Royal Babylon (4 page)

         

Love or even affection within British royal marriages was an irrelevance. Royals didn't marry for companionship or even to start a family: all they required was one healthy offspring to occupy the throne, and the circle was closed. The Queen's uncle, Edward VIII, was the first British king of his dynasty to marry for love, and he lost his crown and was more or less punished with exile abroad because of it. Foreign princesses, usually German, were routinely exported to Britain as breeding stock to secure the continuity of the British royal family. It was a mechanical and impersonal business.

When it was time for George I's eldest son to get married, the King insisted on making sure that his son's fiancée, Caroline of Anspach, was as chaste as she claimed to be by personally giving her a physical examination. Precisely what the Princess thought about having her prospective father-in-law, the King of England, look up her skirts is not on record, which is a pity because by all accounts she swore like a trouper.

Years later, George II grew to hate his eldest son, Frederick the Prince of Wales—“Griff” as he was known to his family, or “Poor Fred” as he was to be known to posterity thanks to a sour Jacobite jingle that celebrated his premature death. The
King disliked his son so much he had even considered passing him over for his younger brother, whose gratuitous savagery in putting down the Jacobites had earned him the name “Butcher” Cumberland.

However, in 1734 the Prince of Wales asked his father for an increase in his income and a suitable marriage. The first request was completely ignored; the second met with the offer of Charlotte, a Danish princess who was both deformed and mentally backward. The King terminated the marriage negotiations, remarking, “I did not think that grafting my half-witted coxcomb upon a madwoman would improve the breed.” The search was widened until the King's eye fell on a miniature portrait displaying the smallpox-scarred features of Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha.

The seventeen-year-old Princess Augusta arrived in London in April 1736 in a state of sheer terror at the prospect of marrying into a family in which sons constantly quarreled with parents while the fathers introduced themselves to their prospective daughters-in-law by peering inside their panties. She wasn't even allowed time to get used to her surroundings since the wedding was arranged for that very evening. She was crammed into her wedding dress and marched off to the altar, where, literally sick with fear, she threw up over the Queen's skirt. The Prince of Wales set himself up for his honeymoon nuptials by downing several plates of jelly, which he believed to be an aphrodisiac, and retired to bed wearing an outlandish nightcap that resembled a guardsman's beaverskin.

When George II decided it was time to marry off his fat and desperate eldest daughter, Anne, the husband he chose for her was Prince William of Orange. The Dutch Prince was extremely short and almost a hunchback. Lord Hervey wrote: “The Prince of Orange's figure, besides his being almost a
dwarf, was as much deformed as it was possible for a human creature to be .  .  . his breath was more offensive than it is possible for those who have not been offended by it to imagine.”

Prince William arrived in London in 1733 for his wedding, but immediately fell ill with pneumonia and was packed off to sample the recuperative waters at Bath. The Princess Royal's parents, now that they had met their prospective son-in-law for the first time in the flesh, were so shocked by what they saw that they quietly offered her the chance to withdraw. The stubborn Princess, however, had fallen in love with the idea of being married at last, and announced that she would marry a baboon if she had to. “Well then,” replied her father, “there is baboon enough for you.”

The big day took place five months later than originally scheduled, on March 25, 1734. At this time the royal family still observed the cruel ritual of public “bedding,” and the wedding night was open to court spectators as usual. The King contrived to have his malformed son-in-law hidden behind a curtain with only the Princess in view, but his pathetic appearance in an oversized nightshirt drew sniggers from their audience. Queen Caroline said she pitied her daughter for having to go to bed with such a “monster.” Lord Hervey reassured her that in time the Princess would get used to the idea. The Queen replied smartly, “I believe one does grow blind at last, but you must allow, my dear Lord Hervey, there is a great difference, as long as one sees, in the manner of one's growing blind.”

         

A high proportion of the British royal family were alleged bigamists. The allegation persists to this day that George III
secretly married a Quaker daughter named Hannah Lightfoot at Curzon Street Chapel, Mayfair, in 1759, and that they had a son, also named George, and the rightful heir to the throne. This story ran throughout the King's reign and threw up another popular madness theory: according to this version, the King's condition was repressed guilt for having dumped Miss Lightfoot.

