II
KEW IN FAVOUR

The chief memories of Kew are associated with its royal master who, by his doings here, earned the nickname of “Farmer George,” in his unpopular days also belittled as the “Buttonmaker,” a sneer at his turning-lathe, and the taste for other mechanical pursuits which he shared with Louis XVI. The “Squire of Kew” is a title that would have suited him better; and he might have lived more happily and usefully had his station been no higher than that which he here affected. When he could get away from State functions and cares, not indeed neglected by him, he liked to live at Kew as a simple country gentleman, keeping a pack of hounds, superintending a model farm, improving his grounds, looking after his children, walking out with his wife, and not wasting his money. As the homely and frugal ways of this royal couple gave offence not only to dissipated courtiers, who felt themselves rebuked, but to the mob, always apt to be a snob, “meanly admiring mean things,” the caricaturists and lampooners of the reign found abundant encouragement to make coarse fun of George’s and Charlotte’s domestic virtues as well as of their public offences. But one guesses that Gillray and Peter Pindar were not applauded by the King’s neighbours at Kew.

For some ten years, as we have seen, Richmond Lodge made his favourite country-seat; and for about the same period he was most at home in Kew House. Then, after taking up their residence at Windsor, the royal family went on making longer or shorter visits to Kew, kept as a villeggiatura where they could be under less ceremony and restraint than in their statelier palaces. Their winter abode was usually Buckingham House. Not till George had been nearly twenty years on the throne did he care for living at Windsor. The castle itself had fallen so much out of repair, that a new “Queen’s Lodge” was built where now are the royal stables; then this took the place of Kew as chief summer residence. When the Richmond people found they were like to lose such distinguished and profitable neighbours, they sorely repented their refusal to sell the bit of land coveted by the King, which was now pressed upon him, but too late to change his intention. That Naboth’s vineyard was eventually taken into the royal grounds; then by an Act of Parliament closing “Love Lane,” a public way between them, George was able to unite the grounds of Richmond and Kew, which long, however, remained distinct enclosures.

So George and Charlotte settled down, had a large family, and lived happily in private life, till fresh troubles came upon them. We should all know Thackeray’s sly account of that life:—

In the Memoirs of Mrs. Papendiek, whose husband and father were Court pages, and who was brought up at Kew, it is mentioned that during the “No Popery” riots the children were sent away to Kew, while the King stayed at his post in London, showing courage and spirit, but would ride down between four and seven in the morning for a peep at his darlings, brought up to their parents’ early hours. Other reminiscences give glimpses of the royal domesticity and rusticity, not so dull to all tastes as to those of a man about town like Thackeray. One lad, John Rogers, who lived into Victoria’s reign, remembered seeing the young King, shut out of Richmond Lodge after a morning walk, tapping at the window in vain, till at last he contrived to open one and push himself in head foremost. In the country, George and Charlotte were up at six, and breakfasted with their children about them. They often dined with the children, too; later on the King took to early dinners that scandalised his guests by the simplicity of mutton and turnips. His usual drink was a sort of lemonade known in the household as King’s cup. In an age of intemperance and riots, he preferred sobriety, the morning dew, and the open air, with plenty of exercise to keep down his fat. The lucky children had all Kew Gardens to play in; and once a week the whole family made a regular promenade through the Richmond grounds. When he went further afield, George loved Paul-prying into the cottages of his poorer neighbours, showing an interest in their petty affairs, and pouring out upon them more questions than could be answered, such as that famous one, how the apple got into the dumpling?

Though the London mob, at different times, were insolent to both sovereigns, they never lost popularity at Kew. When they next visited it after the King’s escape from assassination by a mad woman, the road over Kew Green was found crowded by all the inhabitants, “lame, old, sick, blind, and infants,” with a band of musicians “who began God Save the King! the moment they came on the Green, and finished it with loud huzzas”—a neighbourly demonstration that moved the Queen to tearfully declaring, “I shall always love little Kew for this.”

George succeeded to his mother’s interest in Kew Gardens, now enlarged and improved as will be told in another chapter. He also carried on a large home-farm that extended into the parish of Mortlake, while the Old Deer Park was turned into pasture for a flock of merino sheep which he imported into England. The young princes were brought up to the same tastes. Before getting into their teens, the two eldest had a plot of ground given them, where, à la Sandford and Merton, they planted a crop of corn, weeded, reaped, thrashed and ground it with their own hands, and saw it made into bread, of which the whole family duly partook. Up till our own time was standing in Kew Gardens a miniature structure said to have been built by the princes as part of their apprenticeship to life. In the present Kew Palace are preserved specimens of their early writing, George’s copy being Conscious Innocence, while Frederick traces very creditably the sentiment, Aim at Improvement.

