Tag Archives: court

Fanny Burney: The Keeper of the Robes

Fanny Burney, who is best known as the author of novels Evelina and Cecilia, held the position of ‘Keeper of the Robes’ in the court of King George III and Queen Charlotte between 1786 and 1790. As Keeper of the Robes, Burney aided in dressing the Queen in a mostly ceremonial role, twice a day. Her role enabled her to form relationships with members of the royal family and household.

Fanny Burney was involved in court life at the time of the menus examined in this project and her extensive collections of journals and letters offer insight into her life and health at court and others who became affected by King George III’s illness. More information about members of the royal household present at the time of the menus can be found here, in one of our previous blogs.

To ‘a certain Miss Nobody’


Frances Burney as cited in hester davenport, faithful handmaid

Burney wrote her first diary at age sixteen and always wrote as if for an audience.[1] Initially, she wrote to an imaginary friend but by the time she was twenty, Burney’s diary became letters that she exchanged between her sister, Susan and other family friends. In her time at court, Fanny continued to write journals for Susan despite having been advised to not share details of her role in the royal household to the outside world.

‘The King is not well; he has not been quite well some time, yet nothing I hope alarming…’


FRANCES BURNEY AS CITED IN HESTER DAVENPORT, FAITHFUL HANDMAID

In October 1788, Burney wrote of the King’s illness which delayed the courts return to Windsor from Kew. The court were delayed for a week and Burney describes the melancholy and the difficulties of the time where anxiety was high. As King George III’s illness progresses, Burney shows the impact it had on the household and how his behavioural changes were perceived by members of his court. She also kept records of conversations that she had with other members of the royal household such as Colonel Goldsworthy and Colonel Digby that portrayed the anxieties of those close to the King.

‘Nobody stirred; not a voice was heard; not a step, not a motion. I could do nothing but watch, without knowing for what: there seemed a strangeness in the house most extraordinary.’


FRANCES BURNEY AS CITED IN HESTER DAVENPORT, FAITHFUL HANDMAID

During the period of illness, Burney’s relationship with Queen Charlotte is highlighted showing the companionship between the women and the increased pressures of Burney’s role as King George’s illness continued. On November 5th 1788, Burney was called to serve the Queen at one in the morning, after the royal family had dined. During the meal, it had been reported that the King had a violent outburst at one of his sons. She described the Queen as appearing ‘pale, ghastly pale’.

‘Deeply affected, I hastened up to her, but, in trying to speak, burst into an irresistible torrent of tears…She looked like death – colourless and wan; but nature is infectious; the tears gushed from her own eyes, and a perfect agony of weeping ensued…when it subsided, and she wiped her eyes, she said ‘I thank you, Miss Burney – you have made me cry – it is a great relief to me – I had not been able to cry before, all this night long’.’


FRANCES BURNEY AS CITED IN HESTER DAVENPORT, FAITHFUL HANDMAID

It was decided in November, 1788 that the King would move from Windsor to Kew to ensure privacy. On 5th December 1788, Dr. Willis was introduced to Colonel Digby and as seen by the inclusion of his servant in the menus, he was still present in the court in December, 1789. The King began a steady recovery in February 1789 and 23 April 1789 was celebrated as a day of thanksgiving for his recovery. As part of the celebration, Fanny Burney was awarded a medal for her service.

Royal Archives, LS9-226_0007,
14 December 1789.

Burney left the Queen’s service in July 1791. She continued to write letters and journals after she became trapped in Paris while visiting with her husband and son when the Napoleonic Wars restarted in 1802. She even wrote a detailed letter to her sister, Esther, about her mastectomy without anaesthetic in 1812 which you can read courtesy of the British Library.

Diaries and letters provide an alternate source which help to contextualise the menus in court life. The letters written by Burney give individuals of the court personality and character that make them feel more tangible. Burney also provides a valuable insight into the health and feelings of those surrounding King George III during his bouts of illness.


[1] Hester Davenport, Faithful Handmaid: Fanny Burney at the court of King George III (Stroud, 2000).

Dr Willis: The Cure to the King’s Madness or his Personal Torturer?

Earlier in the year, I transcribed a number of King George III’s menus from February 1789. In each instance, the title of ‘Dr Willis’s servant’ appeared, prompting me to investigate who this Dr Willis was. With this motivation too, I decided to explore Willis’s life and the treatment he conducted on the king, viewing this in the context of late eighteenth-century medicine. This idea of medicine was largely based on older religious and humoral ideas, shortly before the medical revolutions of the nineteenth-century, and as such appears alien compared to more modern treatment. In exploring Dr Willis, his rise as a physician and his appearance in George’s household will be explored, while his treatment of the king will be evaluated regarding contemporary medical ideas. In this too, the damage done to the king by Dr Willis will be recognised, but only insofar as his actions were in-line with the period’s medical practices.


