“July 29th.—We went to the play, and saw Mrs. Siddons in Rosalind. She looked beautifully, but too large for that shepherd’s dress; and her gaiety sits not naturally upon her—it seems more like disguised gravity. I must own my admiration for her confined to her tragic powers; and there it is raised so high that I feel mortified, in a degree, to see her so much fainter attempts and success in comedy.”
A few days later we read that Mrs. Siddons, as Lady Townly, in her looks and the tragic part was exquisite; and again: “Mrs. Siddons performed Mrs. Oakley. What pity thus to throw away her talents! But the Queen dislikes tragedy; and the honour to play before the Royal Family binds her to the little credit acquired by playing comedy.
“Sunday, August 9th.—The King had a council yesterday, which brought most of the great officers of State to Weymouth. This evening her Majesty desired Miss Planta and me to go to the rooms, whither they commonly go themselves on Sunday evenings; and after looking round them, and speaking where they choose, they retire to tea in an inner apartment with their own party, but leave the door open, both to see and be seen. The rooms are convenient and spacious: we found them very full. As soon as the royal party came, a circle was formed, and they moved round it, just as before the ball at St. James’s, the King one way, with his Chamberlain, the new-made Marquis of Salisbury,[[103]] and the Queen the other, with the Princesses, Lady Courtown, etc. The rest of the attendants planted themselves round in the circle. I had now the pleasure, for the first time, to see Mr. Pitt; but his appearance is his least recommendation; it is neither noble nor expressive.”
Three days later occurs a significant entry:
“Wednesday, August 12th.—This is the Prince of Wales’s birthday; but it has not been kept.”
On the 13th the royal party left Weymouth for Exeter, where they arrived to a late dinner. Two days afterwards they proceeded through a fertile and varied country to Saltram, the seat of Earl Morley, a minor. All along the route, the enthusiasm of loyalty which had accompanied the King from Windsor continued undiminished. Arches of flowers were erected at every town, with such devices as rustic ingenuity could imagine, to express the welcome of the inhabitants. Everywhere there were crowds, cheers, singing, peals of bells, rejoicings, garlands, and decorations. The view from Saltram commanded Plymouth Sound, Mount Edgecombe, and a wide stretch of the fine adjacent country. Visits were made from this noble house to the great naval port, to the beauties of the famous Mount, to the woods and steeps of Maristow, and the antique curiosities of Cothele on the banks of the Tamar. On the 27th the Court quitted Saltram for Weymouth, and in the middle of September finally departed from Weymouth on its return to Windsor. Two nights and the intervening day were spent at Longleat, the seat of the Marquis of Bath. “Longleat,” writes Miss Burney, “was formerly the dwelling of Lord Lansdowne, uncle to Mrs. Delany; and here, at this seat, that heartless uncle, to promote some political views, sacrificed his incomparable niece, at the age of seventeen, marrying her to an unwieldy, uncultivated country esquire, near sixty years of age, and scarce ever sober—his name Pendarves. With how sad an awe, in recollecting her submissive unhappiness, did I enter these doors!—and with what indignant hatred did I look at the portrait of the unfeeling Earl, to whom her gentle repugnance, shown by almost incessant tears, was thrown away, as if she, her person, and her existence, were nothing in the scale, where the disposition of a few boroughs opposed them! Yet was this the famous Granville—the poet, the fine gentleman, the statesman, the friend and patron of Pope, of whom he wrote:
‘What Muse for Granville can refuse to sing?’
Mine, I am sure, for one.”
The house, at the time of this visit, though magnificent, and of an immense magnitude, was very much out of repair, and by no means cheerful or comfortable. Gloomy grandeur, Fanny thought, was the character of the building and its fitting-up. “My bedroom,” she says, “was furnished with crimson velvet, bed included, yet so high, though only the second story, that it made me giddy to look into the park, and tired to wind up the flight of stairs. It was formerly the favourite room, the housekeeper told me, of Bishop Ken, who put on his shroud in it before he died. Had I fancied I had seen his ghost, I might have screamed my voice away, unheard by any assistant to lay it; for so far was I from the rest of the mansion, that not the lungs of Mr. Bruce could have availed me.” The last place at which the King stopped on his homeward journey was Tottenham Park, the seat of the Earl of Ailesbury. Here occurred an instance of the enormous expense to which the great nobles sometimes went in entertaining their sovereign. ‘The good lord of the mansion put up a new bed for the King and Queen that cost him £900.’
On September 18 the Court arrived at Windsor. ‘Deadly dead sank my heart’ is our traveller’s record of her sensation on re-entering the detested dining-room. Nothing happened during the remainder of the year to raise her spirits. In October, the days began to remind her of the terrible miseries of the preceding autumn. She found ‘a sort of recollective melancholy always ready to mix’ with her thankfulness for the King’s continued good health. And about the same time disquieting news came from over the water of the march to Versailles, the return to Paris, and the shouts of the hungry and furious poissardes proclaiming the arrival of ‘the baker, his wife, and the little apprentice.’ Events of this kind could not but excite uneasiness at any Court, however popular for the time. These shadows were presently succeeded by another, equally undefined, but of a more personal character. In the middle of November, Fanny was told by Miss Planta, in confidence, that Mr. Digby had written to acquaint his royal patrons with his approaching marriage. ‘I believed not a syllable of the matter,’ says the Diary; ‘but I would not tell her that.’ Only a few days later, however, the same kind friend informed Miss Burney that ‘it was all declared, and that the Princesses had wished Miss Gunning joy at the Drawing-Room.’ ‘Now first,’ says Fanny, ‘my belief followed assertion;—but it was only because it was inevitable, since the Princesses could not have proceeded so far without certainty.’ The wedding took place early in January; and from this time the bridegroom appeared no more at Court, which became to one of the attendants an abode of unrelieved gloom.