Princesses (46 page)

Princess Elizabeth wrote with feeling of the proceedings at Westminster, calling them ‘the vile examinations what kills us,
yet
I am determined not to
despair.'
Princess Mary, meanwhile, having nursed her sister for over eighteen months
without
pause, was
recovering
from a collapse brought on by ‘worry and anxiety of
mind',
her elder sister wrote. The King, Mary told Mrs Adams, was not
worse,
but ‘at a standstill, says nothing quite wrong but nothing quite
right
and talks a great deal more than he
might
or than the physicians like'. Courteous Sir Henry Halford had to divide his time at Windsor between ‘upstairs' – the south apartments, where Princess Mary lay heavy headed – and ‘downstairs' – the north apartments, where the King walked and talked and forgot to sleep. Sir Henry steadied the
nervousness
in Mary's usually placid head by a blister ‘on the back part of the head where the great trembling of the
nerves is.'

The atmosphere in the chambers of Westminster in December was muted and without any of the frenzy that had
characterized
the Machiavellian extravaganzas of 1788-9. The machinery for a regency had been in place since 1789 when the King's recovery had stopped the third reading of Pitt's bill, and the doctors' reports now convinced the Parliamentary Committees that a regency, or ‘substitution for the deficiency in the executive power', was now called for. On 20 December Perceval introduced in the House of Commmons a Regency Bill with restrictions.

The Whigs, who expected to be called on to form a government, worried that the Prince as regent, with the restricted powers that were proposed, as they had been in 1788, would be unable to carry on public business
at all.
Others, the Tory Prime Minister Perceval among them, expected to be turned out if the Prince was appointed regent. They worried more about what would occur, should the frail seventy-two-year-old King be declared well once more and no regency ensue.

In January 1811 – despite a period of paroxysms in late December – the King's health seemed better. He walked on the terrace outside his rooms for an
hour
in mid-month and asked to go ‘upon a particular part' of the south terrace next day, ‘that it might be seen that he was
alive.'
Eight days later on the 26th he talked ‘in the most collected
manner'
for over an hour
with Perceval and the Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon. The physicians had asked the politicians to give the monarch an
account
of what was passing in Parliament, as ‘His Majesty's understanding and comprehension were perfect to every purpose of such a communication.' But he would not discuss public affairs, and, as often as they tried to bring him to talk of them, ‘turned the conversation with much
dexterity…'.

With the Regency Bill nearing enactment at the end of January, Perceval returned to tell the King of its provisions on the 29th, and stressed that it allowed for him to take up the reins of government immediately he recovered. George III countered that at his age he should be thinking of retirement, but evaded overtures from Perceval regarding a voluntary resignation of his powers. And the next half-hour was ‘not so good', wrote Perceval after he came away.

The King's vacillating sanity placed his Cabinet in a predicament for the last time a few days later when the Lord Chancellor came down to Windsor on 5 February to see if he were fit to give his royal assent to the Regency Bill. Although that day the King was calm and collected, Eldon thought it politic not to obtain his signature, and the bill was passed with the assistance of the unequivocally rational Great Seal, enabling the Prince to be sworn in on 6 February at Carlton House as prince regent of the United Kingdom – with restricted powers to be reviewed after a year.

The Prince's decision on becoming regent to keep his father's Tory ministers caused some consternation among the Whigs, but they chose to believe his assurances that he would never forgive himself if his father recovered and found his ministers gone. Sir Henry had indeed told the Prince that news of a change of ministry would ‘produce such an exacerbation … as might put an end to his
life.'
The Whigs waited impatiently for February 1812. If the King were not better by then, the Prince's regency would be confirmed and unrestricted, and then, the Prince intimated sorrowfully, he would no longer feel compunction about introducing his own advisers. Meanwhile, a Queen's Council of seven privy councillors – including Lady Harcourt's brother, the Archbishop of York and Lady Charlotte Finch's son Lord Winchilsea – was established to advise the Queen on the King's care at Windsor, and to visit the monarch weekly to remark on his condition. The princesses, who had not seen their father since those dark days surrounding their sister's death, now began again to pay him visits with their mother – visits which were sometimes painful to endure, and which sometimes raised their hopes. The King, Mary told Mrs Adams after her first visit in early February 1811, had greeted the announcement that the bill was passed ‘with much composure and
calmness.'