It was not through parental indulgence if these boys grew to despise such innocent pursuits. Queen Charlotte taught them herself in their A B C stage: and when they were given over to tutors, the order was that they should be treated like ordinary scholars, flogged if they deserved it, and so forth. The rod seems not to have been spared on him who was to become the Lord’s anointed; and his education in the classics prospered better than his father’s. The notorious Dr. Dodd, who came to be hanged for forgery, was at one time proposed as the Prince of Wales’s tutor. He was brought up with his next brother Frederick, who, till created Duke of York, bore in boyhood the foreign title of Bishop of Osnaburgh, and had been made a Knight of the Bath in the nursery. The little Bishop did not take kindly to books; but in later life George IV. could pose as a scholar before the courtly wits about him; even in his teens he corrected his Governor, Lord Bruce, on a false quantity, so mortifying the noble pedagogue that he gave in his resignation. There is another story, perhaps recorded by Signor Ben Trovato, that in the Prince’s later life an uncourtly Provost of Eton mentioned Homer to him as “an author with whom your Royal Highness is probably not much acquainted,” to which H.R.H. suavely replied that he had forgotten a good deal of his Homer, but remembered one line, and went on to quote Il. i. 225, which, for readers in the same case as to Homer, may be rendered by Dryden’s version, “Dastard and drunken, mean and insolent”—epithets that too well fitted the rebuked pedant in question.

The Eton boys of that day, for whom the summum supplicium, according to Henry Angelo’s Memoirs, was not over six cuts of a birch, would appear to have been handled in less Spartan fashion than were the King’s sons in their private schoolroom. The Princess Sophia told Miss Amelia Murray that she had seen her eldest brothers, at thirteen and fourteen, held by the arms to be flogged with a long whip. But once the naughty boys are said to have turned against one of their severe masters, using upon him the rod he proposed for them. This story may have suggested a scene in Thackeray’s Virginians, as it might have been prompted by one in Roderick Random, or a variant in The Fool of Quality, a very long and edifying romance of the Sandford and Merton school, which had a vogue at this period. The Queen held no high opinion of novel-reading; and if her sons studied the works of Smollett, it would perhaps be on the sly, as must have been a good many doings in that family.

We know how these carefully educated princes had more of Merton than of Sandford in their disposition; then they soon found flatterers and courtiers to set them against their strict training, and to curry favour with a future sovereign. Childish mischief may excuse the freak of the boy Prince of Wales saluting his father with the hated cry of “Wilkes and Liberty!” But it was a serious matter when the second son was precociously found playing the Don Juan with a cottage beauty. That scapegrace Bishop is accused of leading his elder brother into wrong-doings for which he perhaps needed no prompter. Their uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, was another bad counsellor, who delighted in debauching his nephews out of ill will to the moral King. A worse companion, later on, would be the notorious Duke de Chartres, afterwards Égalité Orleans, who brought to London French-polished vices to exchange for English jockeyism.

The Prince of Wales, like his father, was fond of music, and, if flattery may be trusted, made no despicable performer. Mrs. Papendiek, having the same tastes, can give us some glimpse of his hobbledehoy recreations.

Making a butt of a dependent seems no princely pastime; but this lady has worse to tell us of the “First Gentleman in Europe’s” amusements at the age of sixteen. “Much do I lament to add that some of those about the young princes swerved from principle, and introduced improper company when their Majesties supposed them to be at rest, and after the divines had closed their day with prayer.”

The first open scandal about the Prince was his intrigue with the unfortunate “Perdita” Robinson, who turned many a head beside his by her acting in The Winter’s Tale. We know very little about that episode except what the lady thinks fit to tell us in her Memoirs. The boy lover, not yet eighteen, was so closely kept at Kew that for some time he had to content himself with ardent letters. At length an interview was arranged under circumstances which suggest that the tutorial turnkeys must have been in the way of nodding over their port. Lord Malden, who played Leporello in this amour, brought Perdita to an inn on the island between Kew and Brentford, to await the signal that should invite them to cross.

Repeated assignations, she says, followed “at this romantic spot,” where now the party took courage to continue their walks till past midnight. Prince Frederick and Lord Malden, we are to know, were always there to play gooseberry. The lady wore a dark-coloured dress, and the gentlemen were disguised in greatcoats, except that harum-scarum Bishop, who would make his companions uneasy by showing himself in an unclerical buff coat, “the most conspicuous colour he could have selected for an adventure of this nature.” The tutors having got into their nightcaps by midnight, one supposes, these moonlight ramblers even ventured on a little music as the food of love, Frederick being the minstrel whose tones, “breaking on the silence of the night, have often appeared to my entranced senses like more than mortal melody.” It is clear that Perdita does not tell the whole story. Mrs. Papendiek, well up in the gossip of the backstairs, roundly asserts that two officials who had been about these princes from childhood, “privately overlooked the domestic vices and irregularities of their young charge,” and that they smuggled Mrs. Robinson through a back gate to the Prince of Wales’s apartments.

