disobedience like this, were doubled in the thought of not
escaping. I knew not to what I might be exposed, should the
malady be then high, and take the turn of resentment. Still,
therefore, on I flew; and such was my speed, so almost incredible
to relate or recollect, that I fairly believe no one of the whole
party could have overtaken me, if these words from one of the
attendants had not reached me, “Doctor Willis begs you to stop!”
“I cannot! I cannot!” I answered, still flying on, when he called
out, “You must, ma’am; it hurts the King to run.”
Then, indeed, I stopped--in a state of fear really amounting to
agony. I turned round, I saw the two doctors had got the King
between them, and three attendants of Dr. Willis’s were hovering
about. They all slackened their pace, as they saw me stand still;
but such was the excess of my alarm, that I was wholly insensible
to the effects of a race which, at any other time, would have
required an hour’s recruit.
As they approached, some little presence of mind happily came to
my command; it occurred to me that, to appease the wrath of my
flight, I must now show some confidence; I therefore faced them
as undauntedly as I was able, only charging the nearest of the
attendants to stand by my side.
When they were within a few yards of me the King called out, “Why
did you run away?”
Shocked at a question impossible to answer, yet a little assured
by the mild tone of his voice, I instantly forced myself forward
to meet him, though the internal sensation which satisfied me
this was a step the most proper to appease his suspicions and
displeasure, was so violently combated by the tremor of my
nerves, that I fairly think I may reckon it the greatest effort
of personal courage I have ever made.
The effort answered: I looked up, and met all his wonted
benignity of countenance, though something still of wildness in
his eyes. Think, however, of my surprise, to feel him put both
his hands round my two shoulders and then kiss my cheek!
I wonder I did not really sink, so exquisite was my affright when
I saw him spread out his arms! Involuntarily, I concluded he
meant to crush me; but the Willises, who have never seen him till
this fatal illness, not knowing how very extraordinary an action
this was from him, simply smiled and looked pleased, supposing,
perhaps, it was his customary salutation.
She was soon relieved to find the King talking reasonably enough, though
with a certain flightiness, not very different from his ordinary manner.
He insisted on prolonging the interview, after the Willises in vain tried
to cut it short. He talked of Mrs. Schwellenberg, seeming quite well
aware of what Miss Burney had to bear from her “Cerbera”; of the lady’s
own father, author of the _History of Music_; of his favourite composer,
Handel, snatches from whose oratorios he tried to hum over with painful
effect. As they walked on together, he asked endless questions about his
friends, expressed his intention of appointing new officials, complained
angrily of his pages. At last he was persuaded to part from this
reluctant confidante, promising to be her friend as long as he lived;
then she went off to the Queen with a report which ensured forgiveness
for that innocent adventure.
The favourable symptoms continued, little to the satisfaction of the
Prince and his friends, who are credited with passing brutal jests on
the King’s condition. Just as power seemed to be within their grasp, the
Regency Bill was shelved, after an audience given by the King to the Lord
Chancellor, Thurlow, though that shifty Polonius is said to have remarked
that His Majesty had been “wound up” to talk to him. Miss Burney, who now
confined her walks to the roadside, had the happiness of thence seeing
the royal pair walking arm-in-arm in Richmond Gardens. Next day, the King
came to tea with his family in the drawing-room; then, a few days later,
meeting Miss Burney in the Queen’s dressing-room, he said that he had
waited on purpose to tell her--“I am quite well now--I was nearly so when
I saw you before--but I could overtake you better now.” After four months
of royal misery and public excitement, the evergreen sneerer, Horace
Walpole, could note--“The King has returned, not to what the courtiers
call his sense, but to his non-sense.”