‘His Majesty is recovering,' Mrs Kennedy wrote optimistically that month. ‘He walks every day
upon
the terrace, attended by Drs Willis and Heberden. The terrace is shut up from the public, but the people walk in the park and see him with pleasure daily recovering.' George Ill's attendants were replaced with pages, and there was a brief flurry of activity in late spring when the other physicians concurred briefly with Heberden's advice that the King could not recover without stimulus. ‘This day,' wrote Mrs Kennedy on 20 May, ‘… His Majesty rode out on horseback for the first time with the Princesses and only attended by his equerry and gentleman as usual – no physician. He rode up the Long Walk in the park, appeared in great spirits, was out for about an hour. When he got back to the
Castle,
Dr Willis stood at the
door
to receive him. He stumbled getting off horseback and laughing said, “Don't report me ill, Doctor, it is only the old man not so alert as
formerly.'
”

The next day the King unexpectedly spoke to Elizabeth of Princess Amelia, and declared he would not have her live again, her
mind
was so perfect when she was taken. Elizabeth was comforted to think he accepted what had happened. Mary's hopes for a full recovery weakened, however, when, from her room, she saw her father return from another ride with her sisters. She ‘really was quite
overcome
at seeing him so much altered on horseback'. He appeared to her to sit his horse ‘with great difficulty and as if he was very weak'. Earlier he had had to struggle even to get his boots on to his swollen legs. He did not succeed, ‘despite much pulling from the jackboots', and finally, in cloth shoes, struggled on to his mount at ‘Sophy's door'. He did not enjoy the ride, despite his anxiety to go, and when Princess Sophia said it was his dinner hour, he turned back immediately.

The King tried to check and contain himself in his daughters' presence, especially towards the end of each week. The Council members paid their weekly visit of inspection on a
Saturday,
and he was determined to master himself and be declared well. He occasionally displayed the wit that had distinguished his illness in 1788-9. When he heard that the Prince was giving a fête or ball at Carlton House on 5 June, and asked if it was true, the Queen replied that it was designed to mark his own Birthday, and ‘at the same time assist trade'. The King replied trenchantly that he saw no
reason
to ‘put oneself out of the way to help trade'. But after the Queen had gone, Bott, the King's page who served as his eyes, said the orders his master gave that day to imaginary subordinates were more than usually extravagant.

The King, in hopes of being allowed to attend the Regent's fête at Carlton House – a fête, sumptuous at the time, that grew in its extravagance
in people's
minds
as time and the war went on, till it ranked with banquets of antiquity – and feeling fever coming on, even submitted to restraint. But there was no suggestion that the princesses should themselves attend the merriment. Their part was to kneel as vestal virgins at the tomb of their father's sovereignty, mourning its passing. ‘Is there no balm in Gilead?' the Book of Jeremiah demanded in the
cold
church that they attended every morning. They might well have cried in response, that indeed there was none, as the tortuous days slipped by.

During his daughters' visits, the King occasionally
meditated
on Princess Amelia's attachment to Fitzroy. But he had already accepted Sir Henry Halford's bland account of Amelia leaving what she had to Fitzroy, in return for his attendance on her out riding and on journeys. And his
mind
did not rest long on any subject.

The King's recovery did not last. At the end of May the princesses wrote with sadness of a ‘new system' that was about to operate ‘across the
quadrangle'
in their father's apartments – a system sanctioned by the Council and Cabinet in which the physicians' and mad doctors' positions were to be reversed. Dr Robert Willis, on 1 June, assumed the ‘whole responsibility of the
sick room',
and, recommending extreme quiet for the King, forbade for the moment communication with his family. Furthermore, the blind King's pages were removed from their responsibilities at his side, and instead burly keepers were supplied by Willis from his asylum in Lincolnshire. As for Halford, Baillie, Heberden and Dundas, though they might see the King every day, they were to observe only his physical wellbeing, and no longer occupy themselves with his mind. They could do nothing without the consent or presence of Dr Robert Willis, not converse with the King, nor – as Dr Heberden had wished – provide any stimulus for him.

