Princesses (22 page)

Far from dying, the King had found a new lease of life. He was still alive, and gaining strength physically. But on the night of Tuesday, 11 November ‘the ramblings continued', equerry Robert Fulke Greville recorded, ‘and were more
wild
than before, amounting alas to an almost total suspension of reason'. ‘No sleep this night,' he added wearily. ‘The talking incessant throughout.'

The Prince of Wales now ‘took the government of the house into his own hands'. All was done and only done by his orders. His sisters passed all their time with their mother, who ‘lived entirely in her two new rooms, and spent the whole day in patient sorrow and
retirement.'
The princesses did not go for walks, they did not ride, they did not even go to church. They lived in an atmosphere of whispers and silence and dread. News came from the King's room that he was talking much, and with great hurry and agitation, of ‘Eton College, of the boys
rowing,
etc'. He complained of burning, perspired violently, and called to have the windows opened. By the evening he was turbulent and rambling, and at three in the morning he had ‘a violent struggle, jerking very strongly with his arms and legs'. He had not slept for twenty-nine hours. The only edict to emerge from the Queen's rooms was that the Archbishop of Canterbury should ‘issue out public prayers for the poor King, for all the
churches.'
John Moore, the Archbishop, accordingly produced a moving prayer, and Fanny Burney went to St George's Chapel that Sunday to hear it read.

The elder princesses were anguished by their father's state. One morning he attempted to jump out of the window, and in his loquacity did not hesitate to reveal various state secrets to anyone in the vicinity. But he was quieter, too, and arranged his watches and conversed rationally and ate bread and butter and drank tea with relish. His daughters accepted it all and hoped that the care of his poor jumbled mind and weakened frame would result in his
recovery
. However, as the days went by a new source of tension at Windsor developed. As he waited for Fox to return and direct affairs, the Prince began to be less amenable to the wishes of his mother and less moved by the plight of his father.

Members of the Whig leadership – Lord Minto, the Duke of Portland and especially Richard Brinsley Sheridan – made contact with the Prince and argued for action. The Whig doctor Sir Richard Warren pronounced the King's recovery in doubt, and, prophesying a period of years during which the King would be incapable of conducting public business, or indeed of attending Parliament, urged a regency. The King himself was aware in his clouded mind of this possibility and had informed his doctors that he lived under ‘an absolute government, no, a republic, for there are three of you'. He begged them, when they had resolved something, to tell him of it, and he would give his order. ‘But let not these pages', said the humiliated monarch, ‘say to the King, “You must and
must not
”.' The other doctors differed with Warren and predicted the King would recover, thus pleasing the administration and putting in doubt the need for a regency. The King believed that he had recovered already, and asked General Gouldsworthy to go to Eton and obtain a holiday for the boys to celebrate his return to life. Gouldsworthy was also to prepare the Queen for the firing of the guns at noon, and to order Handel's Dettingen Te Deum in church.

Attempts were made to check the King's ceaseless flow of words – he spoke on the 17th for nineteen hours, and not surprisingly developed a catch in his throat – and even to shave him, which he had resisted. But, after being shaved on one side, he rose and would not allow the operation to continue. As he had not been shaved for a fortnight the effect was bizarre. ‘Cabal
flourishes,'
Lord Sheffield wrote. Yet the cause of the caballing was not melancholy but rather gay. The King talked for sixteen hours on 21 November, until the doctors set him to writing to divert him, when he made notes on
Don Quixote.
‘He fancies London is drowned, and orders his yacht to go there,' Sheffield continued. ‘He took Sir George Baker's wig, flung it in his face, threw him on his back, and told him he might stargaze. Sir George is rather afraid of him. In one of his soliloquies
he said, “I hate nobody. Why should anyone hate me?” Recollecting a little, he added, “I beg pardon, I do hate the Marquis of Buckingham.”'

As Fox returned from France and the Houses of Parliament adjourned for a fortnight, to resume business in December with a debate over the regency, the Prince was elated, his sisters desperately unhappy.