George IV entered into a bigamous relationship with Princess Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel while already married to Maria Fitzherbert—as she was a two-times divorcée, a Roman Catholic and a commoner, this marriage was conveniently ignored, although as far as the Church of England was concerned it was valid. It was similarly alleged that when William IV was a serving officer in the Royal Navy he secretly married one Caroline von Linsingen, the daughter of a Hanoverian infantry commander, in a chapel near Pyrmont.

It is highly likely that Queen Victoria's parents also had a bigamous relationship. While her father, the Duke of Kent, was stationed in the army at Quebec he may have secretly married a French-Canadian prostitute named Julie de St. Laurent. This was a charge that the royal family strenuously denied, although they accept that he lived with her for twenty-seven years. George V's reign was dogged by a persistent rumor that he had married the daughter of a British naval officer in Malta, and had several children.

         

Indeed, the British royal mating game arguably reached an all-time cynical low with the marriage of George V and his consort,
Queen Mary. George's elder brother and heir to the throne, the bisexual Duke of Clarence, or Eddie as he was known to his parents, was simple-minded, effete, and so prone to scandal wherever he went that he was even thought to be Jack the Ripper. Apart from his homosexual liaisons, there was also evidence of an illegitimate child born to a London girl at St. Stephen's Hospital, Fulham. The family's time-honored solution to this sort of embarrassment was a quick arranged marriage to some sensible princess who might create an appearance of normality and kill some of the rumors about his private life.

The first name considered as a possible bride was Crown Princess Margaret of Prussia, but she was dropped when Queen Victoria admitted that the Crown Princess was “not regularly pretty.” In the context of royal doublespeak it is safe to assume that she was grotesque. Prince Eddie announced a preference for Hélène, daughter of the Comte de Paris, who was grandson of King Louis Philippe and Pretender to the French throne. Hélène's mother was an extraordinary woman who smoked a pipe and strode around the house with a riding crop which she used to thrash her servants. Her family, however, were Catholics, and Eddie was bound by a British Constitution which forbids Catholic monarchs.

After a few more unsuccessful sorties into the European marriage market they finally found someone else who would take him on—his cousin Princess Mary of Teck, the daughter of “Fat Mary” Adelaide. The Teck family, tainted by the dead hand of non-royal blood, were not in a position to turn down any reasonable offer of a royal marriage. Although Mary must have been aware of his reputation, he was after all heir to Europe's greatest throne and it is likely that Princess Mary would have bitten his matrimonial hand off even if he had been
Jack the Ripper. Shortly before the wedding, however, six days after the Duke of Clarence's twenty-eighth birthday, he developed inflammation of the lungs after a shooting party and was suddenly dead. The preparations for his wedding were deftly switched to funeral arrangements.

The British royal family then made an extraordinary decision. If Eddie's younger brother George was to take over his brother's role as heir to the throne, he might as well take his wife as well. George had no say in the matter. The only woman he really wanted to marry, Princess Marie of Romania, had already turned him down. Within weeks of the funeral, the family were matchmaking Prince George with his dead brother's fiancée. Mary never mentioned Prince Eddie in public again: it was as though he had never existed. After the wedding celebrations, Prince George displayed the full extent of his lack of imagination, tact and sensitivity when he chose as his honeymoon venue York Cottage, Sandringham, the very spot where his brother had expired eighteen months earlier, and which still housed all of his personal belongings including his clothes. Queen Victoria noted that the choice of honeymoon was “rather unlucky.”

         

         

IN MARCH
1801 the sick and confused King George III was laced into a straitjacket and led away by his medical attendants to confinement at Kew Palace. Meanwhile, nearly a thousand miles away in Lisbon, the Queen of Portugal, Maria I, sat on her throne dressed in children's clothing, deranged and raving. In Vienna, the Austro-Hungarian monarch Francis II, head of the mightiest empire in central Europe, observed his cabbagelike son and heir Prince Ferdinand, a six-year-old epileptic born with a hydrocephalic head. In Madrid, the vacuous King Charles IV ruled Spain by default because his violently disturbed elder brother Philip had been declared insane and removed from the line of succession. In St. Petersburg, the psychotic Russian Emperor Paul I threw his dinner around the room for the fun of watching his servants scrape it up after him. Eight hundred miles to the west in Copenhagen, the King of
Denmark, Christian VII, ran around his palace smashing furniture and bashing his head against the walls until he drew blood. It was not a good year to argue the case for hereditary monarchy.