General Herbert Taylor resigned as the King's secretary shortly before the ‘new system' came in. One of his last tasks was to lock away in presses throughout the King's apartments and library the
state,
historical and private papers that he had dealt with since 1805. At different times, the King had
handed
him papers ‘in great number from various presses, table drawers, bureaus,
boxes
etc', and he had found others in bureaux and presses in the State Apartments at Windsor, in the Great Lodge in the Park, in the Queen's House and at Kew. Taylor's work completed, he gave to the Queen the King's ‘private
key'
to all the presses. With this locking away of the King's vast correspondence, with the paperwork that had been his chief tool as monarch sealed up and by recourse to which, even after his blindness, with Taylor's
help,
the sovereign had so often confronted the Cabinet, the apartments ‘across the Quadrangle' grew quiet.

But there was one last eerie communication from those apartments. At an Ancient Music concert in London just before the ‘new system' came into effect at Windsor, the Duke of Cambridge announced that his father had made the selection of all the music that followed – passages from Handel, the King's favourite composer, all of them ‘descriptive of madness or blindness, particularly of those in the opera,
Samson;
there was one also upon madness from love and the lamentation from
Jephtha
on the loss of his daughter'. The resonance of the music was felt throughout the assembly, and the monarch's absence was underlined when the concert ended with ‘God Save the King' – a king ‘who was sometimes', as his daughter Princess Mary put it, ‘so sensible of his own
situation.'

But the King was not always so alert to his circumstances. As the British army – General Spencer with it – forced its way forward in Portugal and won great victories at Almeida and at Fuentes de Oñoro, at home the Treasury computed the frightening cost of these Peninsular expeditions. The new expense of maintaining in state a Regent's Court – even on lines not considered by the Regent himself sufficient to his position – as well as an establishment at Windsor for the ailing King and another for his wife and daughters, was also painfully felt.

The country would have to economize somewhere, now that the Prince could to some degree claim that he had to be magnificent. Commissioners were therefore appointed, and carried out their brief – to make plans to reduce the King's and Queen's establishments, and transfer the appurtenances of state to their son's new Court – with mathematical rigour. The King, ‘employed with the bedclothes', sorting them by night and spending his day in his apartments ‘singing, laughing and talking a great deal to the queen' of very trifling subjects, cared nothing for the changes around him that were meditated. But the princesses were humiliated and mortified by the ‘reductions' that they began to understand would be required of them.

The Queen rarely displayed her feelings, even in private. Her daughters spoke occasionally of her temper, and Princess Mary lamented that she seldom showed herself warm or affectionate. ‘Her unfortunate manner makes things much worse,' Mary wrote. Only when she spoke of the Prince did a glow suffuse the Queen's sunken features, and she was neither support nor companion to her daughters in their distress. In these sad times a visit in early June from Princess Charlotte, now aged fifteen, was very welcome. ‘Her spirits do us all good and keep the house alive,' remarked her aunt Mary; ‘… she says everything that comes into her head and is very clever at the same time.' Charlotte's hoydenish ways, however, did not earn
her aunt's approval. She ‘requires much softening down, more than any young female I ever saw', said Mary, ‘both as to manner and
voice.'
Charlotte's own response to
life
at Windsor was ‘Heavens, how
dull.'

For seventeen days in July 1811 the King suffered ‘paroxysms' and was completely ‘lost, not knowing one soul or giving any marks of reason'. A month later his daughter Mary commented, ‘Nobody who
loves
the poor King can wish his life to be prolonged an hour.' And in August Princess Augusta told Amelia's old nurse Mrs Williams that she had all along had a bad opinion of this illness of the King's, ‘because his affections could never be worked upon'. In all his other illnesses he had rejoiced to see his daughters, she added, and had even been vexed, sometimes ‘beyond measure', when they left – inconsolable in the ‘forenoon', though they were to return in the
evening.
Now he told his daughters his schemes or complained to them as to anyone else, and wished them goodbye without concern. On 15 August, Augusta declared not dispassionately but with finality: ‘Since the 28th of May I have never seen him, but at a distance – and now probably I shall never see him again. For', she explained sadly, ‘under his melancholy state I would not see him for
worlds,
as I cannot serve him. I could do him no good, and he would not know me.' Since July the King's memory had become very impaired.