During the afternoon of 24 November there was a flurry of movement within the walled garden that lay behind the Queen's Lodge at Windsor. And now into the garden, emerging into the walled space and moving down the sloping ground in the direction of the trees and shade at the other end, came a hesitant band of princesses. Their father's doctors, at their wits' end to know how to deal with an unprecedented royal malady, had that morning in conference had an idea: ‘they thought they would try what effect the letting him see his children in the garden would have'. The forlorn hope was that the deranged King, looking on from a window, would gather strength from the mere sight of the daughters for whom he pined in his confinement.

Despite the doctors' determination to try ‘the effect', the King had become agitated at the prospect earlier in the day, and had endeavoured to forbid the scheme. ‘No, I cannot bear it; no, let it be put off till evening, I shall be more able to see them then,' he begged. But the doctors were adamant, and outside the girls now trooped to take part in the experiment. For a moment all was still on the lawn. The younger princesses were unaware of the watcher at the window. And then, startled, they looked up. There was their father struggling at the windows, making efforts to open them, gesticulating at his daughters and banging in frustration on the pane. But how could this be their father, this pale and haggard man wearing a nightgown and nightcap in the middle of the day? And now others appeared at the window, and the King was removed from sight.

While the elder girls were still shaken and the younger ones stared uncomprehendingly, a gentleman appeared with a request from their father that they would come nearer. They approached, and their father called to them through the window. But by now the Princess Royal was quite overcome, as was Princess Mary, on whom the horror of the scene had not been lost. The matter was decided when it appeared that Princess Elizabeth was about to faint. ‘And, in truth,' Mrs William Harcourt wrote to Lady Harcourt, ‘they all seemed more dead than alive when they got into the house.'

The princesses, love their brothers though they did, could not but feel uncomfortable about the growing hostility towards their father. As the Prince plunged deeper into politicking, he became more callous towards
his father's suffering, and even took to mimicking him and his mania in public. The Duke of York, not to be outdone, mimicked his father to some friends in a coffeehouse. Their sisters did not know of these excesses, but of one turbulent act of the Prince's they had personal knowledge. At the end of November, the headstrong Prince drove his three elder sisters and Lady Charlotte Finch around Windsor one evening. Apparently he drove with such ferocity that countless lampposts were left shattered in his
wake
.

The King's close confinement at Windsor was coming to an end. ‘There is not only no impropriety in removing him to Kew,' wrote the doctors on 27 November, ‘but it is advisable.' They declared that a ‘change of place and objects' would facilitate recovery, while ‘air and exercise' were ‘necessary for His Majesty's cure'. The princesses left for Kew with their mother and an assortment of ladies on the morning of 1 December 1788. They found the house – not usually used in winter – freezing and with their names daubed in chalk by the Prince of Wales on the various apartment doors. Fanny Burney was grateful for a rug which the Queen gave her, though it was a very small one. The news was then broken to the King that they had gone before, and he was invited to join them at Kew House. He had been anxious for the Princess Royal to accompany him in his carriage, which could not be allowed. He had lascivious thoughts in this state, although they generally focused on an elderly lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth, Lady Pembroke.

At first, George III refused to leave Windsor, his favourite residence, and became so frantic that ‘they were obliged for the first time to threaten him with a strait waistcoat'. Finally, he hobbled past a mournful gauntlet of members of the household who lined the passage of the Queen's Lodge and, braving crowds who clung to the railings outside the house to see him go, departed back to the house at Kew where he had first been taken ill.

At Kew the King occupied a suite of three rooms, with two equerries or pages always in attendance. The Queen, as at Windsor, took a separate suite of rooms – in this case, a bedroom, the drawing room and the gallery on the first floor – and the princesses had their apartments beyond hers. The house, never designed for winter habitation, was so cold and draughty that the Vice Chamberlain, Colonel Digby, of his own accord and shuddering at the ‘naked, cold boards', sent out to purchase not only carpets but sandbags for doors and windows to stop the wind whistling through the rooms. ‘The wind which blew in upon these lovely Princesses', he declared, ‘was enough to
destroy them.'
But they were made of sterner stuff. The dullness of those hours when the crocodiles of royal children snaked around the shrubberies and lawns seemed, to the princesses in
retrospect, an idyll. Now at night, in company with the other inhabitants, they feared that they heard the King, though his apartments faced towards the garden and only the animals in the menagerie could hear his cries.