The beautiful actress, who was a poetess, too, à ses heures, might well be dazzled by those shining personalities. The Prince vowed unalterable love till death; and the most convincing of his billets-doux was a bond promising to pay Perdita £20,000 at his majority. Perhaps he was sincere for the moment; but we know what such callow vows come to. When, at eighteen, he became to some extent his own master, this unhappily married woman was taken into keeping, and for a time cut a notorious dash before the footlights of society. After Florizel grew tired of her, Perdita’s gushing sentimentality did not overlook businesslike considerations. She let the King buy up the Prince’s letters for £5000; and his bond was commuted for a pension of £400. But, these profits swallowed up by debts and extravagant habits, the poor creature fell into bad health and hasty authorship. Paralysed and harassed, she died in 1800, buried by her own desire, “for a particular reason,” in Old Windsor Churchyard, where her tomb may be seen fenced in with spiked railings to defend it from the body-snatchers that infested those river-side graveyards; and on it may be read an oft-quoted epitaph idealising the painful facts of her career.

At Richmond lived Mrs. Fitzherbert, the Prince of Wales’s more lasting flame, to whom he appears to have been honestly, if illegally, married. When this Prince was launched upon the wicked world, and the Bishop in partibus had been sent off to finish his education abroad, the royal pair still had their quiver full of youngsters, who for twenty years came so fast as to be cue for Horace Walpole’s jesting prophecy that “London will be like the senate of old Rome, an assembly of princes.” Besides others who died young, there were the princes afterwards known as Dukes of Clarence, Kent, Cumberland, Sussex, and Cambridge, and the Princesses Charlotte, Augusta, Mary, Elizabeth, Sophia, and little Amelia, the darling of her father. Where all these children were stowed away, one cannot always make out clearly: we hear of the Princes William and Edward living with their tutors in what is now Cambridge Cottage, and two of the younger boys in a house at the top of the Green. Lady Charlotte Finch, governess to the princesses, had a separate house near the river; then another is spoken of as the “Princess Elizabeth’s house.” Kew House itself was a scrimply inconvenient mansion, for which the royal household made a tight fit even in its state of reduced ceremony. Pictures of it when it was the Princess Dowager’s villa, show a square, plain front with two one-storied wings, from which in all thirty-two windows look straight out upon the lawn. At that time it bore the alias of “The White House.” Miss Burney describes it as a labyrinth of stairs and passages, where at first she continually lost herself among the “small, dark, and old-fashioned” rooms.

It is in 1786 that a search-light comes to be turned upon this semi-private life by the diary of a then most popular novelist. At the end of the year before, Fanny Burney had been staying with her venerable friend, Mrs. Delaney, at Windsor, when one afternoon into the drawing-room walked, unannounced, a burly man in black with a star on his breast. Even the short-sighted visitor hardly needed to be told who he was. As every one in the room drew back out of the way, she was for slipping off; but the King asked in a loud whisper, “Is that Miss Burney?” and after good-naturedly giving her time to recover from her modest confusion, entered upon a conversation of questions, punctuated with what, whats, in which he showed himself very inquisitive as to how she had come to write and print Evelina. The Queen soon followed, to whom George introduced her by repeating their conversation; and Miss Burney went to bed enraptured with her new acquaintances. Further interviews followed, which only increased her admiration, though the satirist rather than the courtier peeps out in her account of directions given her for behaviour in the presence of royalty.

Her demeanour certainly gave satisfaction in the royal circle, for a few months afterwards she was offered the post of one of the Queen’s dressers, which she accepted after some modest misgiving. We remember Macaulay’s indignation, “That with talents which had instructed and delighted the highest living minds, she should now be employed only in mixing snuff and in sticking pins; that she should be summoned by a waiting-woman’s bell to a waiting-woman’s duties; that she should pass her whole life under the restraints of a paltry etiquette, should sometimes fast till she was ready to swoon for hunger, should sometimes stand till her knees gave way with fatigue, that she should not dare to speak or move without considering how her mistress might like her words and gestures.”

