It was not to be expected that the advance to restoration would proceed without break or check. On the 17th we have the entry: ‘My account this morning was quite afflictive once more;’ but under date of the 22nd we read: ‘With what joy did I carry this morning an exceeding good account of the King to my royal mistress! It was trebly welcome, as much might depend upon it in the resolutions of the House concerning the Regency, which was of to-day’s discussion;’ and in some notes summing up the remaining days of the year, we have: ‘The King went on, now better, now worse, in a most fearful manner; but Sir Lucas Pepys never lost sight of hope, and the management of Dr. Willis and his two sons[[96]] was most wonderfully acute and successful. Yet, so much were they perplexed and tormented by the interruptions given to their plans and methods, that they were frequently almost tempted to resign the undertaking from anger and confusion.’
The new year opened amid the same alternations of progress and relapse. In society, the war of politics took a new departure from the King’s derangement. Supporters of the Administration were confident of his speedy recovery; the Opposition were indefatigable in spreading the belief that his disorder was incurable. The animosity on both sides rose to a height which had not been equalled even at Pitt’s first entrance into office. ‘It is a strange subject,’ wrote the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘for party to insist upon, and disgraceful to the country that it should be so; but so it is.’ Uneasiness and uncertainty prevailed everywhere. Some of Miss Burney’s best friends began to be dismayed at her position, and at the prospect before her. Her sister Charlotte, now Mrs. Francis, wrote from Norfolk, urging that Dr. Burney’s consent should be obtained to her resignation, and offering her, on behalf of Mr. Francis and herself, a permanent residence in their house. Evidently, Fanny’s family regarded her as a helpless person, requiring to be looked after and taken care of. Her faith, however, in the comforting predictions of the Willises and Sir Lucas Pepys remained unshaken, and she would not hear of quitting her post.
A fresh trouble had by this time arisen. The Queen could not escape becoming involved in the strife of parties. The Prince of Wales and the Duke of York were naturally impatient to push their afflicted father from his seat. What they wanted in brains was amply supplied by the combined genius of the Whig leaders—by Fox, and Burke, and Sheridan—all embittered at having been so often checkmated by the young statesman whom they had flouted as a mere boy. What the Princes lacked in tenacity of purpose was driven into them by the incessant cry of myriad place-hunters, yelling like famished wolves. The first thought of the faction was how to clutch power as soon as might be; their second, how to engross it as exclusively as possible. No scruple was made of declaring that all places would be vacated and refilled, even if the Regency were to last only a single day.[[97]] That there would be a complete change of Administration was a matter of course. But beyond this, changes were meditated in the army, and other departments of the State, which it was known must grievously offend the King, should they come to his knowledge. Among other promotions, every colonel in favour with the Prince or the Duke was to be raised to the rank of Major-General. Mrs. Fitzherbert, it was said, was to be created a Duchess.[[98]]
Next to Pitt and his colleagues, the chief obstacle to the speedy execution of these notable projects was Queen Charlotte. It was not to be expected that a wife would be as ready as the heir-apparent to believe in the confirmed insanity of the head of the house. It was excusable, to say the least, that one who for more than twenty-eight years had filled, without reproach, the station of Queen Consort, should object to be effaced with her lord, until the necessity for his seclusion was unmistakably demonstrated. And when discord raged in the medical council, when Dr. Warren pronounced the King to be ‘rather worse’ than he had been at Windsor, while to Sir Lucas and the specialists, as well as to ordinary observers, his condition appeared most hopeful, she might surely be pardoned for leaning to the favourable view. Partisans, however, were too excited to listen to reason. The clergyman from Lincolnshire was denounced in the Opposition newspapers as a mere empiric and creature of Pitt. The most scurrilous abuse was heaped upon the Queen. Both in the press, and in the House of Commons, she was accused of being in league with Willis to misrepresent the state of the King’s health, in order to prevent the Prince, her son, from being invested with the authority of Regent. Pitt, having no option but to propose a Regency, was proceeding with the utmost caution, and seeking to lay on the expectant Viceroy several restrictions, which his character seemed to call for, and which assuredly have not been disapproved by the judgment of posterity. Besides limiting the Prince’s power to confer peerages and pensions, and to alienate royal property, the Premier recommended that the care and management of the King’s person, as well as the appointments in the household, should be entrusted to the Queen. Perhaps no part of the Government’s plan aroused more angry hostility than this. ‘How would the King on his recovery,’ demanded Burke in Parliament, ‘be pleased at seeing the patronage of the Household taken from the Prince of Wales, his representative, and given to the Queen? He must be shocked at the idea.’ Allusions to these attacks on one who so little deserved them occur in Miss Burney’s Diary about this time:
“January 10th.—The King again is not so well; and new evidences are called for in the House, relative to his state. My poor Royal Mistress now droops. I grieve—grieve to see her!—but her own name and conduct called in question! Who can wonder she is shocked and shaken? Was there not enough before, firmly as she supported it?
