Princesses (23 page)

The case appeared hopeless. The King was ‘good humoured, but as incoherent
as ever',
wrote Baker and Reynolds on Christmas Eve. He slept one hour or maybe two a night, and Christmas Day 1788 was a sad day at Kew. The bells of St Anne's Church on the Green clamoured, but none of the inhabitants of Kew House joined the congregation. A regency appeared inevitable.

And then, without warning, the King began to improve. He was ‘in a much more composed and collected state yesterday than he has been hitherto', the report of 28 December read. On New Year's Day, Dr Willis reported that the King had played several games of backgammon with him, and ‘conversed in a collected, sensible manner yesterday evening for seven hours'. The King, he believed, was ‘more himself than I have ever seen him since I have had the honour to attend His Majesty'. So the question now arose, and was to grow more urgent: was the King to be judged incapable of conducting public business and even of going down to Parliament because for an hour or two a day he was ‘raging'? The Whigs deemed him incapable; Pitt and the Tories now believed, or affected to believe, that he
was on the verge of a full recovery. Before the point could be resolved, the King worsened again.

The princesses themselves were spared the sight of their father after the failure of the November and December ‘experiments' at Windsor and at Kew until he again seemed on his way to recovery. Visiting him on 17 January 1789, and seeing him play a game of piquet, the Queen judged – and Dr Willis agreed – that he had behaved with propriety. The following day the King's request to see his daughters was granted, although he had awoken ‘never more disturbed in his life'. (After the princesses had gone, the King told one of his pages that the Queen had consented that ‘Esther' – Lady Pembroke, the elderly lady of the Court for whom he had conceived a passion – should come to him.)

On another occasion the King called to Miss Burney whom he had spied in the garden, and when she desperately tried to get away he lumbered after her to try her nerves a little further. But while the King was still for hours at a time ‘very deranged, his looks wild', he was also now rational for long periods. The manner of his greeting Royal and Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth on one occasion was affecting. He told them he had been reading
King Lear,
to which they could think of no response. But, the King continued good-humouredly, ‘in some respects he was not like him, he had no Goneril, nor Regan, but only three
Cordelias.'

In the course of February 1789 the Queen took twelve-year-old Princess Mary to visit her father. ‘Twice,' she believed, ‘he was going to say something wrong, but he put his hand upon his mouth, and said “hush” and then in a moment spoke properly'. Princess Sophia read to him from a
Life of Handel
later in the month. Although there were worse days, on 26 February the doctors announced: ‘There appears this morning to be an entire cessation of His Majesty's illness'. And the following day the glorious news was posted on the railings of the Queen's House: ‘A perfect recovery.' The prayer for that recovery, which the Queen had instigated, and which was read in all parish churches on Sunday mornings, had at last been answered. It was discontinued, and a prayer of thanksgiving substituted.

Desperation and humiliation were alike over, and in euphoric mood the Queen and her daughters – all but Amelia – drove to London with the Willises on 10 March 1789 to enjoy the illuminations there that marked an end to the progress of the Regency Bill. Sir Joseph Banks had illuminated his house with a transparency of Hygeia, and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall described the city splendour: ‘London displayed a blaze of light from one extremity to the other; the illuminations extending … from Hampstead and Highgate to Clapham, and even as far as Tooting;
while
the vast distance between Greenwich and Kensington presented the same dazzling
appearance.'
The royal
ladies
stayed out till one in the
morning,
revelling in
this
public display of affection and support for the recovered
King
.

Meanwhile, at Kew Princess Amelia led her now benign
father
to a window to observe the transparency – shining with representations of the King, providence and health – and illuminations that the Queen had had the painter Biagio Rebecca create in the Palace
courtyard
. She first knelt to him to speak lines written, at the Queen's request, by Miss Burney and ended, with appropriate action: ‘The little bearer begs a kiss from dear Papa for bringing this.'