The news called forth an outburst of public joy, that hit the Prince’s
party hard. A thanksgiving prayer was read in every church; and later on
the King, to the dread of his advisers, would not be satisfied without
the excitement of attending a solemn service at St. Paul’s, where he and
the princesses were moved to tears, while his graceless sons attracted
attention by their irreverent chattering. There is some slight palliation
for the Prince of Wales’s conduct throughout this trying time, in the
fact that the King had showed a dislike to him, and even a want of
fairness to his shortcomings; but the Duke of York, always the father’s
favourite son, has no excuse for backing up his undutiful brother. Soon
after the recovery was announced, London had hailed it with a general
illumination, from rushlights in the humblest cottage window to blazing
devices on the clubs. It was witnessed by the Queen and all her daughters
except the youngest, while, in their absence till the, for them, most
unwonted hour of 1 A.M., Kew House too was lighted up and adorned with a
transparency displaying _The King--Providence--Health--Britannia_; and on
either side of the gates, in gold letters on a purple ground, shone these
most loyal lines:--
Our prayers are heard, and Providence restores
A patriot King to bless Britannia’s shores.
Nor yet to Britain is this bliss confined,
All Europe hails the friend of human kind!
If such the general joy, what words can show
The change to transport from the depth of woe,
In those permitted to embrace again
The best of fathers, husbands, and of men?
Inside the house also the Muse was not silent. His darling Princess
Amelia came to kneel before him, presenting her father with verses in the
Queen’s name, from the pen of her novelist-attendant.
[Illustration: THE WATER LILY POND]
Amid a rapturous Nation’s praise
That sees thee to their prayers restored,
Turn gently from the general blaze,--
Thy Charlotte woos her bosom’s lord.
Turn and behold where, bright and clear,
Depictured with transparent art,
The emblems of her thoughts appear,
The tribute of a grateful heart.
O! small the tribute, were it weigh’d
With all she feels--or half she knows!
But noble minds are best repaid
From the pure spring whence bounty flows.
P.S.--The little bearer begs a kiss
From dear papa, for bringing this.
In the middle of March, after their unusually long stay at Kew, the royal
family moved to Windsor, the King riding on horseback, to be received by
the townsfolk with an ovation of welcome. In June, to complete the cure,
he went to Weymouth for sea-bathing, everywhere on the journey hailed
with acclamations and demonstrations that might well have turned a weak
head. At Weymouth, the exuberant loyalty of the people was embarrassing.
All the shops and bathing-machines placarded _God Save the King_, a
device repeated on the bonnets and waists of the bathing-women, as indeed
on dresses all over England. “All the children,” reports Miss Burney,
“wear it in their caps--all the labourers in their hats, and all the
sailors _in their voices_; for they never approach the house without
shouting it aloud--nor see the King, or his shadow, without beginning to
huzza, and going on to three cheers.… Nor is this all. Think but of the
surprise of His Majesty when, the first time of his bathing, he had no
sooner popped his royal head under water than a band of music concealed
in a neighbouring machine struck up ‘God save great George our King!’”
It was now that occurred the ludicrous incident of the wooden-legged
Mayor presenting an address, and not being able to kneel, to the scandal
of the officials. And here, the “Royals” having gone on a day’s visit
to Sherborne Castle, for the first time in three years Miss Burney had
a holiday, which she spent with a friend in a “romantic and lovely
excursion” to the ruins of Sandsfoot Castle near the neck of Portland
Island, a peep into which she might have found more romantic, had some
couple of miles not been a Georgian lady’s limit on foot.
After a tour through the loyal West country, the Court returned to its
routine of London and Windsor life, with halts at Kew in the summer. But
henceforth Miss Burney’s diary has little to say about Kew; and after
another year we lose that peep-hole into royal domesticity. The life of a
glorified waiting-maid began to tell upon her health and spirits: “Lost
to all private comfort, dead to all domestic endearment, I was worn with
want of rest and fatigued with laborious watchfulness and attendance.”
Her chief comfort had been a sort of intermittent philandering with
the Queen’s Vice-Chamberlain, Colonel Digby--the “Mr. Fairly” of her
journals--a favourite with the King, too, to whom he could “say anything
in his genteel roundabout way.” This gentleman the lady clearly admired
none the less when he became a widower, though to us she presents him
rather too much in the character of a priggish novel hero, full of
edifying reflections and opinions. But the sentimental friend turned out
not impeccable, for he married Another, the “Miss Fuzilier,” about whom
his fellow-servant had often rallied him; and she cannot conceal that
this choice seemed unworthy of him. Her health was so evidently breaking
down that her literary friends cried out on the sacrifice; even the
newspapers gossiped about her condition; and the meddlesome Mr. Boswell
declared that he would set the whole Club upon Dr. Burney, if she were
not allowed to resign.
