Miss Burney was persuaded that the King was displeased with the action of his official, but we venture to doubt the correctness of her belief. Beyond question, Mr. Smelt had had good reason for implying that the daughter, rather than the father, was the object of favour at Windsor. Dr. Burney was by no means a sound enough Handelian to satisfy George III. And, to say the truth, the account of the Handel Centenary Festival was but a poor performance. On the other hand, Fanny’s literary success, and her manner of carrying it, had pleased and interested the royal pair. It is probable, if not absolutely certain, that the design of finding her some employment at Court had already been entertained, and that this was considered to render her father’s suit for himself inopportune.
The first thought was to settle her with one of the princesses, in preference to the numerous candidates of high birth and station, but small fortune, who were waiting and supplicating for places about the persons of the King’s daughters. But in the month following Dr. Burney’s disappointment, a vacancy occurred in the Queen’s own Household. The office of Keeper of the Robes was jointly held by two Germans, Mrs. Schwellenberg and Mrs. Haggerdorn, who had accompanied Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, when she came to England. The health of Mrs. Haggerdorn broke down about this time, and in June, 1786, it was arranged that she should retire, and return to her own country. Who should succeed her was a matter of eager speculation and fierce competition in Court circles; but without consulting anyone, the Queen commissioned Mr. Smelt to make an offer to Frances Burney. This trusted agent was instructed to express her Majesty’s wish to attach the young lady permanently to herself and her family: he was to propose to her to undertake certain duties, which were in fact those of Mrs. Haggerdorn; and he was to intimate that in case of her accepting the situation designed for her, she would have apartments in the palace, would belong to the table of Mrs. Schwellenberg, with whom the Queen’s own visitors—bishops, lords, or commons—always dined; would be allowed a separate footman, and the use of a carriage in common with her senior colleague; and would receive a salary of two hundred pounds a year.
Fanny listened, and was struck with consternation. “The attendance,” she wrote to her dear Miss Cambridge, “was to be incessant, the confinement to the Court continual; I was scarce ever to be spared for a single visit from the palaces, nor to receive anybody but with permission; and what a life for me, who have friends so dear to me, and to whom friendship is the balm, the comfort, the very support of existence!’ It was not the sacrifice of literary prospects that alarmed her. She did not even think of ‘those distinguished men and women, the flower of all political parties, with whom she had been in the habit of mixing on terms of equal intercourse,’[[69]] and from whose society she would be exiled. Her mind dwelt only on the pain of being separated from her family and intimate friends: from Susan and the Lockes; from the old familiar faces at Chesington; from her sister Charlotte, now married and settled in Norfolk; from her correspondent at Twickenham. ‘I have no heart,’ she says, ‘to write to Mickleham or Norbury. I know how they will grieve: they have expected me to spend the whole summer with them.’ Good Mr. Smelt, who, in the words of Macaulay, seems to have thought that going to Court was like going to heaven, was equally surprised and mortified at the mournful reception accorded to his flattering proposals. Mrs. Delany, in whose town house they were delivered, was not less astounded. The recipient, however, had but one thought, that, which ever way her own feelings inclined, the matter must be referred to her father, as the only person entitled to decide it. Dr. Burney, as might have been anticipated, was enraptured by the honour done to his family, and the vista which, in his sanguine view, was opened before his daughter. Meanwhile, Mr. Smelt had gone down to Windsor, and brought back word that the Queen desired a personal interview with Miss Burney. Fanny had her audience, and it ended, as she foresaw must be the case, in her submission. When her Majesty said, with the most condescending softness, ‘I am sure, Miss Burney, we shall suit one another very well,’ there was nothing to be done, but to make a humble reverence, and accept. The Queen told Mrs. Delany: ‘I was led to think of Miss Burney, first by her books, then by seeing her; then by always hearing how she was loved by her friends; but chiefly by your friendship for her.’