This engagement was certainly a mistake on both sides: Miss Burney might have found more congenial employment; and the Queen could have had a better dresser. But Macaulay, after his manner, has rather over-emphasised the evils of her lot in the royal service. She certainly took it as a rise in the world, and to her father it seemed dazzling good fortune. The remuneration offered her, with the chance of further favour, might well have satisfied even successful novelists of that day, few among whom would not have jumped at such admission to the skirts of Court life. Her year’s salary, £200, was almost as much as she got from her second novel, and far more than the proceeds of her first one; then Macaulay slurs over the Queen’s generosity in presents. To look at the matter in no mere terms of pay, literature probably lost little by her laying down the pen for a time; her best work had been done in Evelina; Cecilia was a falling off; and Camilla, written after her experience of service, did not deserve the pecuniary success won for it, in part, by royal patronage. In her diary, Miss Burney herself makes little serious complaint but of the ill-tempered tyranny of her senior colleague, Mrs. Schwellenberg. Court life soon ceased to be a little heaven below for her; but she had distractions in royal journeys to Oxford, Cheltenham, Weymouth, seats at the trial of Warren Hastings, glimpses of great folks, and even spells of moral flirtation with at least one gentleman of the household, not to speak of rather troublesome attentions from another who was a married man. She cannot say too much of the kindness of the King and the princesses; and if her “sweet Queen” proved sometimes an inconsiderate mistress, it was from want of thought rather than a hard heart. The confinement upon which Macaulay lays such stress was no stricter than that of most domestic ladies, who had not Windsor Park and Kew Gardens to walk in. Had she been more robust, the novelist might have lived on to become a second Mrs. Delaney in the royal esteem. But her health broke down, and after five years’ genteel servitude she retired on a pension of a hundred pounds.

During these years the Court had its summer head-quarters at Windsor. Every second week, the “Royals” spent from Tuesday to Friday at Kew, using this as a half-way house for St. James’s, where on Thursdays the Queen held her fortnightly drawing-rooms. This was Miss Burney’s hardest job. She had to be up at six on drawing-room days, with hardly time for breakfast, to help in dressing the Queen, who put on most of her finery at Kew, the “tippet and long ruffles” being carried in paper to save them from dust; then the final touches were added at St. James’s, where, after the function, the idol had to be undecked—in all, three laborious attendances and two journeys, from which the tired keeper of the robes got back to dinner not till nearly seven o’clock, as then seemed a very late hour.

In winter, when the Court moved to London, there would be no going to Kew, which indeed was not fitted up as a cold weather residence. When it came to be occupied for months during the King’s illness, strips of carpet and sandbags had to be provided to make the princesses tolerably comfortable. All the luxury of this house was outside, in its spacious gardens. But the want of state was made up for by the more home-like life of Kew, though that had also its disadvantages; the ladies and gentlemen were not free to see their friends where the King and his younger children might at any time come wandering along the passages and poking into the small rooms. There was not even a chapel in the house; and when the Royal Family happened to spend a Sunday here by some chance, they heard prayers in a private room, through the door of another, where the chief attendants took their place, the servants being edified in an outer apartment, which reminds us of the complaint of one of Queen Anne’s chaplains that he had “to whistle the Gospel through the keyhole.” It was later that George III. fitted Kew Church with a gallery to serve as royal pew.

Towards the end of 1788, this routine was painfully broken upon by the King’s illness, which began during one of his temporary stays at Kew, prolonged then for more than a week, to the great discomposure of the household, ill-provided with clothes, or with books in Miss Burney’s case. The cause of the attack was said to be His Majesty’s sitting in wet stockings; but for some time back signs of strangeness had been noted in him, who had enough to disorder his mind in the conduct of his eldest sons, and in his brooding over the loss of the American Colonies. Miss Burney’s diary gives a vivid picture of those wretched days at Kew, when no one felt sure what to say, and some, like herself, hardly knew what to think of the rumours that filled the house. The King was noisy and voluble beyond his wont, talking himself hoarse in his assurances that there was not much the matter with him, mingled with complaints that he could not sleep. More than once Miss Burney found the Queen in tears. Charlotte had good reason for anxiety: she must have been aware of the character of a similar attack near the beginning of the reign, which had passed off so quickly that it could be hushed up.

By October 25, George seemed so much better that he moved to Windsor, where his restlessness and weakness grew worse again. He obstinately insisted on going out to hunt as usual in the November weather, yet he had to confess that all at once he had become an old man. A few days later there was a terrible commotion in the family. It leaked out that at dinner the King had broken into positive delirium, seizing his eldest son by the collar and pushing him against the wall. The Prince is said to have burst into tears, while the Queen had a fit of hysterics. Her husband could with difficulty be persuaded to spend the night in a separate room, from which all night long she heard his ravings, now no secret to any one in the house.

The King’s death being looked on as imminent, the Prince of Wales at once took command of the misery and confusion at Windsor. His heartless conduct during his father’s illness is matter of history, as also the bitter struggle between his faction and Pitt’s Ministry on the Regency question, the former maintaining the very unwhiggish doctrine that royal authority should pass, in the circumstances, into the Heir Apparent’s hands, while the Tories would make him Regent only with the sanction of Parliament, and under restrictions. The rabble was now on the King’s side; and all respectable persons, not being partisans or place-hunters, were disgusted by the profligate Prince’s conduct. The doctors attending the King had been threatened with popular violence if his illness proved fatal. Their case was a hard one, as not only would the royal patient not always take their remedies nor even see them, but they were treating a complaint then ill understood even by physicians who professed special experience in it. It is said that poor George was put in a strait-waistcoat, chained to the wall, and actually struck by one of his keepers, which would be quite after the practice of that day. But the stories of his harsh treatment are somewhat dubious, for the notion that he was being ill-used often figured among his delusions.

