I said, ‘I saw him as close as I am to you, and conversed with him, and ran away from him once as well, when he seemed not quite himself and I was afraid of what he might do.’
‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘his indisposition. An interesting case.’
‘An interesting case? Is that what they say about it now? I can tell you the physicians were at their wits’ end. They thought whatever it was would kill him and ruin them. Still, they lived to prosper.’
‘And the King lived to a good old age.’
I said, ‘There was nothing good about his old age, and I’ll tell you something else. I knew the two who came after him, George who was the Fourth and then King Billy, and neither of them was right, not in the constitution nor the head. There was a weakness in them all. Well, now we have a queen to reign over us, which I think is a good thing for women are often made of stronger stuff.’
He said, ‘And the idea of a companion like yourself was to give the Royal Highnesses an insight into the lives of the humbler classes? A very advanced theory.’
‘Well I wasn’t so very humble a companion. My father kept a house on Soho Square. I’m talking of sixty years ago, when it was a good address. But King George was a husbandman and a horticulturalist, you know. I think he was testing the old saw that if you grow an onion or two in the cabbage patch they’ll help to keep the worm away. It’s a pity he didn’t think of it before Princess Sofy. Some of her brothers might have benefited from it.’
‘I see,’ he said. ‘You were the onion in Princess Sofia’s cabbage patch. Really very interesting. And was the experiment repeated?’
It was not.
I said, ‘After Sofy there was only Princess Amelia and by then His Majesty’s mind had begun to cloud. It wouldn’t have suited Amelia, anyway. She’d have driven any humble companion to distraction. It was a long time before she could be convinced I wasn’t going to give them fleas and steal their horses. And I don’t know that the plan worked, even for Sofy. There was certainly one worm I failed to keep away. Her Royal Highness never did grow very worldly but I became her friend, which is an entirely different and better thing to be than an onion.’
Epilogue
My grandmother, Nellie Buzzard, wrote this story and left it in my hands. She said it was a true account of her dealings with the Hanovers, who were the biggest tribe of oddities she ever knew and therefore required no author’s fanciful embellishments. As to whether it should be published, she was entirely indifferent. She was the author of three novels, brought out without any fuss or fanfare under her maiden name, C (for Cornelia) Welche. It was better that way, she said. My grandfather thought writing was a mischievous waste of time and she never had the slenderest hope of persuading him otherwise.
Grandma Nellie’s books gained her complimentary notices and some modest earnings, but in her final years she claimed she had nothing new to say and the world would thank her for sitting quietly by the fire with her tea kettle and her memories.
I’m partial. To me she was a dear and admirable grandmother, so in the interests of accuracy I have consulted others who still remember her, as to her true character. Here is how she has been sketched: forebearing, impatient, retiring, outspoken, a cruel mimic, a kind friend, tough as an almond shell, and soft-hearted enough to give you the cloak off her shoulders. It seems to me to render a good likeness.
She died in her sleep last Whitsun Eve. She was eighty-one and was wearing the treasured garnet bracelet she had lent me for my marriage day.
Annie Topham Clearwell
April 1857
How A Humble Companion Came to Be
I first heard of the strange lives of King George III’s daughters long before I thought of writing A Humble Companion. Their father, poor mad George, was a figure well known to readers and theatre-goers, and the Prince Regent, one of their many brothers, had been much written about and caricatured. But of the six girls there were only thumbnail sketches and whispers, in particular concerning Princess Sophia.
For years my idea of telling Sophia’s story gathered dust. I wasn’t sure I could make the leap from writing contemporary comedy to historical fiction, but from time to time I’d take out my notes and wonder if I could do it. Its moment eventually arrived, and with it the need to do far more research than any previous book had required. The 18th century is a different country.
Fanny Burney became my companion, with her delicious diary observations of King George, Queen Charlotte and their enormous family. Then I had to revise long-forgotten history lessons—the story spans the reigns of four monarchs, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars—and explore topics that my schooldays had never touched on: the history of ordinary people’s lives, how they lived, what they ate, what they wore.
I had two early decisions to make. First, who was to tell the story? My preference is always for First Person narration. It imposes certain limitations, but for me those are more than made up for by its power to draw you in to the very heart of the action. The question was, who should that narrator be? I needed someone who could be close enough to make a credible witness to a royal story—so not a servant—but independent enough to have a life of her own, so therefore not a royal sister. A companion was the answer, someone who travelled between Sophia’s cloistered life and the real world. And so was born Nellie Buzzard.
The second decision I needed to make was about the style of language. I have a horror of books written in fake Olde Englishe. Nellie was anyway a woman with a modern outlook on life, but I needed to beware of using anachronisms. I added the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary to the stack of reference books at my side. It has the very useful feature of saying when a word was first used.