Four
days
later, the King and Queen and the
elder
princesses travelled to Windsor from Kew: ‘All illness over, all fears removed, all sorrows lightened,' as Miss Burney put it. ‘The King was so well as to go on
horseback.'
And Mr Leonard Smelt, the Prince of Wales's former tutor and now Deputy Ranger of Richmond Park, wrote some days later with satisfaction from Windsor to Miss Hamilton: ‘Their majesties and the three eldest princesses came here last Saturday, and the improvement in all their appearance is as rapid as the most attached and sanguine of their subjects could wish it – The youngest princesses, I understand, come here in a few days as, excepting the attendance on the drawing
room
(which the papers will inform you is only for the Queen and the princesses), the residence will be solely here for some
time.'

Public anxiety and medical speculation
about
the ‘family disease' that was held to have afflicted the King surfaced now in newspaper and magazine articles. And the King's own reactions to his illness, and sentiments about his imprisonment at Kew, emerged. He did not forget the impertinences served upon him and indeed the humiliations to which he had been subjected. Some
months
later, he ‘talked of the coercion and asked, how could a
man
sleep with his arms pinioned in a strait waistcoat and his leg tied to the
bedposts.'
When the Archbishop of Canterbury and others counselled
against
the
service
of thanksgiving for his recovery in St Paul's Cathedral that the King demanded, he replied, ‘My Lords, I have twice read over the evidence of my physicians on my case, and if I can stand that, I can stand
anything.'

Were the princesses disturbed by the widespread understanding that their father's illness was hereditary, and alarmed that their prospects as brides in Europe might be affected? Time might tell soon enough, as the King's promise of November the
year
before to make his Court at
Hanover
‘gay' for aspirants to his daughters' hands had survived his illness. Or at least he threw out a ‘hint' in March 1789 to Prince Augustus, back in Göttingen after wintering in the south, that he might receive a ‘call to Hanover', as he contemplated a visit. And his equerry Robert Fulke Greville noted that the subject of a visit to Hanover was much on the King's mind.

His daughters, meanwhile, were celebrating the end of their own confinement. For the four months of her father's illness, the Princess Royal told her brother Augustus later in the year, she had written
nothing
. Princess Elizabeth told a friend she had seen nobody during those months. Now they more than made up
for it,
and on 15 April the Queen, Princess
Augusta
and Princess Elizabeth admired at the play an ingenious transparency featuring the King's recovery, while Mr Bannister, the leading actor, led the audience in six rousing choruses of ‘God Save the King'. ‘I always did and ever shall glory in being born an
Englishwoman,'
Elizabeth wrote to Augustus, as they prepared for the great Thanksgiving planned for the 23rd in St Paul's Cathedral.

On that day, the King and Queen drove down to the cathedral in splendour, in the gold coronation coach drawn by the famous Hanoverian Royal Creams. And the Queen, stalwart in her demonstrations of loyalty to the King here and at the drawing room, armoured herself with all the jewels the King had given her on marriage. Even Augusta, usually ‘so careless as to what she was
dressed
in, provided only that she was dressed', and Elizabeth, ‘usually anxious to forget that she was burdened by being great', dressed sumptuously for the service – in a prescribed uniform of imperial
purple silk and patterned gold muslin over white satin. Only the Prince of Wales and Duke of York resisted the festive mood – they pointed at their parents in church, ate biscuits and burst into fits of laughter.

The King withstood the rigours at the Thanksgiving of the ‘good
old
Te Deum and
Jubilate'
he had wanted. But many commented on his extreme loss of weight and altered appearance. His face, wrote one, was ‘as sharp as a knife, and … his eyes appeared therefore more prominent than before … He appears extremely weak in his manner of
walking.'

The princesses launched themselves into further celebrations – including rival fetes given by the French and Spanish ambassadors – for their father's recovery. For a gala celebration on May Day at Windsor of which the Princess Royal was hostess, they painted dozens of fans with the motto ‘Health to one and happiness to
millions.'
The Whigs boycotted a ball at White's, the government club in St James's, but the princesses and
other
ladies sparkled in a ‘uniform' of white and gold with purple bandeaux inscribed with the now familiar acronym GSTK in diamonds. The Queen thought highly of this ball, ‘as all the world was in accord and of the same
opinion.'
But her Whiggish eldest daughter was of a different view, and preferred Brooks's ball the other side of the street which
all
Society attended the following week.

