Next to Pitt and his colleagues, the chief obstacle to the speedy execution of these notable projects was Queen Charlotte. It was not to be expected that a wife would be as ready as the heir-apparent to believe in the confirmed insanity of the head of the house. It was excusable, to say the least, that one who for more than twenty-eight years had filled, without reproach, the station of Queen Consort, should object to be effaced with her lord, until the necessity for his seclusion was unmistakably demonstrated. And when discord raged in the medical council, when Dr. Warren pronounced the King to be ‘rather worse’ than he had been at Windsor, while to Sir Lucas and the specialists, as well as to ordinary observers, his condition appeared most hopeful, she might surely be pardoned for leaning to the favourable view. Partisans, however, were too excited to listen to reason. The clergyman from Lincolnshire was denounced in the Opposition newspapers as a mere empiric and creature of Pitt. The most scurrilous abuse was heaped upon the Queen. Both in the press, and in the House of Commons, she was accused of being in league with Willis to misrepresent the state of the King’s health, in order to prevent the Prince, her son, from being invested with the authority of Regent. Pitt, having no option but to propose a Regency, was proceeding with the utmost caution, and seeking to lay on the expectant Viceroy several restrictions, which his character seemed to call for, and which assuredly have not been disapproved by the judgment of posterity. Besides limiting the Prince’s power to confer peerages and pensions, and to alienate royal property, the Premier recommended that the care and management of the King’s person, as well as the appointments in the household, should be entrusted to the Queen. Perhaps no part of the Government’s plan aroused more angry hostility than this. ‘How would the King on his recovery,’ demanded Burke in Parliament, ‘be pleased at seeing the patronage of the Household taken from the Prince of Wales, his representative, and given to the Queen? He must be shocked at the idea.’ Allusions to these attacks on one who so little deserved them occur in Miss Burney’s Diary about this time: “JANUARY 10TH.—The King again is not so well; and new evidences are called for in the House, relative to his state. My poor Royal Mistress now droops. I grieve—grieve to see her!—but her own name and conduct called in question! Who can wonder she is shocked and shaken? Was there not enough before, firmly as she supported it? “11TH.—This morning Dr. John gave me but a bad account of the poor King. His amendment is not progressive; it fails, and goes back, and disappoints most grievously; yet it would be nothing were the case and its circumstances less discussed, and were expectation more reasonable.