A character needs a back-story. Even if, as in Nellie’s case, she’s telling the story from the perspective of an elderly woman, you still need to know where she came from and what shaped her. Part of that job was already done for me: the character of Nellie’s father was based on someone who really existed and who worked in the royal household. Ludwig Weltje was major domo to the Prince Regent. He even has a street named after him, in Hammersmith, where he retired when his days of royal service were done.
So I knew the kind of milieu Nellie would have grown up in, but I needed a precise location. I spent a few days in London and, after much wandering around, I settled on Soho Square. In the late 18th century it would have had the right cosmopolitan mix of tradesmen, immigrants and professional classes to have appealed to a man like Nellie’s father, a German pastry cook made good. Some of the buildings Nellie would have known are still standing and the little park isn’t very much altered either. By the end of my location-seeking trip I found I was having to remind myself that Nellie was purely my invention. She was starting to take shape. And it was sitting in Soho Square among the buzz of lunchtime office workers that I first heard Nellie’s voice and set down the opening lines of Chapter 1.
The other place I visited on that research trip was Kew and its modest palace that was one of the childhood homes of Princess Sophia and her sisters. It seems like an unlikely royal residence, but is quite in keeping with what we know of King George, a man who kept sheep and liked to wade into the Thames to chat to the basket-weavers gathering rushes.
Kew Palace is open to the public and some of its rooms are untouched by time, especially on its upper floors. I found it very easy to imagine the confined lives of the six princesses, kept on a short tether by a demanding mother and a father who couldn’t bear to let them marry and go away from him. Historical Royal Palaces, the organisation that curates Kew, have installed a modern recording that plays in one of the corridors, and gives an impression of servants’ footsteps, laughter, doors banging, and brings those empty rooms to life. If Sophia returned today she would recognise it without much difficulty.
The creation of Nellie was easy. I liked her and her company soon dominated my working day. Capturing Princess Sophia was a harder challenge. When there is little record of a historical figure’s life and achievements, when they had no public presence, the only way to form an image of them is from the fossil-like impressions they made on those who were around them. The fall-out from her scandal certainly kept the royal lawyers busy.
Princess Sophia, the second youngest of the brood, was a ghostly figure in life, rarely seen, but she left behind her rich pickings for a novelist. Secrets are powerful things, though just how secret Sophia’s story was is arguable. At least one caricaturist of the time made reference to it.
Nevertheless I had always to be mindful that in writing this book I was waking the dead. My aim, in Nellie’s telling of Sophia’s story, was only ever to follow where the evidence pointed. The fact that her cousin, Queen Victoria, eventually paid Tommy Garth an annual pension out of her own purse seems to me to be eloquent testimony to the truth.
It is one of my writing quirks that I like to create a minor character, a bit-player, who amuses me when progress is slow or I’ve hit a problem of plot. Some people have a desk toy. I have a Morphew. Characters like Dick Morphew are an example of the inexplicable, thrilling things that can happen when you’re writing fiction. I have no idea where Morphew came from. He just stepped onto the page, growling and sniffing and scratching underneath his insanitary wig. He cost me no sleepless nights. He arrived perfectly formed and he still makes me laugh.
Towards the end of the process of writing a book I’m contractually obliged to start thinking ‘what next?’ Sometimes I’m undecided, but when I was wrapping up A Humble Companion I had no such doubts. A new voice, a generation younger than Nellie, had already announced herself. Nan McKeever’s story, The Liar’s Daughter, will be published later this year.
Reference Books
Daily Life in the 18th Century by Kirstin Olsen, (Greenwood Press)
Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England by Amanda Vickery, (Yale University Press)
The Complete Servant by Samuel & Sarah Adams, (Southover Press)
A Writer and Reader’s Life
Laurie Graham
Why do you write?
It’s an unstoppable habit. As a child who was a duffer at many things I discovered writing was something I could do with ease. Creating an inner world was and still is a seductive pleasure.
How do you write? On a page, or on a screen?
Both. I use A4 pads for planning and for trying to resolve problems. The rest of life tends to intrude and I end up with shopping lists and messages to myself embedded in my longhand writing. But when I’m really writing, when things are really flying, I love the speed and capabilities of my computer.
When do you write?
Always in the morning, sometimes on into the afternoon, but I take a lot of breaks. A morning without achieving something makes me uncomfortable, but the achievement is not necessarily 1000 words added to a novel. It may be 1000 words deleted. I work slowly.
What’s a typical writing day?
No two days are alike. I generally have several projects on the go and although the current novel is uppermost in my mind I may have to lay it aside. Journalism jobs arrive out of the blue and are required yesterday. Or I might discover a hole in my research and need to spend a day reading. Life is very varied.
Best part of writing?
Sometimes, when a character’s voice comes through loud and clear, or a scene just seems to write itself, I experience a physical, literally visceral sensation, like the flutter of adrenalin. You can’t force it. It comes unbidden and disappears all too easily.
Worst part of writing?