At the end of November the doctors determined on removing him to Kew, where he could get exercise in the privacy of the Gardens. The King angrily refused to leave Windsor, and had to be coaxed away by a promise that he should see his wife and children, gone on before him. “Princes, equerries, physicians, pages—all conferring, whispering, plotting and caballing, how to induce the King to set off!” noted Miss Burney, who accompanied her mistress on their hasty flitting to Kew House, where the Prince of Wales had written in chalk over each room the name of its occupant. Everybody had to put up with the discomfort of being crowded together in that ill-furnished mansion. The only good rooms were given up to the King, those above being left empty that he might not be disturbed. Part of the household overflowed into the Prince of Wales’s house opposite; the younger children being lodged in their usual quarters on Kew Green. Pent up closely with “the Schwellenberg,” Miss Burney had her full share of troubles; but her womanly devotion rose to the occasion, and she declares that “not even the £20,000 prize in the lottery could, at this time, draw me from this melancholy scene.” She had the satisfaction of being employed, every morning, to carry the physicians’ report to the Queen, who, by her enemies, was accused of doctoring those bulletins to give the most favourable view of symptoms on which, for once, doctors differed.

The Prince of Wales and his partisans listened rather to those big-wigs of the profession that were most gravely shaken over a case they did not understand. They perhaps agreed best in looking askance on an outsider called in upon the removal to Kew. This was the Rev. Mr. Willis, who at Lincoln, and in a private asylum of his own, had shown the benefit of a more rational treatment of the insane. Though he had a medical degree, he was belittled as a quack by many members of a guild apt to suspect innovators; but his success had been so notable that he was now employed, with his sons, trained in his methods, to be constantly about the King. From the first he took a hopeful view of the case; and when, with occasional interference, he was allowed to have his way, it soon appeared that he was the right man in the right place. His secret seems to have been a mixture of kindness and firmness; but perhaps he was not above using nostrums of his own. Mrs. Papendiek, whose husband was in attendance, says that one of the remedies used was musk, the smell of which the King could not bear, but the doctor insisted on it as efficacious. He took the responsibility of giving the King a razor to shave himself, for which he was afterwards denounced almost as compassing Lèse-majesté; but on all such questions he stipulated for leave to go by his own experience and judgment.

Had this been in the era of newspaper kodaking, we should no doubt have fuller details of the King’s madness, as to which more or less doubtful stories leak out in the memoirs and letters of the day. He is described as wanting to climb the Pagoda, and on being thwarted, throwing himself sulkily on the ground, from which it took four or five men three-quarters of an hour to raise him. Another day he tried to throw himself out of a window. The worst symptom was his incessant garrulity: he would go on talking for hours about everything or nothing. One of the doctors once found him translating the Court Calendar into doggerel Latin. The most pathetic story is that of his being overheard earnestly praying for his recovery. At times he showed touches of humour and shrewdness. He managed, though it had been forbidden, to get hold of a copy of King Lear, Dr. Willis not being strong in literature; and when his elder daughters were first allowed to visit him, he told them “I am like poor Lear; but thank God! I have no Regan, no Goneril, but three Cordelias.” Once he reproached Willis with having given up his sacred calling for profit; and when the reverend doctor excused himself on the precedent of Christ healing demoniacs, “Yes,” said the King, “but He did not get seven hundred a year for it!”

The Willises, by the way, afterwards complained of their remuneration, whatever it was; but their treatment of George III. made an excellent advertisement for the family, one of whom was sent for to Lisbon in the case of a mad Queen of Portugal. They seem to have given some offence in the household by the position they had to assume. Great was flunkey indignation when four of Dr. Willis’s keepers were raised to brevet-rank as pages, that after his recovery they might remain beside the King in case of a relapse. About that time several of the regular pages seem to have been dismissed or disgraced, it is said for carrying tales to the Prince of Wales. These “pages,” of course, had now grown into adult servants above mere menial rank, such beardless boys as figure in history and romance being distinguished as “pages of honour.”

Poor Miss Burney was so worn out that one of the doctors, noticing her wan looks, insisted on her taking daily exercise, such as was the prescription for the King. As the orders were to keep every one out of his way, she made a point of inquiring whether he would be in the Kew or the Richmond grounds; but once there was a misunderstanding that led to the most violent agitation of her life. While tramping her constitutional round of Kew Gardens, through the trees she saw three or four figures, whom at first her short-sighted eyes took for workmen, till she was too late aware of His Majesty’s person among them.