This she was most loth to do. She tried taking “the bark,” but that did
little good. The Rev. Dr. Willis volunteered a prescription which she
found “too violent” in its effect, while grateful to him for his interest
in her. “Why,” said he, “to tell the truth, I don’t quite know how I
could have got on at Kew, in the King’s illness, if it had not been for
seeing you in a morning. I assure you they worried me so, all round, one
way or other, that I was almost ready to go off. But you used to keep
me up prodigiously. Though, I give you my word, I was afraid sometimes
to see you, with your good-humoured face, for all it helped me to keep
up, because I did not know what to say to you, when things went bad, on
account of vexing you.”
Every one noticed her miserable plight, yet the Queen showed herself
too blind to the fact of a life being wasted in her service. Even the
ill-tempered Mrs. Schwellenberg was kind in her way, who seems to have
found this subordinate a pleasingly submissive victim, and occasionally
spoke well of her behind her back: “The Bernan bin reely agribble!”
This “Cerbera,” whatever her faults, had the virtue of devotion to her
lifelong mistress, and could not understand living by choice out of
sunshine of Court favour. She tempted Miss Burney with the dazzling
prospect of her own post in reversion. But the novelist was sick of her
gilded cage. With trembling knees, after long hesitation, as if it were
a crime, in the form of a petition she offered her resignation, not
over-graciously received. The Queen proposed a six weeks’ holiday, a
change of air. When this was declined, the Schwellenberg raged against
Miss Burney and her father as almost guilty of treason. “I am sure she
would have gladly confined us both in the Bastille, had England such
a misery, as a fit place to bring us to ourselves from a daring so
outrageous to imperial wishes.”
She held on some months longer to let the Queen find a successor, secured
in the person of a Hanoverian pastor’s daughter, Mdlle. Jacobi, who, for
sign of family poverty, brought a niece with her in the disguise of maid.
Miss Burney’s last King’s birthday ball under the royal roof was marked
by a visit to Mrs. Schwellenberg’s room from the young Duke of Clarence,
our future sovereign, of which the diarist jotted down a long and most
amusing description, though she has to apologise for not giving a full
“idea of the energy of His Royal Highness’s language.” He insisted upon
them all drinking the King’s health in champagne so often that some of
the courtly attendants were a little shaky on their legs; and as for the
Sailor Prince, he got so drunk that, as he told his sister next morning,
“You may think how far I was gone, for I kissed the Schwellenberg’s
hand”--and he might have added, bid her “Hold your potato jaw, my dear!”
If this be a true sketch from high life, the novelist need not be accused
of exaggerating the manners of her Braughtons and Captain Mirvans.
Among her last duties was expounding to the inquisitive King and
Queen the allusions in Boswell’s _Dr. Johnson_, in 1791 the book of
the day, which Miss Burney hardly approved of, being one of the few
who “by acquaintance with the power of the moment over his unguarded
conversation, know how little of his solid opinion was to be gathered
from his accidental assertions.” Now she was at pains to vindicate to
her royal patrons “the serious principles and various excellences” of
her famous friend. The year before, when Boswell visited her at Windsor,
he had in vain pressed her to contribute “personal details” to his work.
“You must give me some of your choice little notes of the Doctor’s; we
have seen him long enough upon stilts; I want to show him in a new light.
Grave Sam, and great Sam, and solemn Sam, and learned Sam--all these he
has appeared over and over. Now I want to entwine a wreath of the graces
across his brow; I want to show him as gay Sam, agreeable Sam, pleasant
Sam: so you must help me with some of his beautiful billets to yourself.”
