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!”