REGENCY RELOADEDLET’S CUT THROUGH THE GLAM AND LOOK AT THE GRITTY, THE MAD KING AND THE ROMANCE WRITER
Fanny’s popularity as a writer garnered her many honors, including a place at the Court of King George III and Queen Charlotte. This George, of course, was the mad king whose descent into illness led to the appointment of the Prince of Wales as Regent. During the winter of 1788-89, in her role as a dresser to the Queen, Fanny was a privileged observer and sometime participant in the drama of the first Regency crisis. Her presence as an intimate of the Royal Family during the entire length of George III’s confinement catapulted her into the center of one of the great political whirlwinds of English history. During that time she wrote a remarkable and intimate narration of the king’s madness, and of the disorder of the court in the cold and isolated confines of the palace at Kew. For most of the winter the king was kept from his family, with only doctors and attendants admitted to his chambers. The poor man was often violent (not surprising, given the harshness of his medical treatments - more on that in a later post), and his doctors thought his condition too disturbing for the queen and the royal sons and daughters to witness. Moreover, the doctors absolutely forbade any members of the court to have contact with the king. One day in February, Fanny was walking alone in the gardens of Kew. She had been ordered by her doctors to take the air as much as possible, since the brutally confining life at court - especially this court - had damaged her health. She described what happened next as an occasion of “the severest personal terror” she had ever experienced. During her walk she had been spotted by the king, who was strolling through the garden under the supervision of his doctors. The king called out to her and then set off in hot pursuit, chasing her down the labyrinthine paths and avenues as she tried to escape (great scene for a romance novel, don’t you think?). Fanny ran as if her life depended on it. She wrote that, “I should not have felt the hot lava from Vesuvius - at least not the hot cinders - had I run so during its eruption.” She didn’t stop until the doctors commanded her to halt, worried that the king’s insane dash would cause him to collapse. Fanny screeched to a stop and held her ground, trying her best to appear confident as George III rushed up to her. Much to her astonishment, instead of hurting her the king grabbed her shoulders and pressed an enthusiastic kiss to her cheek. She later excused his less-than-royal behavior as “but the joy of a heart unbridled, now, by the forms and proprieties of established and sober custom.” This surely must stand as the most elegant description of madness ever written. Now that the mad king had his hands on her, he had no intention of letting her go. “What did he not say!” Burney exclaimed in her diary. “Everything that came uppermost in his mind he mentioned; he seemed to have just such remains of his flightiness as heated his imagination without deranging his reason, and robbed him of all control over his speech...” Alas, Fanny’s discretion prevented her from telling us exactly what he did say. The doctors eventually dragged the king away, and Fanny never revealed the details of their Alice-through-the-looking-glass conversation, only joking later that the king had promised her eternal friendship and affection. But it’s likely the incident had a tremendous impact on her, since her later novels all feature heroines who suffer serious emotional breakdowns. Kew was essentially a royal lunatic asylum and Fanny one of the inmates, but her loyalty to King George and Queen Charlotte compelled her to edit or simply omit the most gruesome or humiliating tales of the mad king’s illness. We can only honor her kindness, but the voyeur in me wishes she had been a little less discrete.
|
Fanny Burney (1752-1840) was a highly popular novelist during
both the Georgian and Regency eras. Her gift for characterization
and her wonderful powers of observation helped her craft deeply
felt romances that were also astute commentaries on life in fashionable
English society. Although she wrote only four novels over
the course of her career, she also penned diaries of her life in
the beau monde, which are still regarded as some of the best memoirs
ever written by an English author. 