- Frances Burney and the Tea Table Wars:Negotiating Agency at Windsor and in the Court Journals
Frances Burney took up the position of Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte in 1786 and served in that capacity until 1791 when she resigned due to ill health. Her position allowed her little autonomy; she was unable to have visitors of her own without first asking permission and could not call any time her own. In addition to dressing the queen, one of her duties was to play hostess to the king's equerries and any visitors to the Windsor Court at the evening tea table when her "Co-adjutrix," Mrs. Schwellenberg, was indisposed and/or chose to remain in town. In response to what she considered an unwelcome burden, Burney launched a campaign to assert some degree of the agency she had achieved as a thirty-four-year-old popular author. The tea table at Windsor became the initial site of this campaign: the tea table, because it was one of the few places in late-eighteenth-century British society where women exercised complete control, and the Queen's Lodge at Windsor Castle because, of all the royal residences in use at that time, the very domestic, staid, and proper court at Windsor most compelled and problematized such a personal assertion. In launching this campaign and in carrying it forward over the course of several years, Burney used the demands of propriety as a justification for her exclusionary practices, which, ironically, struck the equerries as impolite, an offense against proper court [End Page 201] protocol. At the same time that she tried to limit her required visibility at the tea table, she used her journal to confront the imposed invisibility of her life as a servant at court—in particular the court at Windsor. A day's ride from London, and therefore far from the cultural and literary life of the city, the Windsor court provided no stage other than the tea table upon which she might individually shine. Since the centrality accorded her at the tea table was problematic for Burney because it was too public and too forced, her journal allowed her to chronicle the early tea table wars in a stylized, confident manner and thus to display Burney the author as an antidote to the lack of visibility Burney the servant endured, thereby redefining Burney's worth at court as literary rather than domestic. When George III became ill and the tea table at Windsor was temporarily dispersed, Burney continued to use her journal strategically. Her record of her experiences as hostess of the tea table during this period reads as less stylized and confidant than her earlier chronicle but offers a more mature view of Burney the writer and the woman.
There are three distinct strands of the tea table wars chronicled in Burney's Court Journals. The first involves her ongoing difficulties with Mrs. Schwellenberg when the older woman hosted the tea table. The second is marked by her confrontations with the Rev. Charles de Guiffardière over her decision not to invite new equerries to the tea table at the Windsor Court. This conflict played out over the course of her early years at court primarily on those occasions when Mrs. Schwellenberg was absent from Windsor and Burney, in consequence, was required to host the tea table.1 The third strand consists of Col. Stephen Digby's more subtle, self- serving exploitation of Burney at the tea table she hosted at Windsor, as well as at Cheltenham, Kew, and Weymouth during the king's illness, later in her time in service. While the three strands offer distinct incarnations of the tea table, in all three, Burney's focus in her journals was on exploring the tea table as a site of conflict and also as a place where she could achieve some small victories. As they captured the specific characteristics of these encounters at the tea table, her journals allowed her to anchor and validate herself at court. The tea table was a space she would have been familiar with when living at home with her father and on her visits...