The very attempt at concealment gave rise to various alarming reports. The best answer that could be devised for the latter was to allow the King to appear at the levée at the end of October. The Queen suffered much when this plan was resolved upon; and it had the result, which she expected, of over-fatiguing the King and rendering him worse. At the close of the levée, the King remarked to the Duke of Leeds and Lord Thurlow, the latter of whom had advised him to take care of himself and return to Windsor: ‘You then, too, my Lord Thurlow, forsake me, and suppose me ill beyond recovery; but whatever you or Mr. Pitt may think or feel, I, that am born a gentleman, shall never lay my head on my last pillow in peace and quiet as long as I remember the loss of my American Colonies.’ This loss appears to have weighed heavily on his mind, and to have been one of the great causes by which it was ultimately overthrown.
Early in November he became delirious, but the medical men, Warren, Heberden, and Sir G. Baker, could not tell whether the malady would turn, at a critical point, for life or death; or whether, if for the former, the patient would be afflicted or not with permanent loss of reason. The disease was now settled in the brain, with high fever. The Princes of the Blood were all assembled at Windsor, in the room next to that occupied by the sufferer, and a regency bestowing kingly power on the Prince of Wales was already talked of.
When the fact of the King’s illness could no longer be with propriety concealed, the alarm without the royal residence was great, and the disorder scarcely less within. The most graphic picture of the state of affairs is drawn by Lord Bulkeley. ‘The Queen,’ he says, ‘sees nobody but Lady Constance, Lady Charlotte Finch, Miss Burney, and her two sons, who, I am afraid, do not announce the state of the King’s health with that caution and delicacy which should be observed to the wife and the mother, and it is to them only that she looks up. I understand her behaviour is very feeling, decent, and proper. The Prince has taken the command at Windsor, in consequence of which there is no command whatsoever; and it was not till yesterday that orders were given to two grooms of the bedchamber to wait for the future, and receive the inquiries of the numbers who inquire; nor would this have been done if Pitt and Lord Sydney had not come down in person to beg that such orders might be given. Unless it was done yesterday, no orders were given for prayers in the churches, nor for the observance of other forms, such as stopping the playhouses, &c., highly proper (?) at such a juncture. What the consequence of this heavy misfortune will be to government, you are more likely to know than I am; but I cannot help thinking that the Prince will find a greater difficulty in making a sweep of the present ministry in his character of Fiduciary Regent than in that of King. The stocks are already fallen two per cent., and the alarms of the people of London are very little flattering to the Prince. I am told that message after message has been sent to Fox, who is touring with Mrs. Armistead on the continent; but I have not heard that the Prince has sent for him, or has given any orders to Fox’s friends to that effect. The system of favouritism is much changed since Lord Bute’s and the Princess Dowager’s time; for Jack Payne, Master Leigh, an Eton schoolboy, and Master Barry, brother to Lord Barrymore, and Mrs. Fitz, form the cabinet at Carlton House.’
The afflicted King, for a time, grew worse, then the Opposition affected to believe that his case was by no means desperate. Their insincerity was proved as symptoms of amelioration began to show themselves. Then they not only denied the fact of the King’s improved health, but they detailed all the incidents they could pick up of his period of imbecility, short madness, or longer delirium. But, in justice to the Opposition, it must be remarked that the greatest traitor was not on that side, but on the King’s. The Lord Chancellor Thurlow was intriguing with the Opposition when he was affecting to be a faithful servant of the crown. His treachery, however, was well known to both parties; but Pitt kept it from the knowledge of George III., lest it should too deeply pain or too dangerously excite him. When Thurlow had, subsequently, the effrontery to exclaim in the House of Lords, ‘When I forget my King, may my God forget me!’ a voice from one behind him is said to have murmured, ‘Forget you! He will see you d—d first.’
There was assuredly no decency in the conduct of the heir-apparent or of his next brother. They were gaily flying from club to club, party to party, and did not take the trouble even to assume the sentiment which they could not feel. ‘If we were together,’ says Lord Grenville, in a letter inserted in the ‘Memoirs,’ ‘I would tell you some particulars of the Prince of Wales’s behaviour towards the King and Queen, within these few days, that would make your blood run cold, but I dare not admit them to paper because of my informant.’ It was said that if the King could only recover sufficiently to learn and comprehend what had been said and done during his illness, he would hear enough to drive him again into insanity. The conduct of his elder sons was marked, not only by its savage inhumanity, but by an indifference to public and private opinion which distinguishes those fools who are not only without wits, but who are also without hearts. When the Parliament was divided by fierce party strife, as to whose hands should be confided the power and responsibilities of the regency, the occasion should have disposed those likely to be endowed with that supreme power to seek a decent, if temporary, retirement from the gaze of the world. Not so the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York. They kept open houses, and gaily welcomed every new ally. They were constant guests at epicurean clubs and convivial meetings. They both took to deep play, and both were as fully plucked as they deserved. There was in them neither propriety of feeling nor affectation of it.
The condition of the Queen was deplorable, and a succession of fits almost prostrated her as low as her royal husband. The Prince of Wales himself ‘seemed frightened,’ says Mr. Neville to the Marquis of Buckingham, ‘and was blooded yesterday,’ November 6, the second day of the King’s delirious condition; but as phlebotomy was a practice of this princely person when in love, one cannot well determine whether his pallor arose from filial or some less respectable affection.
Up to this time the King had grown worse, chiefly through total, or nearly total, loss of sleep. He bewailed this with a hoarse, rapid, yet kindly tone of voice; maintaining that he was well, or that to be so he needed but the blessing of sleep. The Queen paced her apartment with a painful demonstration of impatient despair in her manner; and if, by way of solace, she attempted to read aloud to her children or ladies, any passage that reminded her of her condition and prospects made her burst into tears.
Previous to the first night of the King’s delirium he conducted, as he had always been accustomed to do, the Queen to her dressing-room, and there, a hundred times over, requested her not to disturb him if she should find him asleep. The urgent repetition showed a mind nearly overthrown, but the King calmly and affectionately remarked that he needed not physicians, for the Queen was the best physician he could have. ‘She is my best friend,’ said he; ‘where could I find a better?’
The alarm became greater when the fever left the King, after he had three times taken James’s powders, but without producing any relief to the brain. The Queen secluded herself from all persons save her ladies and the two eldest Princes. These, as Lord Bulkeley said, did not announce to her the state of the King’s health with the caution and delicacy due to the wife and mother who now depended on them. This dependence was so complete that the Prince of Wales, as before said, took the command of everything at Windsor, one result of which was a disappearance of everything like order. The Queen’s dependence on such a son was rather compulsory than voluntary. When he first came down to Windsor, from Brighton, the meeting was the very coldest possible, and when he had stated whence he came her first question was when he meant to return. However, it is said that when the King broke out, at dinner, into his first fit of positive delirium, the Prince burst into tears.
The sufferer was occasionally better, but the relapses were frequent. The Queen now slept in a bed-room adjoining that occupied by the King. He once became possessed with the idea that she had been forcibly removed from the bed, and in the middle of the night he came into the Queen’s room with a candle in his hand, to satisfy himself that she was still near him. He remained half-an-hour, talking incoherently, hoarsely, but good-naturedly, and then went away. The Queen’s nights were nights of sleeplessness and tears.