Whenever historians talk about “mad” kings they nearly always run into problems. “Madness” is not an exact medical term: it is a general description applied by laymen to any condition that results in profoundly aberrant or irrational behavior. Mental disorders can have a variety of causes, including physical damage or disease. Encephalitis lethargica, for example, is an acute infectious disease of the central nervous system which can result in mental illness. At least one Habsburg Emperor, Ferdinand I, suffered from it; Czar Peter the Great probably did too. The symptoms of encephalitis—hallucinations, headaches, violent antisocial behavior and insomnia—are unfortunately so very similar to schizophrenia that retrospective diagnosis can be very tendentious. Another problem for historians is that by definition royalty is an occupation in which eccentric or anomalous behavior occurs naturally, making the line between genuine madness and “normal” royal behavior a very thin one.

         

One gentleman for whom 1801 was a particularly good year was the Reverend Francis Willis, rector of the parish of Wapping. Willis was born the son of a clergyman and became the vicar of Gretford, where he opened a private lunatic asylum. It was quite common in eighteenth-century England for this type of establishment to be run by churchmen who wanted to supplement their income. Occasionally the treatment offered
was relatively humane, but more often than not mental derangement was cured by restraint and punishment; the insane were broken, like horses. Willis belonged to the latter school. In time he became rector of St. John's, Wapping, but continued to run the provincial asylum, assisted by his son John, as a lucrative sideline. Over a period of twenty-eight years, the Willises acquired a reputation for running the best little madhouse in Lincolnshire.

On December 5, 1788, Francis Willis and his son John were summoned to Windsor Castle. King George III, they were informed, had taken temporary leave of his senses and required their services. For the Willises it was the beginning of an astonishing career as quacks by appointment to the crowned basket cases of Europe.

After that of Queen Victoria, the reign of George III was the longest of any English king or queen. His reign was full of ironies. The greatest irony was that the only reasonably dignified monarch the House of Hanover ever produced is mostly remembered as the mad king who lost his American colonies and later his marbles. In fact, he was just about the only male member of the British royal family who wasn't reviled by his subjects. Unlike other members of his dynasty, he didn't take hordes of mistresses or waste vast amounts of public money on personal extravagances. He ate and drank little and even took exercise when he could because he didn't want to become freakishly obese like many of his close relatives. He was quite diligent in fulfilling his royal duties, and was still writing his own official and private correspondence until he was sixty-seven without any help.

Uniquely for a Hanoverian monarch, he was a likable man who was at ease chatting freely with commoners. Dr. Johnson
met him and was impressed: “Sir, they may talk of the King as they will, but he is the finest gentleman I have ever seen.” It was said that if only George had visited America the colonials would never have risen against him. But George never traveled to America, or anywhere else for that matter. Beyond his holiday jaunts to Weybridge, he hardly traveled at all, never once setting foot in Wales, Scotland or Ireland, and in England never any farther north than Worcester.

Like most of the Hanoverians, George III was far from clever, but he was naturally inquisitive and loved to dabble. He was an unlikely patron of the arts and sciences. He founded the Royal Academy, yet had no taste in art. He had little grasp of science, yet gave personal financial backing to the greatest astronomer of the age, William Herschel. He was certainly no scholar, believing Shakespeare to be “sad stuff,” yet he amassed the greatest book collection of the day, now the King's Library in the British Museum. He also had a fairly enlightened attitude toward medicine and the treatment of the mentally ill. It is again ironic that in his later years he should have suffered so horribly at the hands of medical ignorance.

George III was not the first mentally unbalanced British monarch. King John was a deeply disturbed individual, probably the victim of a psychological disorder, according to a contemporary report “sent mad by sorcery and witchcraft.” Richard II's most recent biographer believes that he showed signs of incipient madness consistent with schizophrenia. Henry VI suffered a complete mental breakdown and was evidently insane for the latter part of his reign. Henry VIII suffered from a severe and progressive personality disorder, possibly the result of brain damage, either from a severe blow to the head or tertiary syphilis.

