Queen's House (11 page)

Her memoirs illustrate perfectly the atmosphere of the Court of a king and queen who encouraged the arts and sciences as perhaps no other monarchs have done. As a writer in the
London Chronicle
of May 1764 recognized, ‘The fine arts, hitherto too much neglected in England, seem now to rise from oblivion, under the reign of a monarch, who has a taste to perceive their charms, and a propensity to grant his royal protection to whatever can embellish human life.'
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‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown'

Unfortunately this renaissance did not last. The autumn of 1788 brought a chill wind: the King suffered a serious mental breakdown. He had had an earlier illness, believed to have been similar, in 1765, from which he soon recovered. He recovered from the 1788 breakdown in the next year but it was the harbinger of a gathering storm, which eventually by 1810 was to destroy the King's sanity. George III, who had been hailed as the ‘Apollo of the Arts', slowly dwindled into a sad old man, blind and deaf, shut away at Windsor.

The history of the King's ‘madness' can be sketched only lightly here. The current theory that he suffered from porphyria might well be true, but it is worth pointing out that even without it, the pressures weighing on him were enough to strain his mental health.

During his reign he was battered by a succession of public and private tragedies, and he lost early the support of the man on whom he had completely relied. The Earl of Bute was an excellent tutor and his good influence in the education of George III should not be underestimated. But Bute, like many academics before and since, was out of his depth in the harsh world of politics. Besides, Bute was a Scot, and the 1745 rising of the Young Pretender (Bonnie Prince Charlie) was not forgotten – Buckingham House was called ‘Holyrood House' by the satirists. The King made Bute his Chief Minister but in 1763 he resigned, leaving his
pupil to stand on his own two feet and make his own decisions at a critical time. Bute retired to a house at Kew, where he wrote his botanical works and encouraged the Queen and her daughters in their studies and flower painting. In vain the young King searched for a substitute. Chief Ministers succeeded each other in rapid succession: George Grenville followed Bute in 1763, Rockingham followed Grenville in 1765 and Grafton followed Rockingham in 1766. The only minister of great stature, the elder Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, whom the King, after initial hostility, came to respect, suffered a nervous breakdown in 1767. Had he still been in charge, the waste and folly of the conduct of the American War of Independence might have been avoided. As it was, the King was guided through the years of war by the ineffectual Lord North, who, though painfully aware of his own inadequacy, could not persuade the King to allow him to retire. To a king with a deep sense of royal duty, losing the American colonies was a bitter blow.

The pressures on George III were all the more heavy because, even had he been willing to delegate responsibility, after the resignation of his adored Bute there was no one he could trust. He felt he must oversee everything, from the hanging of pictures to the personal supervision of the defence of London during the Gordon riots.

The Gordon riots, named after Lord George Gordon, were provoked by a move to relax the intolerant laws against Roman Catholics. In the summer of 1780 drunken mobs were wrecking the City of London, setting on fire houses belonging to anyone sympathetic to the Catholics. Several thousand troops were quartered in the grounds of the Queen's House, and the King spent the night with his men, as Henry V had before the Battle of Agincourt. Finding that they were sleeping on the ground, he promised them that ‘straw would be brought for the next night & my servants will instantly serve you with a good allowance of wine & spirits'. His grandfather, George II, had been the last king to lead his troops into battle, at Dettingen, Germany, and George III had the same Hanoverian courage. It was claimed that it was his decisiveness in calling up the troops that stopped the riots.

Then there was the eternal problem of Ireland, which some of his ministers wanted to solve by granting Catholic emancipation, which
the King believed would mean breaking his Coronation oath to preserve his Protestant inheritance. An invasion of the French into Ireland in 1789 doubled the threat.

The French Revolution of 1789, culminating in the death by guillotine of the French King and Queen, sent a flood of refugees to Britain, bringing hair-raising tales of bloody massacre. The British monarchy itself was under threat. It was a dangerous world, deeply disturbing for a king with a profound sense of royal duty.