“11TH.—This morning Dr. John gave me but a bad account of the poor King. His amendment is not progressive; it fails, and goes back, and disappoints most grievously; yet it would be nothing were the case and its circumstances less discussed, and were expectation more reasonable.
“12TH.—A melancholy day: news bad both at home and abroad. At home, the dear, unhappy King still worse; abroad, new examinations voted of the physicians! Good Heaven! what an insult does this seem from Parliamentary power, to investigate and bring forth to the world every circumstance of such a malady as is ever held sacred to secrecy in the most private families! How indignant we all feel here no words can say.”
Macaulay is very severe on poor Miss Burney for the want of correct constitutional principles shown in this last entry. He cites the passage to prove that the second Robe-Keeper’s ‘way of life was rapidly impairing her powers of reasoning and her sense of justice;’ that, as he elsewhere says, this existence was as incompatible with health ‘of mind as the air of the Pomptine Marshes with health of body.’ The critic is perfectly right in stating that the motion which roused indignation at Kew was made by Mr. Pitt, who was regarded as the King’s champion, though he should have added that it was brought forward in response to a challenge from the Opposition. But Miss Burney felt as a woman, and wrote as a woman, not as a politician. Had she been a politician, she would still have been entitled to the indulgence which was being claimed and abused by every speaker and journalist on the side opposed to the Court. Consider the debates and the scandalous charges that she read daily in the newspapers. And if she erred, she erred in company with a large number of other heretics who should have been far better fortified in sound doctrine than herself. If the atmosphere of the palace was unwholesome, it was much less contaminating than the malaria of Carlton House. If the novelist was wrong in thinking that the House of Commons ought not to concern itself with the details of the King’s illness, what is to be said of the eminent Whigs who maintained that the Legislature had nothing to do with any question relating to the disposition of the regal authority? What shall be said for Alexander Wedderburn, then Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and afterwards Lord Chancellor, who advised the Prince of Wales to seize on the Regency without consulting either House of Parliament? Or what can be urged for Fox himself, who asserted his patron’s right to take this course, in the very face of the assembled Commons? ‘It is melancholy,’ says Macaulay, ‘to see genius sinking into such debasement.’ What words, then, shall we apply to Edmund Burke, who scandalized both sides of the House by declaring that ‘the Almighty had hurled the monarch from his throne, and plunged him into a condition which drew down upon him the pity of the meanest peasant in his kingdom’? Miss Burney, still feeling and writing as a woman, could not accuse her old friend Burke of being debased, though she sadly laments over him as ‘that most misguided of vehement and wild orators.’[[99]] Such was the virulence engendered in a spectator of the misery at Court by associating with Leonard Smelt and Colonel Digby.
“Kew Palace, Monday, February 2nd.—What an adventure had I this morning! one that has occasioned me the severest personal terror I ever experienced in my life.
“Sir Lucas Pepys still persisting that exercise and air were absolutely necessary to save me from illness, I have continued my walks, varying my gardens from Richmond to Kew, according to the accounts I received of the movements of the King. For this I had her Majesty’s permission, on the representation of Sir Lucas.