Born to the minister of Lincoln Cathedral in 1718, Francis Willis was raised to be a religious man. He graduated Oxford University with an MA in 1741 and, having returned to study medicine, gained a medical MD in 1759. Between these years, Willis had married and had turned their home into a mental asylum, and would later go on to help found the Lincoln General Hospital in the 1760s. In 1788, aged seventy, Willis was summoned to court to aid the king, under Lady Harcourt’s recommendation, and began his work in December. Willis was well liked by many at court, such as Fanny Burney, for his manner and wit, but was seen as a quack by other royal physicians. By 17 February 1789, the king was seen to have been cured, and Willis’s job was done. He remained in court for a month after, to keep an eye on the king, and would return to Lincolnshire with a sizeable pension. In later life, Willis would help treat the queen of Portugal for her madness, no doubt aided by his reputation for aiding mad monarchs. Having retired from aiding the royal court in 1801, sending his son to help when the king would relapse, Willis would continue to practice medicine until his death in 1807, aged 89.

Dr Willis is noted here in George’s menu from January 1789 during their stay at Kew

In his service to the royals, Dr Willis was seen as a man of experience for his previous medical work in Lincolnshire, and aided the king as such. In this, the contemporary methods Willis used to treat the king were paired with other methods of psychological aid, meaning that the two parted on good terms despite Willis’s treatment. Though this is surprising considering the treatment George received. The King was tortured and abused in the name of ‘curing’ his madness and, while shocking by modern standards, this treatment was common in treating those deemed ‘mad’. Though simply stating that Willis’s methods were torturous is not enough to understand what the king underwent. In looking into the medical ‘aid’ Willis conducted, compared to medical knowledge in the period, an insight into what George endured is clear.

 

 

A portrait of Dr Willis by John Russel from the same year as the menu above

While by no means malicious, Willis’s treatment of the king was definitely harmful to his overall condition, though it was not uncommon for the period. For treatment, the king would regularly be bound in a chair and gagged, while suffering a wealth of mental and emotional abuse in the form of Willis’s ‘lectures’. In other instances, the king’s legs would be blistered to draw out bad humours, and would even be confined to a straightjacket if he were to remove the bandages from the wounds. George would also even be beaten by one of Willis’s assistants, perhaps even the one mentioned in the royal menus! Though compared to other cases of dealing with madness in the period, the king’s treatment was not out of the ordinary.


In madhouses, where the majority of the mentally ill were treated, conditions were as bleak as what the king endured, with cases such as William Belcher’s offering a harrowing example of treatment for the ‘mad’. As such, George received the same treatment, with Willis even stating that he would draw no distinction in treatment between the king or any other patient. In this then, while the king’s treatment may have been torturous, they were not uncommon in the context or done maliciously, as proven by the positive relationship between George and Willis. Despite this though, the treatment was not wholly effective, perhaps even delaying the king’s recovery from illness and damaging him overall. Furthermore, Willis’s treatment had no long-term effectiveness, with the king’s madness returning the next century and being permanent as of 1810.

“bound and tortured in a straight-waistcoat, fettered, crammed with physic with a bullock’s horn, and knocked down, and declared a lunatic by a Jury that never saw me…”

Belcher’s description of his treatment, Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilisation (London, 2015) p. 139


From this therefore, it is clear to modern audiences that Willis’s treatment was indeed harmful to the king by modern standards, though in his own context Willis acted as one would have with the knowledge they had. Indeed, Brooke’s analogy of Willis being no more cruel than a contemporary dentist removing teeth without anaesthetic speaks volumes about ideas of medicine, and of Willis in the eighteenth century.

Bibliography:

Brooke, John, King George III (Tiptree, 1972)
Burney, Frances, The Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, Vol. 2 (London, 1891)
Clarke, John, The Life and Times of George III (London, 1972)
Hibbert, Christopher, George III: A Personal History (London, 1998)
Porter, Roy, “Willis, Francis” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2012)
Scull, Andrew, Madness in Civilisation (London, 2015)
Smith, Leonard, Peters, Timothy, “Introduction to ’Details on the Establishment of Doctor Willis, for the Cure of Lunatics’ (1796)” in History of Psychiatry, Vol 28 (3), (September, 2017)

LS9-226_0060, January 31, 1789