The day after Parliament met following the November adjournment to consider the King's case, seventy-year-old Dr Francis Willis joined the medical team at Kew. Willis was a ‘mad-doctor', a physician who devoted himself to the care of the insane at an asylum at Gresford near Lincoln where, with his two sons John and Thomas, he supervised 800 lunatics. Queen Charlotte found Willis's arrival hard to bear. It announced to the world, as much as if the King had been placed in the care of Dr Monro of Bedlam, that he was now regarded as a madman. Moreover, with the Lincolnshire doctor – a rough man with none of the sophisticated manners of Baker or Warren – came the odious instrument then commonly employed in the management of the mentally ill, the strait waistcoat or straitjacket.

On 8 December, Willis, examined by a House of Commons committee keen to establish the prognosis of the King's case, declared that he had treated no fewer than thirty patients a year with mental disorder for twenty-eight years, and he believed, like Baker, that the King would recover. Three months was, in his estimation, the normal time of recovery for nine out of ten people who had been placed in his care. But he submitted that the King's cure might take a little longer. ‘When His Majesty reflects upon an illness of this kind, it may depress his spirits, and retard his cure more than a common person.' At any rate, he saw no ‘present signs of convalescence'.

Lady Charlotte Finch led the Queen and princesses in prayer on the Sunday. The prayers that they said so fervently seemed answered when the King appeared to be recovering day by day, and he even went for a walk in the Gardens. In another ‘experiment', Mary and five-year-old Amelia were held up to a window so that he could see them. But ‘when he had fixed his eyes upon them, he pulled off his hat, which in his agitation he flung one way, his gloves and cane another, and ran into the house' – where he burst into tears. Next day, 13 December, despite this scene, the King's incessant pleas to be allowed to see his ‘Emily', Princess Amelia, were answered, and she was brought to him. (At night he rolled to and fro, reciting her name and asking her wraith how she could let him be subjected to these humiliations.) He ‘pressed the Princess Emily in his arms who cried very much and was
frightened.'
In just a few weeks the King had become very thin, and he had grown a beard. Furthermore, his speech was rambling, though he tried to check it in front of his daughter, and even his movements were wild and abrupt. Princess Amelia was hurried away, and that night Dr
Willis took the decision to ‘confine' the King for the first time in the strait waistcoat, and he remained in it till morning.

Four days later, the waistcoat was employed again. Dr Warren reported from Kew that the King had become ‘very unquiet… had no sleep during the whole night, and was confined by Dr Willis early this morning'. Dr Warren released the King from this confinement at ten in the morning, and left him eating breakfast but talking at the same time in ‘a very disturbed manner – the whole resembling our worst Windsor days'. The following day the King was even more ‘agitated and confused', Sir Lucas Pepys informed the Prince of Wales, ‘perhaps from having been permitted to read
King Lear,
which he is now reading and
talking about.'
The King's mind, although turning on a few subjects only, was not deprived of guile or logic. When a doctor forbade him the play, he asked instead for Colman's
Works,
which he knew contained the original ‘altered by Colman for the stage'.

Such was the King's fear of the straitjacket, so docile did he become when threatened with it, that the punitive measure came slowly to be regarded as having magical curative powers. Both family and politicians began to afford Dr Willis a certain respect, although the King remained wary of him. On one occasion when the monarch was castigating him for having left the Church to join the medical profession, Dr Willis objected: ‘May it please your Majesty, Our Saviour went about healing the sick.' ‘Yes,' replied the King, ‘but I never heard that he had £700 a year for
doing so.'