Of course, the proposition and the acceptance were alike mistaken. The service required was unworthy of the servant, nor was she competent for the service. On the one hand, the talents of a brilliant writer were thrown away in a situation where writing was neither expected nor desired. On the other, a novice of puny figure, imperfect sight, extreme nervousness, and small aptitude for ordinary feminine duties, was most unlikely to become distinguished in the profession of a lady-in-attendance. Under the most favourable circumstances, the gains and advantages attached to her constrained life at Court were not to be compared with those which might be looked for from the diligent use of her pen in the freedom of home. Yet allowing all this, we cannot disguise from ourselves that much heedless rhetoric has been expended by several critics on the folly of Miss Burney’s choice, and the infatuation of her parent. These critics, we conceive, have been led astray, partly by those more extreme trials of her servitude which no prudence could have foreseen, but principally by an erroneous estimate of her position at the time when she closed with the Queen’s offer.
The picture which has been imagined of Frances Burney sending forth, at short intervals, a series of ‘Cecilias,’ and receiving for each a cheque of two thousand guineas, is attractive, but purely visionary. It would, we venture to say, have tickled her fine sense of humour amazingly. We are not to think of her as of a favourite novelist of to-day, whom the booksellers and the editors of magazines conspire to keep constantly employed. Her longing to see herself in print seems to have been satiated by the appearance of ‘Evelina.’ Her second work was a much less spontaneous production. Indeed, it is not clear that ‘Cecilia’ would have been written but for the urgency of Crisp, seconded by other friends. Her two fathers were agreed that she ought to exert herself while her powers and her fame were fresh; but how much stimulus was applied after Crisp’s death, we are not informed. Hers was not a very energetic nature, and she had some misgiving that her invention was exhausted. At any rate, she had now let four years go by without attempting anything new. Her third book was not published for the space of a lustrum after her release from Court, and then only under strong pressure of the res angusta domi. There had been some talk of laying out the amount paid for ‘Cecilia’ in the purchase of an annuity. But we do not find that this saving plan was executed. What has been contemptuously called ‘board, lodging, and two hundred a year,’ was no bad provision for a single lady of thirty-four, who was producing nothing, and had no income of her own. Boswell, it is true, declared that he would farm her out himself for double or treble the money; but then Boswell did not know a great deal of female authors. Burney was much better aware what to expect from his daughter’s enterprise and resolution; and we are by no means sure that, in accepting for her the offered place, he proved himself a less practical man than the ‘irresponsible reviewers’ who have derided him as a moon-struck worshipper of royalty. Burke, who certainly did not undervalue Miss Burney, and who knew something of her family circumstances, was delighted at the news, and thought that the Queen had never shown more good sense than in appointing Miss Burney to her service; though he afterwards owned to having miscalculated, when the service turned out to mean confinement to such a companion as Mrs. Schwellenberg.
But neither the irksomeness of the duty, nor the character of Mrs. Schwellenberg, was known to the outer world. Both required experience to make them understood. How by degrees they disclosed themselves to Miss Burney, we shall learn presently. For the feud which sprang up between the two ladies, it must, in fairness, be owned that the elder was not wholly answerable. Miss Burney—we ought now properly to call her Mrs. Burney—had been appointed second Keeper of the Robes. She seems to have supposed that this put her on a level with Mrs. Schwellenberg, giving the latter the advantage of formal precedence only. But whatever had been the relation of Mrs. Haggerdorn to her colleague, it appears clear that Fanny, a much younger, and quite inexperienced person, was intended to be subordinate. Thus, when she expresses a fear that, by want of spirit to assert it, she had lost a right to invite guests to table, we cannot but remember that, in the terms proposed to her, the table had been described as Mrs. Schwellenberg’s. The chief Keeper, as we shall see, was coarse and offensive in speech, domineering and tyrannical in action, but her junior sometimes resented a tone of superiority and command which their royal mistress evidently thought natural and reasonable.
