The general feeling infected James Boswell, though not very intimate with the Burney family. In this same autumn, Boswell was on a visit to the Dean of Windsor, who was also Bishop of Carlisle. Miss Burney met him one morning at the choir-gate of St. George’s Chapel:
“We saluted with mutual glee: his comic-serious face and manner have lost nothing of their wonted singularity; nor yet have his mind and language, as you will soon confess.
“‘I am extremely glad to see you indeed,’ he cried, ‘but very sorry to see you here. My dear ma’am, why do you stay?—it won’t do, ma’am! you must resign!—we can put up with it no longer. I told my good host the Bishop so last night; we are all grown quite outrageous!’ Whether I laughed the most, or stared the most, I am at a loss to say; but I hurried away, not to have such treasonable declarations overheard, for we were surrounded by a multitude. He accompanied me, however, not losing one moment in continuing his exhortations: ‘If you do not quit, ma’am, very soon, some violent measures, I assure you, will be taken. We shall address Dr. Burney in a body; I am ready to make the harangue myself. We shall fall upon him all at once.’
“I stopped him to inquire about Sir Joshua; he said he saw him very often, and that his spirits were very good. I asked about Mr. Burke’s book. ‘Oh,’ cried he, ‘it will come out next week: ’tis the first book in the world, except my own, and that’s coming out also very soon; only I want your help.’ ‘My help?’ ‘Yes, madam; 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.’”
Fanny evaded this request by declaring that she had not any stores at hand; she could not, she afterwards said, consent to print private letters addressed to herself. The self-satisfied biographer followed her to the Queen’s Lodge, continuing his importunity, and repeating his exhortations to her to resign at once. At the entrance, he pulled out a proof-sheet of the First Book in the world, and began to read from it a letter of Dr. Johnson to himself. ‘He read it,’ says the Diary, ‘in strong imitation of the Doctor’s manner, very well, and not caricature. But Mrs. Schwellenberg was at her window, a crowd was gathering to stand round the rails, and the King and Queen and Royal Family now approached from the Terrace. I made rather a quick apology, and with a step as quick as my now weakened limbs have left in my power, I hurried to my apartment.’
By what representations Dr. Burney was brought to view his daughter’s condition in its true light we are not distinctly informed. We find, however, that, before October ended, a memorial to the Queen, written by Fanny in her father’s name and her own, requesting permission for the Robe-Keeper to resign, had been approved by the Doctor, who expressed his desire that it should be presented at the first favourable opportunity. Then came a pause: the invalid was taking bark, which for a short time recruited her strength; and she cherished the hope of obtaining a ship for her brother James before she left the Court. But her hopes both for her brother and herself proved illusory. In December, her loss of health became so notorious that no part of the house could wholly avoid acknowledging it. ‘Yet,’ she writes, ‘was the terrible piquet the catastrophe of every evening, though frequent pains in my side forced me, three and four times in a game, to creep to my own room for hartshorn and for rest.’ The remaining members of the household were more considerate than the mistress of the card-table. The ladies had the fellow-feeling of fellow-sufferers; even Mr. Turbulent frankly counselled Miss Burney to retreat before it was too late. A general opinion prevailed that she was falling into a decline, and that, at best, she was reduced to a choice between her place and her life. “There seemed now,” she says, “no time to be lost; when I saw my dear father he recommended to me to be speedy, and my mother was very kind in urgency for immediate measures. I could not, however, summon courage to present my memorial; my heart always failed me, from seeing the Queen’s entire freedom from such an expectation; for though I was frequently so ill in her presence that I could hardly stand, I saw she concluded me, while life remained, inevitably hers.” Fanny’s nervousness, in fact, had made her less anxious to deliver her letter than her father was to have it delivered, and some further persuasion from him was required before the paper reached her Majesty’s hands.
At length it was presented, and the result was exactly what the writer had anticipated. The Schwellenberg stormed, of course: to resign was to return to nothingness; to forfeit the protection of the Court was to become an outcast; to lose the beatific vision of the Sovereign and his consort was hardly less than to be excluded from heaven. The Queen thought the memorial very modest and proper, but was surprised at its contents. Indomitable herself, she could not understand how anyone else could suffer from more than passing illness. She therefore proposed that her sick attendant should have six weeks’ leave of absence, which, with change of air and scene, and the society of her family, the Locks and the Cambridges, would ensure a perfect cure. This proposal was duly communicated to Dr. Burney. The good man’s answer arrived by return of post. With much gratitude for the royal goodness, he declared, on medical authority, that nothing short of an absolute retirement gave any prospect of recovery. “A scene almost horrible ensued,” says Miss Burney, “when I told Cerbera the offer was declined. She was too much enraged for disguise, and uttered the most furious expressions of indignant contempt at our proceedings. I am sure she would gladly have 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 against imperial wishes.”