‘Burke's blast'

The troubles that beset George III in foreign affairs were made more difficult by the increasingly hostile opposition at home. The new radicals found the contrast between royal extravagance and public misery infuriating. The Queen's House, now so little used, was expensive to maintain and such expenditure proved offensive. Angry questions in Parliament were followed by a brilliant speech by the statesman Edmund Burke. In 1779 he had propounded a ‘Plan of Economic Reform', which proposed, among other things,

the overhaul of the Royal Household and the abolition of scores of offices, notably those of treasurers, comptrollers and cofferers; the partial extermination of sinecures; a reduction of secret pensions; and a curtailment of redundant offices in the independent jurisdictions of Wales, Cornwall, Chester and Lancaster. He said: ‘There is scarce a family so hidden and lost in the obscurest recesses of the community which does not feel that it has something to keep or to get, to hope or to fear, from the favour or displeasure of the Crown.'

On 11 February 1780 Burke made one of his greatest speeches – a bitter attack on the corruption in the royal Household.

Our palaces are vast inhospitable halls. There the bleak winds, there ‘Boreas and Eurus and Caurus and Argestes loud', howling through the vacant lobbies and clattering the doors of deserted guard-rooms, appal the imagination and conjure up the grim spectre of departed tyrants – the Saxon, the Norman and
the Dane; the stern Edwards and fierce Henrys – who stalk from desolation to desolation through the dreary vacuity and melancholy succession of chill and comfortless corridors.

The Household, Burke claimed, still retained ‘Buttery, Pantry and all that rabble of places which, though profitable to the holders and expensive to the State, are almost too mean to mention. Why not put the catering out to contract, as the King of Prussia did?' There were superfluous offices: ‘Why could not the Lord Chamberlain take over the Great Wardrobe – a department which in a few years had cost the Crown £150,000 for “naked walls or walls hung with cobwebs”.'

So many Offices were sinecures, given to MPs and others.

Why maintain an Office of the Robes when the Groom of the Stole held a sinecure? These establishments, useless in themselves, had three useless Treasurers – ‘two to hold a purse and one to play with a stick'. Why pay a man £100 a year, with an assistant also at £100 a year, to regulate some matter not worth twenty shillings? Everybody knew the answer; that these dignitaries were paid for their vote in Parliament, not for their diligence in administration, cookery or catering.

Then in a passage of ringing rhetoric he savaged the ‘principle that one person should do the work, while another drew the emoluments'.

The King's domestic servants were all undone; his tradesmen remained unpaid, and became bankrupt – because the turnspit of the King's Kitchen was a Member of Parliament. His Majesty's slumbers were interrupted, his pillow was stuffed with thorns and his peace of mind entirely broken – because the turnspit of the King's Kitchen was a Member of Parliament. The judges were unpaid; the just of the kingdom bent and gave way, the foreign ministers remained inactive and unprofited; the system of Europe was dissolved; the chain of our alliances was broken; all the wheels of government at home and abroad were stopped; because the turnspit of the King's Kitchen was a Member of Parliament.
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Burke did not win the vote, but he won the argument and his arrows struck home. The King secretly looked to private bankers to service his debts.

Nathaniel Wraxall, a contemporary, noted the effect of Burke's blast.
Many persons of high rank reluctantly disappeared from about the King's person and Court in consequence of Burke's Bill. The Earl of Darlington quitted the Jewel House and Lord Pelham the Great Wardrobe; the first of which offices owed its institution to Elizabeth, while the latter remounted to the times of the Plantagenets. The Earl of Essex laid down the Stag Hounds, as did Lord Denbigh the Harriers.

Many other sinecures were blown away.