Whatever injury Miss Burney may have sustained by entering the palace, her readers at least have no cause to complain. ‘I am glad for her interest,’ wrote Walpole, ‘though sorry for my own, that Evelina and Cecilia are to be transformed into a Madame de Motteville, as I shall certainly not live to read her Memoirs, though I might another novel.’ But what was to Horace a source of regret, may be to us matter for congratulation. Fanny’s Diaries are now much more studied than her novels. Few of us would wish to exchange the journal of her life at Court for another fiction from her pen. The Harrels, the Delvilles, the Briggses, about whom Burke and Reynolds and Mrs. Delany talked as if they were real personages, are for most of us names that call up no association. Queen Charlotte and stout King George are better known to us than any other royal pair mentioned in English history. And for this we are in great measure indebted to the little lady who joined their household in July, 1786. The likeness of the Queen, which we remember as well as we do the features of our mothers, is entirely of her drawing; while she contributes not a few of the sketches which are combined in our impression of the monarch who loved music, and backgammon, and homely chat, and Ogden’s sermons, as much as he detested popery, and whiggery, and freethinking, and Wilkes. Nor are characters of another kind wanting in this journal. Mrs. Schwellenberg’s arrogance, her insolence, her peevishness, her ferocious selfishness, her broken English, are more familiar to the present generation than the humours, the affectations, the piebald dialect of Madame Duval, or than the traits of any of the other figures in Evelina. The Senior Robe-keeper was no doubt as indifferent to posthumous reputation as she was to the contemporary opinion of all who could not displace her. That she ran any risk from the satire of her timorous assistant was a thought which never occurred to her illiterate mind. She hardly knew what satire meant. She flattered herself that Harry Bunbury could not caricature her because she had no hump. For writers of imagination she had an unbounded contempt. ‘I won’t have nothing what you call novels,’ she once cried in Fanny’s presence, ‘what you call romances, what you call histories—I might not read such what you call stuff—not I!’ Had she been one degree less callous, or one degree less ignorant, she might have been slower to provoke the hostility of Johnson’s ‘little character-monger.’ Well! we have her portrait, most carefully executed. And we have also, by the same cunning hand, vivid delineations of many other persons, more or less notable, and of several interesting scenes that fell under the artist’s view during her connection with the Queen. We do not go to Miss Burney’s record of those five years for secrets of state, or politics, or even Court scandal—with which last, indeed, she seems to have busied herself as little as with the first two—but for a picture of the domestic life and manners of the Sovereign and his consort. It is no small proof of the journalist’s tact and discretion that she was able to produce so candid a narrative of what she experienced and witnessed without giving offence to the family concerned. The Duke of Sussex is reported to have said, that he and the other surviving children of George III. had been alarmed when the Diaries of Madame d’Arblay were announced for publication, but pleased with the book when it appeared; ‘though I think,’ added his Royal Highness, ‘that she is rather hard on poor old Schwellenberg.’ The Duke, of course, had seen the Schwellenberg only in her part of an abject toad-eater. Yet there may be something in his observation. Fanny had a light touch, but, like other women, was unforgiving towards an enemy of her own sex.