The Queen herself betrayed a blank disappointment at Dr. Burney’s inflexibility, but neither exhibited displeasure nor raised any further obstacle. Yet the prisoner’s liberation was still at a distance. In January, 1791, she was prostrated by an attack of some acute illness which lasted through the two following months. On returning to her duty, she found that search was being made for a suitable person to succeed her. But the selection proved difficult, and her Majesty, of course, could not be pressed. It was at length arranged that Miss Burney should be set free soon after the celebration of the King’s birthday in June. This matter settled, her position grew easier. Her colleague not only laid aside asperity of manner, but became even ‘invariable in kindness.’ And Fanny now began to do the old lady more justice than she had ever done before. She acknowledged, in short, that Cerbera’s bark was worse than her bite; that though selfish, harsh, and overbearing, she was not unfriendly; that she was even extremely fond of her junior’s society, when the latter could force herself to appear gay and chatty. On such occasions the morose German would melt, and tell the Queen: ‘The Bernar bin reely agribble.’ ‘Mrs. Schwellenberg, too,’ adds the Diary, ‘with all her faults, is heart and soul devoted to her royal mistress, with the truest faith and loyalty.’ As for this mistress, she treated her retiring servant with all her former confidence, clouded only by a visible, though unavowed, regret at the prospect of their separation. Thus the closing weeks of this life at Court were spent in comparative tranquillity, though there were intervals of great weakness and depression.
“On the opening of this month,” says the Diary for June, “her Majesty told me that the next day Mr. Hastings was to make his defence, and warmly added, ‘I would give the world you could go to it!’” There was no resisting such an appeal, and accordingly, under date of June 2nd, we read: “I went once more to Westminster Hall, which was more crowded than on any day since the trial commenced, except the first. Peers, commoners, and counsel, peeresses, commoneresses, and the numerous indefinites, crowded every part, with a just and fair curiosity to hear one day’s defence, after seventy-three of accusation.”[accusation.”] Miss Burney heard the accused read his vindication, and listened with an interest which she knew would be shared by the King and Queen; she heard something also about herself, which she did not communicate to their Majesties. She attended to the story of Hastings when told by himself as she had never attended to it before; her sympathy followed him when he expressed disdain of his persecutors, when he arraigned the late Minister, Lord North, of double-dealing, and the then Minister, Mr. Pitt, of cowardly desertion. She shared his indignation when the Managers interrupted him; she exulted when the Lords quelled the interruption by cheering the speaker, and when Lord Kenyon, who presided in the place of the Chancellor, said, ‘Mr. Hastings, proceed.’ She contrasted the fortitude of the defendant, who for so many days had been silent under virulent abuse, with the intemperate eagerness of his assailants, who could not exercise the like self-control even for three brief hours. In short, she felt as warm-hearted women always have felt, and as it is suspected that even icy politicians, men of light and leading on their respective sides, occasionally do feel in the present enlightened age. “The conclusion of the defence,” continues this excited partisan, “I heard better, as Mr. Hastings spoke considerably louder from this time: the spirit of indignation animated his manner, and gave strength to his voice. You will have seen the chief parts of his discourse in the newspapers; and you cannot, I think, but grow more and more his friend as you peruse it. He called pathetically and solemnly for instant judgement; but the Lords, after an adjournment, decided to hear his defence by evidence, and in order, the next Session. How grievous such continued delay to a man past sixty, and sighing for such a length of time for redress from a prosecution as yet unparalleled in our annals!”
When it was over, Windham approached her, and ‘in a tone of very deep concern, and with a look that fully concurred in it,’ said, ‘Do I see Miss Burney? Indeed,’ he went on, ‘I was going to make a speech not very gallant.’ ‘But it is what I should like better,’ cried the lady; ‘for[‘for] it is kind, if you were going to say I look miserably ill, as that is but a necessary consequence of feeling so, and miserably ill I have felt this long time past.’ She prevented more by going on to say how happy she was that he had been absent from the Managers’ Box, and had not joined in the attempt made by his fellow-managers to disconcert Mr. Hastings. ‘Indeed, I was kept in alarm to the very last moment; for at every figure I saw start up just now—Mr. Fox, Mr. Burke, Mr. Grey—I concluded yours would be the next.’ ‘You were prepared, then,’ cried he with no little malice, ‘for a “voice issuing from a distant pew.”’ This unexpected quotation from Cecilia “put me quite out,” says Fanny, “whereupon he seized his opportunity to put himself in. For, after a little laugh at his victory, he very gravely, and even almost solemnly, said, ‘But there is another subject—always uppermost with me—which I have not ventured to speak of to you; though to others you know not how I have raved and raged! But I believe, I am sure, you know what I allude to.’ ’Twas impossible, thus challenged, to dissemble. ‘Yes,’ I answered; ‘I own, I believe I understand you; and, indeed, I should be tempted to say further—if you would forget it when heard, and make no implications—that, from what has come round to me from different quarters, I hold myself to be very much obliged to you....’ When we came home I was immediately summoned to her Majesty, to whom I gave a full and fair account of all I had heard of the defence; and it drew tears from her expressive eyes, as I repeated Mr. Hastings’ own words, upon the hardship and injustice of the treatment he had sustained.” At night, the reporter was called upon to repeat her narrative to the King, to whom she was equally faithful, “sparing nothing of what had dropped from the persecuted defendant relative to the Ministers of the Crown.”