Their case was a hard one, as not only would
the royal patient not always take their remedies nor even see them, but
they were treating a complaint then ill understood even by physicians who
professed special experience in it. It is said that poor George was put
in a strait-waistcoat, chained to the wall, and actually struck by one of
his keepers, which would be quite after the practice of that day. But the
stories of his harsh treatment are somewhat dubious, for the notion that
he was being ill-used often figured among his delusions.
At the end of November the doctors determined on removing him to Kew,
where he could get exercise in the privacy of the Gardens. The King
angrily refused to leave Windsor, and had to be coaxed away by a promise
that he should see his wife and children, gone on before him. “Princes,
equerries, physicians, pages--all conferring, whispering, plotting and
caballing, how to induce the King to set off!” noted Miss Burney, who
accompanied her mistress on their hasty flitting to Kew House, where the
Prince of Wales had written in chalk over each room the name of its
occupant. Everybody had to put up with the discomfort of being crowded
together in that ill-furnished mansion. The only good rooms were given up
to the King, those above being left empty that he might not be disturbed.
Part of the household overflowed into the Prince of Wales’s house
opposite; the younger children being lodged in their usual quarters on
Kew Green. Pent up closely with “the Schwellenberg,” Miss Burney had her
full share of troubles; but her womanly devotion rose to the occasion,
and she declares that “not even the £20,000 prize in the lottery
could, at this time, draw me from this melancholy scene.” She had the
satisfaction of being employed, every morning, to carry the physicians’
report to the Queen, who, by her enemies, was accused of doctoring those
bulletins to give the most favourable view of symptoms on which, for
once, doctors differed.
The Prince of Wales and his partisans listened rather to those big-wigs
of the profession that were most gravely shaken over a case they did not
understand. They perhaps agreed best in looking askance on an outsider
called in upon the removal to Kew. This was the Rev. Mr. Willis, who
at Lincoln, and in a private asylum of his own, had shown the benefit
of a more rational treatment of the insane. Though he had a medical
degree, he was belittled as a quack by many members of a guild apt to
suspect innovators; but his success had been so notable that he was
now employed, with his sons, trained in his methods, to be constantly
about the King. From the first he took a hopeful view of the case; and
when, with occasional interference, he was allowed to have his way, it
soon appeared that he was the right man in the right place. His secret
seems to have been a mixture of kindness and firmness; but perhaps he
was not above using nostrums of his own. Mrs. Papendiek, whose husband
was in attendance, says that one of the remedies used was musk, the
smell of which the King could not bear, but the doctor insisted on it as
efficacious. He took the responsibility of giving the King a razor to
shave himself, for which he was afterwards denounced almost as compassing
_Lèse-majesté_; but on all such questions he stipulated for leave to go
by his own experience and judgment.
Had this been in the era of newspaper kodaking, we should no doubt have
fuller details of the King’s madness, as to which more or less doubtful
stories leak out in the memoirs and letters of the day. He is described
as wanting to climb the Pagoda, and on being thwarted, throwing himself
sulkily on the ground, from which it took four or five men three-quarters
of an hour to raise him. Another day he tried to throw himself out of a
window. The worst symptom was his incessant garrulity: he would go on
talking for hours about everything or nothing. One of the doctors once
found him translating the Court Calendar into doggerel Latin. The most
pathetic story is that of his being overheard earnestly praying for
his recovery. At times he showed touches of humour and shrewdness. He
managed, though it had been forbidden, to get hold of a copy of _King
Lear_, Dr. Willis not being strong in literature; and when his elder
daughters were first allowed to visit him, he told them “I am like poor
Lear; but thank God! I have no Regan, no Goneril, but three Cordelias.”
Once he reproached Willis with having given up his sacred calling for
profit; and when the reverend doctor excused himself on the precedent of
Christ healing demoniacs, “Yes,” said the King, “but He did not get seven
hundred a year for it!”
The Willises, by the way, afterwards complained of their remuneration,
whatever it was; but their treatment of George III. made an excellent
advertisement for the family, one of whom was sent for to Lisbon in the
case of a mad Queen of Portugal. They seem to have given some offence
in the household by the position they had to assume. Great was flunkey
indignation when four of Dr. Willis’s keepers were raised to brevet-rank
as pages, that after his recovery they might remain beside the King in
case of a relapse. About that time several of the regular pages seem
to have been dismissed or disgraced, it is said for carrying tales to
the Prince of Wales. These “pages,” of course, had now grown into adult
servants above mere menial rank, such beardless boys as figure in history
and romance being distinguished as “pages of honour.”
[Illustration: THE PAGODA]
Poor Miss Burney was so worn out that one of the doctors, noticing her
wan looks, insisted on her taking daily exercise, such as was the
prescription for the King. As the orders were to keep every one out of
his way, she made a point of inquiring whether he would be in the Kew or
the Richmond grounds; but once there was a misunderstanding that led to
the most violent agitation of her life. While tramping her constitutional
round of Kew Gardens, through the trees she saw three or four figures,
whom at first her short-sighted eyes took for workmen, till she was too
late aware of His Majesty’s person among them.
Alarmed past all possible expression, I waited not to know more,
but turning back, ran off with all my might. But what was my
terror to hear myself pursued!--to hear the voice of the King
himself loudly and hoarsely calling after me, “Miss Burney! Miss
Burney!”
I protest I was ready to die. I knew not in what state he might
be at the time; I only knew the orders to keep out of his way
were universal; that the Queen would highly disapprove any
unauthorised meeting, and that the very action of my running
away might deeply, in his present irritable state, offend him.
Nevertheless, on I ran, too terrified to stop, and in search of
some short passage, for the garden is full of little labyrinths,
by which I might escape.
The steps still pursued me, and still the poor hoarse and
altered voice rang in my ears--more and more footsteps resounded
frightfully behind me--the attendants all running, to catch their
eager master, and the voices of the two Doctor Willises loudly
exhorting him not to heat himself so unmercifully.
Heavens, how I ran! I do not think I should have felt the hot
lava from Vesuvius--at least not the hot cinders--had I so run
during its eruption. My feet were not sensible that they even
touched the ground.
Soon after, I heard other voices, shriller, though less nervous,
call out “Stop! stop! stop!”
I could by no means consent; I knew not what was purposed, but I
recollected fully my agreement with Dr. John that very morning,
that I should decamp if surprised, and not be named.