Treasurer of the Chamber, Cofferer of the Household and six clerkships in the Board of Green Cloth. The valuables of the Jewel House and Great Wardrobe were put in the care of the Lord Chamberlain. From this year, too, the appointments of Lord Chamberlain and Lord Steward ceased to carry cabinet rank. Mysteriously, the Master of the Buck Hounds survived the purge.
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And economies were made in the royal Household, much to the indignation of the higher ranks among the equerries. Mrs Papendiek watched with anger, as cheaper newcomers were employed ‘who felt no interest – neither duty nor respect; and as to fidelity, such was not understood'. She wrote:

It is a dangerous expedient to call the attention of the public to economies practised in the Royal Household. It degrades every regulation and as the inferior classes always look with a jealous eye upon the great, any changes that may be deemed absolutely necessary should be accomplished as quietly and privately as possible. It is not improbable that the wonderful change in our Royal Household was brought on by Edmund Burke's reform in the Civil List; and that this led through many trifling channels to the destruction of the French king, for in his country also the cry for economy was raised and soon spread far and wide.
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‘The Damnedest Set of Millstones'

Added to the King's political difficulties was the deep disappointment and concern that his family caused him. The Prince of Wales in particular was almost as hostile to him as his father had been to George II. The
Prince's wild extravagance, debts and mistresses had caused the King great distress from when the Price was sixteen and even more so when he came of age and moved from the Queen's House to his own residence, Carlton House. Here his riotous behaviour and his alternative court were a constant humiliation to the abstemious King, who had hoped to bring in a reign of virtue. The pain was even greater when the Prince lured the King's favourite son, the Duke of York, into his circle. When the Prince secretly married the charming Mrs Fitzherbert he was doubly breaking the law – by marrying a Roman Catholic, forbidden by the Act of Settlement, and by marrying against George Ill's law forbidding any royal marriage without the King's permission. Furthermore the Prince, seduced by the politics of the King's enemy, Charles James Fox, actively canvassed in elections for the Whigs.

During these years there were other family worries. On 17 September 1767, the King's brother, Edward, Duke of York, the much loved companion of his youth, died at Monaco. The Duke, a ‘silly and frivolous' young man, had lost the King's favour; so much so that when, in 1765, the King was drafting a Regency Bill in case of his death, he deliberately left out the Duke, appointing the Queen as Regent. Nevertheless, the King was deeply distressed at his death and ‘cried his eyes out'.

The death of the King's mother in 1772 was yet another sharp blow. She had been an important influence in his early life, and even after his marriage he had kept closely in touch.

Then he was deeply concerned about his sisters. Princess Augusta was unhappily married to the difficult and unfaithful Hereditary Prince of Brunswick. She was widowed in 1806 and the King brought her back to England and settled her in Blackheath, and she died at her rented house in Hanover Square in 1813. Her daughter, Princess Caroline, was to become the scandalous wife of the Prince of Wales, and for the sake of his sister, the King and Queen made great efforts to have patience with that difficult lady.

Another sister, Princess Caroline, was even more tragic. She was married at fifteen to her cousin, the diseased and wretched Christian VII of Denmark. She consoled herself with the Court doctor, Struansee, was condemned for adultery and was banished to a fortress, after being
forced to watch the execution of her lover. George III persuaded the Danes to allow her to go to Celle in Hanover, where she died in 1775 at the age of twenty-four. She is remembered in Denmark as ‘the Queen of Tears': portraits of her and her husband hang in Buckingham Palace today – a sad reminder of the harsh fate of many royal brides.

The King's brothers, the Dukes of Gloucester and Cumberland, had offended him by making secret marriages, causing him to introduce in 1773 the Royal Marriages Act.

The deaths of the King's own children, Prince Alfred in 1782, aged nearly two, and Prince Octavius in 1783, aged four, were successive hammer blows: he had said he did not wish to go to Heaven if Octavius was not there. In the scale of grief, the death of this much-loved son ranked with the loss of a continent.

‘I fear I am not in my right mind'

It is worth remembering the appalling strain on the royal Household during the time of the King's madness. They watched the King, for whom they had affection, beaten and confined in a straitjacket, lose his prized dignity and self-control and sink into degradation. Both Miss Burney and Mrs Papendiek describe these harrowing times. ‘The depth of terror during that time no words can paint,' wrote Miss Burney, who was bid ‘to listen to hear what the King was saying in his delusions … Nothing could be so afflicting as this task … even now, it brings fresh to my ear his poor exhausted voice.'
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