The last day of Miss Burney’s five years’ slavery dawned at Kew, from
which she attended Her Majesty to St. James’s, and there took leave of
her with deep emotion. Freedom, congenial society, and country air soon
restored the lady’s health; and the faithless Colonel Digby’s place in
her heart became more than filled by General D’Arblay, one of a colony
of French _émigrés_ settled at Juniper Hill above Mickleham, near her
sister’s house, and her friends, the Lockes of Norbury. Lessons in one
another’s language gave excuse for meetings, at which Cupid was soon
of the party. The not-over-young couple married in haste and privately,
but seem never to have repented. With the proceeds of the bride’s next
novel, _Camilla_, they built Camilla Cottage, still conspicuous, as
Camilla Lacey, on the slopes above Box Hill station; but at the peace
General D’Arblay went back to France, where his wife became for years an
involuntary exile.
Mrs. Papendiek has a mischievous statement that Miss Burney was dismissed
on account of the Queen’s displeasure that she used her spare hours for
writing a novel in the palace; and that the authoress was much mortified
by the loss of her post. But this seems mere scandal. Madame D’Arblay
owned to writing an unsuccessful tragedy at Kew and Windsor; and some
years after, when _Camilla_ was published, she confessed to the King and
Queen that the “skeleton” of it had been jotted down under their roof,
at which they expressed no displeasure, but graciously acknowledged the
dedication with a gift of a hundred guineas. The same gossiping authority
says that Miss Jacobi did not recommend herself to the Queen, nor to “old
Schwelly,” who refused to allow that niece-maid to dine at her table. A
few years later Mrs. Papendiek herself succeeded to the post once held
by the novelist, for which she was much fitter, to judge by the space
given to dress in her journals. But these records end before she entered
upon her duties; and we know little more of her Court life but that she
gained promotion in the royal household, from which she retired to spend
her old age at Kew.
In 1805, another literary lady came into the service of Queen Charlotte,
Miss Cornelia Knight, afterwards companion to the Prince Regent’s
daughter. Her journals are much more discreet about the royal family
than Miss Burney’s; and there is a hiatus in them for most of the period
of her living at Windsor, where she gives little more than hints of
dissensions and grudges in the highest circles, and a general impression
that Kew had fallen out of its old favour. All these three writers had a
common point, in being able to boast of Dr. Johnson’s acquaintance, most
intimate in the case of Miss Burney.
Thorne, in his _Environs of London_, as also the official guide, have
it that the King was confined, during his first illness, in the present
palace, apart from his family; and this statement is followed by a
mob of guide-books, _servum pecus_, that often go tumbling after one
another into the same ditch. But Miss Burney and other witnesses prove
that it was not so; and Thorne has misled himself in his reference to
George Rose’s _Diary_. Rose clearly refers to the next serious attack in
1801. It was whispered that in 1795 there had been a recurrence of the
symptoms, passing off in a few days. But at the beginning of the next
century, when the King’s mind was agitated by the resignation of Mr. Pitt
on the Catholic Emancipation question, he caught a bad cold that ended
as before. This time the illness began at Buckingham House; then, after
His Majesty seemed fit to attend to business again, on his going to Kew
a severe relapse took place, shown by his informing the Prince of Wales
that he proposed to abdicate the English Crown and retire to Hanover or
America.
It was now that he came to be separated from his family, and confined in
the “Dutch House” under charge of the Willises, to whom he had taken a
strong dislike, and is said to have struck one of them before his removal
could be effected by force. The father no longer appears as taking the
leading part in the King’s treatment; but one of the sons for a time
was the fly-wheel in the State, since through him all papers had to be
presented for the royal signature. When the Lord Chancellor was admitted
to the King’s sick-room, he vehemently declared, “as a gentleman and a
king,” that he would sign no document nor perform any act of sovereignty
unless he were that very day restored to his wife and daughters; and he
was then taken back to the house over the way, to be still more or less
closely watched by the Willises.
Dr. Thomas Willis,[1] writing at this time to Mr. Rose in the King’s
name, tells that his own quarters are on Kew Green, “a few doors below
the _Rose and Crown_,” a tavern still standing in less transmogrified
state than its neighbour, the _King’s Arms_, also mentioned in books
of that period. Kings reign and pass away; kingdoms flourish and fade,
mansions rise and fall, while public-house signs often seem to have more
permanence in them than most human institutions. Yet of them too _transit
gloria_, if we may believe the report that half the taverns of England
at one time took Wilkes’s head for their sign, as to which evidence of
popularity he himself used to tell how he overheard a loyal old lady’s
remark, “Ah! he swings everywhere but where he ought.”