The King, still frail, did not attend these festivities, and he found that his head for business was somewhat impaired. He wrote in May that ‘lassitude and
dejection'
made it difficult for him to take quick or satisfactory decisions, and complained of fatigue: ‘I am not yet able to copy my own papers.' Telling Pitt that he would attempt for the meanwhile only to ‘supervise' his ministers' work, and relying on time to complete his cure, he continued to take bark, with tartar mixed in, as directed by Dr Willis, now back at his Gresford asylum. And he continued to make plans for Hanover.

The King missed a piquant encounter at the ball following his Birthday drawing room on 4 June between his daughter Princess Augusta and the Duke of Richmond's heir, Captain Charles
Lennox,
whom the Queen had pointedly invited – to her son the Prince of Wales's fury. A week earlier, Lennox had fought a duel with the Duke of York, his commanding officer in the Coldstreams, after publicly insulting his brother the Prince. ‘The Duke of York had one of his curls shot off, and when the King and Queen heard it, the first showed very little and the second no emotion at all, and both said coldly that they believed it was more Fred's fault than Lennox's,' wrote an indignant Whig. The royal parents had not yet forgiven their eldest sons their behaviour during the King's illness.

When the dancing began, Lennox joined with his partner in the royal family's set. The Prince of Wales left that set with the Princess Royal, before the Captain could ‘turn' her. But the Duke of York with Princess Augusta remained. And so Augusta danced with the dashing Captain, creating in the circumstances a sensation. Indeed, the manuscript of
The Claustral Palace,
a projected book detailing the romances of the princesses and for that reason suppressed, features handsome Captain Lennox as Augusta's earliest
lover
.

A rash of lovers and suitors and even a bridegroom might have followed for Augusta in Germany had the King stuck to his plan of setting up shop at Hanover. Unfortunately, Dr Willis counselled against the proposed trip as too strenuous, and advised the King to take ‘a few dips in the
sea'
instead as a final guarantee of his health. This suggestion took root with the King, and led him – anxious that he might not ‘entirely recover the vigour of mind and the inclination of taking the same active part' that he had done ‘for above 28 years' without ‘thorough
relaxation'
– to plump for Weymouth. This was a rather staid sea-bathing resort in Dorset, thirteen hours by coach from Windsor, where his brother Gloucester had a house.

And so early in the morning of 25 June 1789 the three elder princesses departed Windsor for Weymouth, part of a caravan of eight coaches loaded with luggage and supplies – Lyndhurst in the New Forest their first stop. The Queen, the princesses and all the ladies, noted Miss Burney, wore ‘riding coats of the Windsor uniform, which is a new dress
taken
up this year', for their journey. The younger princesses –
Mary,
Sophia and Amelia – stayed behind at Lower Lodge at Windsor with Gouly and Lady Charlotte Finch.

En route to Weymouth the party stopped for a few days in the ancient New Forest in Hampshire. It was the King's first visit to this royal hunting ground, and at its entrance a local baronet, Sir Charles Mills, waited to present him with a brace of white greyhounds with silver collars. Hereditary Keepers of the Forest then escorted the royal party to the ‘King's house' at Lyndhurst, where the Duke of Gloucester received them. Princess Augusta, at least, was greatly taken with the New Forest, and some years later fantasized to an admirer of living in a cottage there.

Miss Burney, another of the party, remembered instead the experience of passing through Salisbury further down the route to Weymouth: ‘a city which with their Majesties, I could not see for
people
! It seemed to have neither houses nor walls, but to be composed solely of
faces.'
The roads, according to one observer, were ‘lined with every human creature of every rank and every age, in chariots, coaches, carts, on horseback, upon asses …
all come to see, and holler, and scream their true loyalty and joy … every field and every hedge was robbed of every flower to wreathe garlands and
crowns.'