A Georgian Pageant. Frank Frankfort Moore
to the Queen. “The Queen,” she writes, “is almost overpowered with some secret terror. I am affected beyond all expression in her presence to see what struggles she makes to support her serenity. To-day she gave up the conflict when I was alone with her; and burst into a violent fit of tears. It was very, very terrible to see! … something horrible seemed impending … I was still wholly unsuspicious of the greatness of the cause she had for dread. Illness, a breaking up of the constitution, the payment of sudden infirmity and premature old age for the waste of unguarded health and strength—these seemed to me the threats awaiting her; and great and grievous enough, yet how short of the fact!” …
At last the terrible truth was revealed. Miss Burney was dining with one of the Queen's ladies; but there was little conversation between them. It was clear that both had their suspicions of the nature of the dread shadow that was hovering over the castle. They remained together, waiting for the worst. “A stillness the most uncommon reigned over the whole house. Nobody stirred; not a voice was heard; not a motion. I could do nothing but watch, without knowing for what; there seemed a strangeness in the house most extraordinary.”
To talk of such passages as these as examples of literary art would be ridiculous. They are transcripts from life itself made by some one with a genius for observation, not merely for recording. Boswell had a genius for recording; but his powers of observation were on a level with those of a sheep. We know perfectly well what his treatment of the scenes leading up to the tragedy of the King would have been. But Fanny Burney had the artist's instinct for collecting only such incidents as heighten the effect.
When she is still sitting in the dim silence of that November evening with her friend some one enters to whisper that there was to be no playing of the after-dinner music in which the King usually took so much pleasure. Later on the equerries come slowly into the room. There is more whispering—more head-shaking. What was it all about? Had anything happened? What had happened? No one wishes to be the first to speak. But the suspense! The strain upon the nerves of the two ladies! At last it can be borne no longer. The dreadful revelation is made. The King is a madman!
At dinner, the Prince of Wales being present, His Majesty had “broken forth into positive delirium, which long had been menacing all who saw him most closely; and the Queen was so overpowered as to fall into violent hysterics. All the princesses were in misery, and the Prince of Wales had burst into tears. No one knew what was to follow—no one could conjecture the event.” Nothing could be more pathetic than the concern of the King for his wife. His delusion is that she is the sufferer. When Fanny Burney went to her room, where she was accustomed to await her nightly summons to attend Her Majesty, she remained there alone for two hours. At midnight she can stand the suspense no longer. She opens the door and listens in the passage. Not a sound is to be heard. Not even a servant crossed the stairs on the corridor off which her apartment opened. After another hour's suspense a page knocks at her door with the message that she is to go at once to her Royal mistress.
“My poor Royal Mistress!” she writes. “Never can I forget her countenance—pale, ghastly pale she looked … her whole frame was disordered, yet she was still and quiet. And the poor King is dreadfully uneasy about her. Nothing was the matter with himself, he affirmed, except nervousness on her account. He insisted on having a bed made up for himself in her dressing-room in order that he might be at hand should she become worse through the night. He had given orders that Miss Goldsworthy was to remain with her; but it seemed that he had no great confidence in the vigilance of any one but himself, for some hours after the Queen had retired he appeared before the eyes of the horrified lady-in-waiting, at the door, bearing a lighted candle. He opened the bed curtains and satisfied himself that his dread of her being carried out of the palace was unfounded; but he did not leave the room for another half-hour, and the terror of the scene completely overwhelmed the unhappy lady.”
Truly when this terror was walking by night Fanny Burney's stipend was well earned. But worse was in store for her when it was decided that the King should be removed to Kew Palace, which he detested and which was certainly the most miserable of all the miserable dwelling-places of the Royal Family. It seemed to be nobody's business to make any preparation for the reception of the Queen and her entourage. The rooms were dirty and unwarmed, and the corridors were freezing. And to the horrors of this damp, unsavoury barrack was added Mrs. Schwellenberg, the German she-dragon who had done her best to make Fanny Burney's life unendurable during the previous three years. Formerly Fanny had dwelt upon the ill-treatment she had received at the hands of this old harridan; but now she only refers to her as an additional element of casual discomfort. The odious creature is “so oppressed between her spasms and the house's horrors, that the oppression she inflicted ought perhaps to be pardoned. It was, however, difficult enough to bear,” she adds. “Harshness, tyranny, dissension, and even insult seemed personified. I cut short details upon this subject—they would but make you sick.”
Truly little Miss Burney earned her wages at this time. The dilapidated palace was only rendered habitable by the importation of a cartload of sandbags, which were as strategically distributed for the exclusion of the draughts as if they were the usual defensive supply of a siege. But even this ingenious device failed to neutralise the Arctic rigours of the place. The providing of carpets for some of the bare floors of the bedrooms and passages was a startling innovation; but eventually it was carried out. An occasional set of curtains also was smuggled into this frozen fairy palace, and a sofa came now and again.
But in spite of all these auxiliaries to luxury—in spite, too, of Mrs. Schwellenberg's having locked herself into her room, forbidding any one to disturb her—the dreariness and desolation of the December at Kew must have caused Miss Burney to think with longing of the comforts of her father's home in St. Martin's Street and of the congenial atmosphere which she breathed during her numerous visits to the Thrales' solid mansion at Streatham.
The condition of the King was becoming worse, and early whispers of the necessity for a Regency grew louder. It was understood that Mrs. Fitzherbert would be made a duchess! Everybody outside the palace sought to stand well in the estimation of the Prince of Wales, and Pitt was pointed out as a traitor to his country because he did his best to postpone the Comus orgy which every one knew would follow the establishing of a Regency. The appointment of the Doctors Willis was actually referred to as a shocking impiety, suggesting as it did a wicked rebellion against the decree of the Almighty, Who, according to Burke, had hurled the monarch from his throne. There were, however, some who did not regard Mr. Burke as an infallible judge on such a point, and no one was more indignant at the mouthings of the rhetorician than Miss Burney. But it seemed as if the approach of the Regency could no longer be retarded. The Willises were unable to certify to any improvement in the condition of the King during the month of January, 1789. It was really not until he had that chase after Fanny Burney in Kew Gardens that a change for the better came about.
Though she was greatly terrified by his affectionate salutation, she could not but have been surprised at the sanity displayed in the monologue that followed; for one of the first of his innumerable questions revealed to her the fact that he was perfectly well aware of what a trial to her patience was the odious Mrs. Schwellenberg. He asked how she was getting on with Mrs. Schwellenberg, and he did so with a laugh that showed her how well he appreciated her difficulties in this direction in the past. Before she could say a word he was making light of the Schwellenberg—adopting exactly the strain that he knew would be most effective with Miss Burney.
“Never mind her—never mind her! Don't be oppressed! I am your friend! Don't let her cast you down—I know that you have a hard time of it—but don't mind her!”
The advice and the tone in which it was given—with a pleasant laugh—did not seem very consistent with what she expected from a madman. Fanny Burney appears up to that moment to have been under the impression that the King and Queen had known nothing of the tyranny and the insults to which she had been subjected by Mrs. Schwellenberg. But now it was