She was soon relieved to find the King talking reasonably enough, though with a certain flightiness, not very different from his ordinary manner. He insisted on prolonging the interview, after the Willises in vain tried to cut it short. He talked of Mrs. Schwellenberg, seeming quite well aware of what Miss Burney had to bear from her “Cerbera”; of the lady’s own father, author of the History of Music; of his favourite composer, Handel, snatches from whose oratorios he tried to hum over with painful effect. As they walked on together, he asked endless questions about his friends, expressed his intention of appointing new officials, complained angrily of his pages. At last he was persuaded to part from this reluctant confidante, promising to be her friend as long as he lived; then she went off to the Queen with a report which ensured forgiveness for that innocent adventure.

The favourable symptoms continued, little to the satisfaction of the Prince and his friends, who are credited with passing brutal jests on the King’s condition. Just as power seemed to be within their grasp, the Regency Bill was shelved, after an audience given by the King to the Lord Chancellor, Thurlow, though that shifty Polonius is said to have remarked that His Majesty had been “wound up” to talk to him. Miss Burney, who now confined her walks to the roadside, had the happiness of thence seeing the royal pair walking arm-in-arm in Richmond Gardens. Next day, the King came to tea with his family in the drawing-room; then, a few days later, meeting Miss Burney in the Queen’s dressing-room, he said that he had waited on purpose to tell her—“I am quite well now—I was nearly so when I saw you before—but I could overtake you better now.” After four months of royal misery and public excitement, the evergreen sneerer, Horace Walpole, could note—“The King has returned, not to what the courtiers call his sense, but to his non-sense.”

The news called forth an outburst of public joy, that hit the Prince’s party hard. A thanksgiving prayer was read in every church; and later on the King, to the dread of his advisers, would not be satisfied without the excitement of attending a solemn service at St. Paul’s, where he and the princesses were moved to tears, while his graceless sons attracted attention by their irreverent chattering. There is some slight palliation for the Prince of Wales’s conduct throughout this trying time, in the fact that the King had showed a dislike to him, and even a want of fairness to his shortcomings; but the Duke of York, always the father’s favourite son, has no excuse for backing up his undutiful brother. Soon after the recovery was announced, London had hailed it with a general illumination, from rushlights in the humblest cottage window to blazing devices on the clubs. It was witnessed by the Queen and all her daughters except the youngest, while, in their absence till the, for them, most unwonted hour of 1 A.M., Kew House too was lighted up and adorned with a transparency displaying The King—Providence—Health—Britannia; and on either side of the gates, in gold letters on a purple ground, shone these most loyal lines:—

Inside the house also the Muse was not silent. His darling Princess Amelia came to kneel before him, presenting her father with verses in the Queen’s name, from the pen of her novelist-attendant.

In the middle of March, after their unusually long stay at Kew, the royal family moved to Windsor, the King riding on horseback, to be received by the townsfolk with an ovation of welcome. In June, to complete the cure, he went to Weymouth for sea-bathing, everywhere on the journey hailed with acclamations and demonstrations that might well have turned a weak head. At Weymouth, the exuberant loyalty of the people was embarrassing. All the shops and bathing-machines placarded God Save the King, a device repeated on the bonnets and waists of the bathing-women, as indeed on dresses all over England. “All the children,” reports Miss Burney, “wear it in their caps—all the labourers in their hats, and all the sailors in their voices; for they never approach the house without shouting it aloud—nor see the King, or his shadow, without beginning to huzza, and going on to three cheers.… Nor is this all. Think but of the surprise of His Majesty when, the first time of his bathing, he had no sooner popped his royal head under water than a band of music concealed in a neighbouring machine struck up ‘God save great George our King!’” It was now that occurred the ludicrous incident of the wooden-legged Mayor presenting an address, and not being able to kneel, to the scandal of the officials. And here, the “Royals” having gone on a day’s visit to Sherborne Castle, for the first time in three years Miss Burney had a holiday, which she spent with a friend in a “romantic and lovely excursion” to the ruins of Sandsfoot Castle near the neck of Portland Island, a peep into which she might have found more romantic, had some couple of miles not been a Georgian lady’s limit on foot.

After a tour through the loyal West country, the Court returned to its routine of London and Windsor life, with halts at Kew in the summer. But henceforth Miss Burney’s diary has little to say about Kew; and after another year we lose that peep-hole into royal domesticity. The life of a glorified waiting-maid began to tell upon her health and spirits: “Lost to all private comfort, dead to all domestic endearment, I was worn with want of rest and fatigued with laborious watchfulness and attendance.” Her chief comfort had been a sort of intermittent philandering with the Queen’s Vice-Chamberlain, Colonel Digby—the “Mr. Fairly” of her journals—a favourite with the King, too, to whom he could “say anything in his genteel roundabout way.” This gentleman the lady clearly admired none the less when he became a widower, though to us she presents him rather too much in the character of a priggish novel hero, full of edifying reflections and opinions. But the sentimental friend turned out not impeccable, for he married Another, the “Miss Fuzilier,” about whom his fellow-servant had often rallied him; and she cannot conceal that this choice seemed unworthy of him. Her health was so evidently breaking down that her literary friends cried out on the sacrifice; even the newspapers gossiped about her condition; and the meddlesome Mr. Boswell declared that he would set the whole Club upon Dr. Burney, if she were not allowed to resign.