Our readers must not suppose that Miss Burney, on her appointment, went to live in Windsor Castle. Some years before that time, the Castle had been forsaken by the royal family as uninhabitable. A sort of makeshift palace, known as the Upper Lodge, or the Queen’s Lodge,[[70]] was erected hard by, opposite the South Terrace; a long narrow building, with battlements fronting northward towards the old towers, and southward towards a walled garden, at the further end of which was placed the Lower Lodge, a smaller building of similar character, appropriated to the use of the Princesses. Fanny, as an attendant on the person of the Queen, was quartered in the Upper Lodge. “My Windsor apartment,” she wrote, “is extremely comfortable. I have a large drawing-room, as they call it, which is on the ground-floor, as are all the Queen’s rooms, and which faces the Castle and the venerable Round Tower, and opens at the further side, from the windows, to the Little Park. It is airy, pleasant, clean, and healthy. My bedroom is small, but neat and comfortable; its entrance is only from the drawing-room, and it looks to the garden. These two rooms are delightfully independent of all the rest of the house, and contain everything I can desire for my convenience and comfort.” The sitting-room had a view of the walk leading to the Terrace, access to which was obtained by a flight of steps and an iron gate. Mrs. Delany’s door was at a distance of less than fifty yards from the Queen’s Lodge. The paltry and uncomfortable barracks erected under George III. no longer discredit the Crown of England. The restoration of Windsor Castle was commenced in 1800, and occupied a good many years. ‘In 1823 the Queen’s House was pulled down, and the present royal stables, built in 1839, occupy part of the site. It is, indeed, very difficult to identify any of the landmarks now; everything has been so completely changed. The steps and the iron gate, the railings and the Princesses’ garden, have all disappeared as completely as the Upper and Lower Lodges.’[[71]]
In the following passage we have a summary of the new Robe-keeper’s usual round of daily duties:
“I rise at six o’clock, dress in a morning gown and cap, and wait my first summons, which is at all times from seven to near eight, but commonly in the exact half-hour between them. The Queen never sends for me till her hair is dressed. This, in a morning, is always done by her wardrobe-woman, Mrs. Thielky, a German, but who speaks English perfectly well. Mrs. Schwellenberg, since the first week, has never come down in a morning at all. The Queen’s dress is finished by Mrs. Thielky and myself. No maid ever enters the room while the Queen is in it. Mrs. Thielky hands the things to me, and I put them on. ’Tis fortunate for me I have not the handing them! I should never know which to take first, embarrassed as I am, and should run a prodigious risk of giving the gown before the hoop, and the fan before the neckerchief. By eight o’clock, or a little after, for she is extremely expeditious, she is dressed. She then goes out to join the King, and be joined by the Princesses, and they all proceed to the King’s chapel in the Castle, to prayers, attended by the governesses of the Princesses, and the King’s equerry. Various others at times attend; but only these indispensably. I then return to my own room to breakfast. I make this meal the most pleasant part of the day; I have a book for my companion, and I allow myself an hour for it.... At nine o’clock I send off my breakfast-things, and relinquish my book, to make a serious and steady examination of everything I have upon my hands in the way of business—in which, preparations for dress are always included, not for the present day alone, but for the Court-days, which require a particular dress; for the next arriving birthday of any of the Royal Family, every one of which requires new apparel; for Kew, where the dress is plainest; and for going on here, where the dress is very pleasant to me, requiring no show nor finery, but merely to be neat, not inelegant, and moderately fashionable. That over, I have my time at my own disposal till a quarter before twelve, except on Wednesdays and Saturdays, when I have it only to a quarter before eleven.... These times mentioned call me to the irksome and quick-returning labours of the toilette. The hour advanced on the Wednesdays and Saturdays is for curling and craping the hair, which it now requires twice a week. A quarter before one is the usual time for the Queen to begin dressing for the day. Mrs. Schwellenberg then constantly attends; so do I; Mrs. Thielky, of course, at all times. We help her off with her gown, and on with her powdering things, and then the hairdresser is admitted. She generally reads the newspapers during that operation. When she observes that I have run to her but half dressed, she constantly gives me leave to return and finish as soon as she is seated. If she is grave, and reads steadily on, she dismisses me, whether I am dressed or not; but at all times she never forgets to send me away while she is powdering, with a consideration not to spoil my clothes, that one would not expect belonged to her high station. Neither does she ever detain me without making a point of reading here and there some little paragraph aloud.... Few minutes elapse ere I am again summoned. I find her then always removed to her state dressing-room, if any room in this private mansion can have the epithet of state. There, in a very short time, her dress is finished. She then says she won’t detain me, and I hear and see no more of her till bedtime....