The second avowed derangement lasted, by fits and starts, till the
summer of 1801. A course of sea-bathing at Weymouth again completed the
patient’s recovery; but the dread of fresh attacks remained. The next
one came in 1804, when his repugnance to the Willises was so marked
that the doctor of Bedlam was employed. It is, of course, a common
symptom of insanity, the turning against its best friends. And now poor
George showed intermittent symptoms of dislike to the Queen herself, so
that they began to occupy separate apartments, and are found not even
dining together. The old domestic happiness was gone, along with the
uncomfortable Kew House, that had so often been its scene. Yet, had the
King kept his health, there seems reason to believe that Kew might have
become more of a home to him than ever.
George III., returning to the plan set on foot in the early years of
his reign, took a fancy for building a castle here, after plans prepared
by Wyatt, the then esteemed architect, in the bad taste of the period.
The design is to be seen in one of the rooms of the present palace. The
other house was pulled down in 1802, to make way for the new structure,
which would have stood nearer the river-side, looking over to the not
very royal town of Brentford, that “town of mud,” so strangely admired by
the Georges and reviled by their poets. But the works were interrupted
by the King’s fresh attack in 1804, and this building never got further
than the state of a pretentious shell, which stood idle for nearly a
quarter of a century, and was then demolished by George IV. That monarch
had no more love for Kew than his father for Hampton Court. He had spent
freely upon his own whims, on Carleton House, and on the Pavilion, the
latter gimcrack medley a laughing-stock even for contemporary taste, and
a byword with irreverent writers like Byron--
Shut up,--no, not the King, but the Pavilion,
Or else ’twill cost us all another million!
His father, unless for saddling us with so many expensive sons, had lived
so carefully and economically, that the nation need not have grudged
him a “Folly” for once in a way. It was his spendthrift heir who began
to restore Windsor Castle, demolishing the Queen’s Lodge there, and to
rebuild Buckingham Palace in its present form.
[Illustration: THE PALACE]
When Kew House had disappeared, the sturdy “Dutch House,” now known
as Kew Palace, became the occasional retreat of the royal family, its
scant accommodations, no doubt, eked out by those other mansions held
on Kew Green. It was here that Addington found the King dining rather
before one o’clock on the simplest fare. His mind continued to be
rather cranky, as shown by his strange freak of wearing a huge powdered
wig in conjunction with the mediæval trappings of the Order of the
Garter. Blindness came gradually on to increase his afflictions. In
1809 the nation joyfully celebrated his Jubilee, with much feasting of
the poor--and the rich--relieving of prisoners for debt, pardoning of
military culprits, illuminations, libations, and such memorials as the
statue on the Weymouth Esplanade, that records the townsfolk’s gratitude
to the King, whose stay at his favourite bathing-place had so often sent
up the price of its lodgings. We may be sure Kew, in its small way, was
not behindhand in such loyal doings.
But Kew was hardly again to welcome the Father of his People. Repeated
agitations went to overthrow his reason for good--the triumphant marches
of Napoleon, the tarnishing of British arms not yet brightened by
Wellington’s victories, the misconduct and unpopularity of his sons, the
death of his beloved youngest daughter, Amelia. At the beginning of 1811,
George had just wits enough left to consent to the Prince’s Regency. A
few months later, Charles Knight was one of the Windsor crowd that saw
their aged Sovereign in public for the last time. Henceforth he lived
confined in the Castle, prisoner of blindness, by and by of deafness,
cheered by music, by religious exaltation, and by delusive memories of
the past, more than by flitting glimmers of melancholy reason, in one of
which he had the satisfaction of learning Napoleon’s downfall and the
recovery of Hanover. A most pathetic figure was the blind old King with
his white beard, only now and then visited by those nearest to him. It is
said that the selfish Regent was moved to tears when one day he overheard
his father murmuring the complaint of Milton’s Samson:--
O dark, dark, dark! Amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark! Total eclipse
Without all hope of day!
O first created Beam, and Thou, Great Word,
“Let there be light! and light was over all,”
Why am I thus bereaved Thy prime decree?