This she was most loth to do. She tried taking “the bark,” but that did little good. The Rev. Dr. Willis volunteered a prescription which she found “too violent” in its effect, while grateful to him for his interest in her. “Why,” said he, “to tell the truth, I don’t quite know how I could have got on at Kew, in the King’s illness, if it had not been for seeing you in a morning. I assure you they worried me so, all round, one way or other, that I was almost ready to go off. But you used to keep me up prodigiously. Though, I give you my word, I was afraid sometimes to see you, with your good-humoured face, for all it helped me to keep up, because I did not know what to say to you, when things went bad, on account of vexing you.”

Every one noticed her miserable plight, yet the Queen showed herself too blind to the fact of a life being wasted in her service. Even the ill-tempered Mrs. Schwellenberg was kind in her way, who seems to have found this subordinate a pleasingly submissive victim, and occasionally spoke well of her behind her back: “The Bernan bin reely agribble!” This “Cerbera,” whatever her faults, had the virtue of devotion to her lifelong mistress, and could not understand living by choice out of sunshine of Court favour. She tempted Miss Burney with the dazzling prospect of her own post in reversion. But the novelist was sick of her gilded cage. With trembling knees, after long hesitation, as if it were a crime, in the form of a petition she offered her resignation, not over-graciously received. The Queen proposed a six weeks’ holiday, a change of air. When this was declined, the Schwellenberg raged against Miss Burney and her father as almost guilty of treason. “I am sure she would have gladly confined us both in the Bastille, had England such a misery, as a fit place to bring us to ourselves from a daring so outrageous to imperial wishes.”

She held on some months longer to let the Queen find a successor, secured in the person of a Hanoverian pastor’s daughter, Mdlle. Jacobi, who, for sign of family poverty, brought a niece with her in the disguise of maid. Miss Burney’s last King’s birthday ball under the royal roof was marked by a visit to Mrs. Schwellenberg’s room from the young Duke of Clarence, our future sovereign, of which the diarist jotted down a long and most amusing description, though she has to apologise for not giving a full “idea of the energy of His Royal Highness’s language.” He insisted upon them all drinking the King’s health in champagne so often that some of the courtly attendants were a little shaky on their legs; and as for the Sailor Prince, he got so drunk that, as he told his sister next morning, “You may think how far I was gone, for I kissed the Schwellenberg’s hand”—and he might have added, bid her “Hold your potato jaw, my dear!” If this be a true sketch from high life, the novelist need not be accused of exaggerating the manners of her Braughtons and Captain Mirvans.

Among her last duties was expounding to the inquisitive King and Queen the allusions in Boswell’s Dr. Johnson, in 1791 the book of the day, which Miss Burney hardly approved of, being one of the few who “by acquaintance with the power of the moment over his unguarded conversation, know how little of his solid opinion was to be gathered from his accidental assertions.” Now she was at pains to vindicate to her royal patrons “the serious principles and various excellences” of her famous friend. The year before, when Boswell visited her at Windsor, he had in vain pressed her to contribute “personal details” to his work. “You must give me some of your choice little notes of the Doctor’s; we have seen him long enough upon stilts; I want to show him in a new light. Grave Sam, and great Sam, and solemn Sam, and learned Sam—all these he has appeared over and over. Now I want to entwine a wreath of the graces across his brow; I want to show him as gay Sam, agreeable Sam, pleasant Sam: so you must help me with some of his beautiful billets to yourself.”

The last day of Miss Burney’s five years’ slavery dawned at Kew, from which she attended Her Majesty to St. James’s, and there took leave of her with deep emotion. Freedom, congenial society, and country air soon restored the lady’s health; and the faithless Colonel Digby’s place in her heart became more than filled by General D’Arblay, one of a colony of French émigrés settled at Juniper Hill above Mickleham, near her sister’s house, and her friends, the Lockes of Norbury. Lessons in one another’s language gave excuse for meetings, at which Cupid was soon of the party. The not-over-young couple married in haste and privately, but seem never to have repented. With the proceeds of the bride’s next novel, Camilla, they built Camilla Cottage, still conspicuous, as Camilla Lacey, on the slopes above Box Hill station; but at the peace General D’Arblay went back to France, where his wife became for years an involuntary exile.

