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.