The Strangest Family by Janice Hadlow

Author:Janice Hadlow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

An Intellectual Malady

LIKE LORD HERVEY BEFORE HER, Fanny Burney thought the royal family had little true understanding of what it was like to be ill. ‘The fatigues of a court attendance are so little understood by them,’ she confided to her journal in 1788, ‘that persons known to be able to quit their rooms and their bed are instantly concluded to be qualified for all the duties of office.’1 Her own frequent indispositions were, she thought, greeted with a wounding lack of sympathy by those around her – especially the queen. Charlotte did indeed find the many ailments that beset the female members of her household frustrating. Determinedly healthy herself, she found their continual parade of fevers, headaches and ‘lowness of spirits’ extremely trying. Fanny, who took her health very seriously, was most offended at any implication of self-indulgence she sensed in the queen’s remarks. ‘Illness here … has been so unknown, that it is commonly supposed it must be wilful and therefore meets little notice till accompanied by danger or incapacity of duty,’ she wrote tartly, before adding her own explanation for behaviour that so contradicted her usual vision of the natural condescension of her employers. ‘This is by no means from hardness of heart – far otherwise – there is no hardness of heart in any one of them; but it is prejudice and want of personal experience.’2

Like the queen, George was rarely unwell. He had quickly recovered from a bout of chickenpox in 1761. Four years later, he had been ill with chest pains and a recurring fever which, for a few months, refused to respond to treatment. Tuberculosis was suspected, and his condition had been sufficiently threatening to trigger plans for a regency if he did not rally. Since his recovery he had been as healthy as it was possible for a middle-aged man to be in the eighteenth century. Now aged fifty, he attributed his wellbeing to his ascetic lifestyle, telling an observer who commented on his careful diet that he simply preferred eating and drinking sparingly to ‘growing feeble and diseased’ through overindulgence.

His sudden sickness in the summer of 1788, therefore, took everyone – including the king – by surprise. On 12 June, George told his first minister, William Pitt, that he was too ill to leave Kew and come to town, having suffered ‘a pretty smart bilious attack’ that had caused him severe pain. Writing some weeks later to her brother Augustus in Göttingen, Royal stressed ‘how ill our dear Papa has been. His complaint was very disagreeable and indeed alarming for the time that it lasted; the spasm beginning at three in the morning and continuing till eight in the evening.’3 Sir George Baker, the royal doctor, had been summoned – a measure in itself of how ill the king felt, for, as he told Fanny Burney, he ‘had a detestation of all physicians’ and was extremely averse to consulting them.

No one, least of all Sir George, had any idea what had caused the king’s sudden indisposition.

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