Mrs. Papendiek has a mischievous statement that Miss Burney was dismissed on account of the Queen’s displeasure that she used her spare hours for writing a novel in the palace; and that the authoress was much mortified by the loss of her post. But this seems mere scandal. Madame D’Arblay owned to writing an unsuccessful tragedy at Kew and Windsor; and some years after, when Camilla was published, she confessed to the King and Queen that the “skeleton” of it had been jotted down under their roof, at which they expressed no displeasure, but graciously acknowledged the dedication with a gift of a hundred guineas. The same gossiping authority says that Miss Jacobi did not recommend herself to the Queen, nor to “old Schwelly,” who refused to allow that niece-maid to dine at her table. A few years later Mrs. Papendiek herself succeeded to the post once held by the novelist, for which she was much fitter, to judge by the space given to dress in her journals. But these records end before she entered upon her duties; and we know little more of her Court life but that she gained promotion in the royal household, from which she retired to spend her old age at Kew.

In 1805, another literary lady came into the service of Queen Charlotte, Miss Cornelia Knight, afterwards companion to the Prince Regent’s daughter. Her journals are much more discreet about the royal family than Miss Burney’s; and there is a hiatus in them for most of the period of her living at Windsor, where she gives little more than hints of dissensions and grudges in the highest circles, and a general impression that Kew had fallen out of its old favour. All these three writers had a common point, in being able to boast of Dr. Johnson’s acquaintance, most intimate in the case of Miss Burney.

Thorne, in his Environs of London, as also the official guide, have it that the King was confined, during his first illness, in the present palace, apart from his family; and this statement is followed by a mob of guide-books, servum pecus, that often go tumbling after one another into the same ditch. But Miss Burney and other witnesses prove that it was not so; and Thorne has misled himself in his reference to George Rose’s Diary. Rose clearly refers to the next serious attack in 1801. It was whispered that in 1795 there had been a recurrence of the symptoms, passing off in a few days. But at the beginning of the next century, when the King’s mind was agitated by the resignation of Mr. Pitt on the Catholic Emancipation question, he caught a bad cold that ended as before. This time the illness began at Buckingham House; then, after His Majesty seemed fit to attend to business again, on his going to Kew a severe relapse took place, shown by his informing the Prince of Wales that he proposed to abdicate the English Crown and retire to Hanover or America.

It was now that he came to be separated from his family, and confined in the “Dutch House” under charge of the Willises, to whom he had taken a strong dislike, and is said to have struck one of them before his removal could be effected by force. The father no longer appears as taking the leading part in the King’s treatment; but one of the sons for a time was the fly-wheel in the State, since through him all papers had to be presented for the royal signature. When the Lord Chancellor was admitted to the King’s sick-room, he vehemently declared, “as a gentleman and a king,” that he would sign no document nor perform any act of sovereignty unless he were that very day restored to his wife and daughters; and he was then taken back to the house over the way, to be still more or less closely watched by the Willises.

Dr. Thomas Willis,[1] writing at this time to Mr. Rose in the King’s name, tells that his own quarters are on Kew Green, “a few doors below the Rose and Crown,” a tavern still standing in less transmogrified state than its neighbour, the King’s Arms, also mentioned in books of that period. Kings reign and pass away; kingdoms flourish and fade, mansions rise and fall, while public-house signs often seem to have more permanence in them than most human institutions. Yet of them too transit gloria, if we may believe the report that half the taverns of England at one time took Wilkes’s head for their sign, as to which evidence of popularity he himself used to tell how he overheard a loyal old lady’s remark, “Ah! he swings everywhere but where he ought.”

The second avowed derangement lasted, by fits and starts, till the summer of 1801. A course of sea-bathing at Weymouth again completed the patient’s recovery; but the dread of fresh attacks remained. The next one came in 1804, when his repugnance to the Willises was so marked that the doctor of Bedlam was employed. It is, of course, a common symptom of insanity, the turning against its best friends. And now poor George showed intermittent symptoms of dislike to the Queen herself, so that they began to occupy separate apartments, and are found not even dining together. The old domestic happiness was gone, along with the uncomfortable Kew House, that had so often been its scene. Yet, had the King kept his health, there seems reason to believe that Kew might have become more of a home to him than ever.

George III., returning to the plan set on foot in the early years of his reign, took a fancy for building a castle here, after plans prepared by Wyatt, the then esteemed architect, in the bad taste of the period. The design is to be seen in one of the rooms of the present palace. The other house was pulled down in 1802, to make way for the new structure, which would have stood nearer the river-side, looking over to the not very royal town of Brentford, that “town of mud,” so strangely admired by the Georges and reviled by their poets. But the works were interrupted by the King’s fresh attack in 1804, and this building never got further than the state of a pretentious shell, which stood idle for nearly a quarter of a century, and was then demolished by George IV. That monarch had no more love for Kew than his father for Hampton Court. He had spent freely upon his own whims, on Carleton House, and on the Pavilion, the latter gimcrack medley a laughing-stock even for contemporary taste, and a byword with irreverent writers like Byron—