“What a scene! how variously was I affected by it! but, upon the whole, how inexpressibly thankful to see him so nearly himself—so little removed from recovery!
“I went very soon after to the Queen, to whom I was most eager to avow the meeting, and how little I could help it. Her astonishment, and her earnestness to hear every particular, were very great. I told her almost all. Some few things relating to the distressing questions I could not repeat; nor many things said of Mrs. Schwellenberg, which would much, and very needlessly, have hurt her.”
About February 6, a further improvement in the King’s state took place, which proved to be decisive. From this time, not only were his equerries allowed to attend him again in the evening, but the Queen was once more admitted to his chamber. Singularly enough, the progress of his recovery coincided exactly with the progress of the Regency Bill. The latter was brought into the House of Commons on the 5th, and on the following day a printed copy was shown to Fanny. “I shuddered,” she writes, “to hear it named.” On the 10th she reports: “The amendment of the King is progressive, and without any reasonable fear, though not without some few drawbacks. The Willis family were surely sent by Heaven to restore peace, and health, and prosperity to this miserable house!” On the 12th the Regency Bill passed the Commons, and was carried up to the House of Lords; it was there subsequently read a second time, went through Committee, and was ordered for a third reading. But that stage was not to arrive. Miss Burney writes on the 13th: “Oh, how dreadful will be the day when that unhappy Bill takes place! I cannot approve the plan of it; the King is too well to make such a step right. It will break his spirits, if not his heart, when he hears and understands such a deposition.
“Saturday, 14th.—The King is infinitely better. Oh that there were patience in the land, and this Regency Bill postponed!”
Macaulay, quoting part of the entry for the 13th, leaves it to be inferred that the writer disapproved of ‘Pitt’s own Bill’ under any circumstances; he carefully omits the words which show that her objection was to the plan being proceeded with when the King’s recovery was so far advanced as to render it inapplicable. The Ministry speedily made it plain that they were of the same mind as Miss Burney. On the 17th, the Peers, on the motion of the Lord Chancellor, adjourned the further consideration of the Regency Bill; and a week later the measure was finally abandoned.
“What a different house,” says the Diary of the 19th, “is this house become!—sadness and terror, that wholly occupied it so lately, are now flown away, or rather are now driven out; and though anxiety still forcibly prevails, ’tis in so small a proportion to joy and thankfulness, that it is borne as if scarce an ill!” Before the month ended, Miss Burney had an assurance of the King’s entire restoration from his own mouth. “The King I have seen again—in the Queen’s dressing-room. On opening the door, there he stood! He smiled at my start; and, saying he had waited on purpose to see me, added, ‘I am quite well now—I was nearly so when I saw you before; but I could overtake you better now.’”
All England had been intent on the little palace at Kew, where distress was now turned into rejoicing. To none of his subjects was the recovery of the royal patient a matter of indifference. To a limited party it was a source of bitter disappointment and chagrin. To the immense majority it brought unbounded satisfaction. It was the engrossing topic of the day. ‘Nobody,’ said an observer, ‘talks, writes, thinks, or dreams of anything else.’ On the 1st of March thanksgivings for the happy event were offered in all the churches of the capital. On the 10th the physicians took their departure from Kew. On the same day Parliament was opened by Commission under the sign manual. At sunset began a spectacle worthy of the occasion. ‘London,’ wrote Wraxall, ‘displayed a blaze of light from one extremity to the other; the illuminations extending, without any metaphor, from Hampstead and Highgate to Clapham, and even as far as Tooting; whilst the vast distance between Greenwich and Kensington presented the same dazzling appearance. The poorest mechanics contributed their proportion, and instances were exhibited of cobblers’ stalls decorated with one or two farthing candles.[[101]]
The Queen carried all the Princesses, except the youngest, up to town, to feast their eyes on streets as brilliant and crowded as Vauxhall on a gala night. It may cool our historic fervour to remember that the blaze of light which astonished our ancestors was produced by nothing more luminous than oil-lamps, and that the crowds of 1789 would pass for a sorry muster in the huge Babylon of to-day; but, after all, the scene exhibited in London, when even the cobblers’ stalls were illuminated, was not without its significance on the eve of the meeting of the States General at Versailles. Cowper, usurping the functions of Thomas Warton, then poet-laureate, sang of Queen Charlotte’s private expedition:
‘Glad she came that night to prove,
A witness undescried,