Historians still do not agree on the cause of King George III's illness, or how many bouts of madness he had. There were at least four, and possibly six, periods throughout his reign during which he was apparently mentally unbalanced. He may have had a couple of early minor attacks in the 1760s which were kept secret by the court and passed off to the outside world as influenza. Even the Prime Minister didn't suspect that anything was wrong, and the King made a swift recovery on each occasion. The theory that these two early illnesses were connected with his later condition is disputed.

The King became seriously mentally unbalanced beyond doubt in 1788–89, then again in 1801, in 1804, and then permanently from 1810 until his death ten years later. In 1811 the King's physicians testified to Parliament that George III was irretrievably insane. By this time he was also seventy-three years old, stone-deaf, blind and almost certainly suffering from senile dementia.

The first serious attack of mental illness—and the events covered by the film
The Madness of King George
—began in 1788 and lasted just a few months. In June 1788 the King had what his doctor called “a smart bilious attack,” and was sent to take the waters at Cheltenham. He returned to Windsor four weeks later apparently cured. Three months later, however, during the evening of October 17, the King fell ill with violent stomach cramps and complained of respiratory problems. His condition alarmed everyone who saw him. The veins in his face stood out; he became delirious and he foamed at the mouth. It is said that the King's old friends rallied around him with an astonishing display of loyalty by pretending to be mad themselves. The Duchess of Devonshire recorded in her diary: “The courtiers all affect to have been mad.” The regular court
physician, Dr. Baker, reported that the King's condition was deteriorating quickly. His speech became rapid and agitated, and he babbled feverishly and continuously. He became violent and abusive toward his family and his courtiers, and was generally “quite unlike his normal self.” At one point he lapsed into a coma and appeared to be near death.

At first it was thought that the King was suffering from “flying gout”—the Georgian medical profession's stock-in-trade diagnosis for anything they couldn't explain, which covered pretty much everything. This mysterious affliction was thought to be relatively harmless unless one was unfortunate enough to get it in one's head. The King's flying gout, it was asserted, had originated in his feet but had traveled to his brain and become somehow stuck there. The answer was to apply blisters to the royal head to drive the gout back down again. When it became all too obvious that this was a painful waste of time, Dr. Baker administered large drafts of opium to his patient, but was otherwise completely baffled by the King's illness and at a complete loss what to do about it.

Six more doctors were called in to the King, none of them any wiser than the last, but each hoping to profit by finding a fluke cure for the royal affliction. They bickered among themselves, placed his head on a pillow made from a bag of warm hops, put leeches on his temples, gave him large doses of James's Powder to make him sweat, and stuck his feet in red-hot water to draw out the “humor.” Sir William Fordyce was consulted on the strength of his well-known treatise,
Cultivating and Curing Rhubarb in Britain for Medical Uses
. Eventually the only thing that everyone could agree on was that the King was suffering from temporary insanity. Finally and very reluctantly, they agreed to stand aside and let a so-called expert on the
treatment of the mentally ill have a go. Enter the Willises of Wapping.

Until the eighteenth century, madness had always been regarded as demonic possession. The in-vogue text on the subject of madness, a book called
Anatomy of Melancholy
by Robert Burton, had been published back in 1621. Burton taught that madness was often caused by the retention of bodily excretions: the best cure was to tie patients to a wall and literally beat the crap out of them. Burton's work was soon to be usurped by the crack French physician Jean Esquirol. Mental illness, explained Monsieur Esquirol, was caused by a variety of conditions, including living in a new home, squeezing a pimple, old age, childbirth, the menstrual cycle, a blow on the head, constipation, shrinkage of hemorrhoids, misuse of mercury, disappointment in love, political upheavals, shock, thwarted ambition, excessive study, masturbation, prostitution, religion and bloodletting (the last item was particularly confusing to a medical profession who had been brought up to believe that bloodletting was the best cure for everything, including insanity). Doctors of the mad French king Charles VI tried to cure him by trepanation—the sawing of small holes in his skull to relieve pressure on his brain—and an early fifteenth-century version of shock treatment, when ten men with blackened faces hid in the King's room, then leapt out at him. Charles VI died completely insane seventeen years later. Until the early twentieth century, most English doctors were taught that much mental illness was a result of large quantities of phlegm: the standard treatment was to force the patient to throw up three or four times a day.

By King George III's day there had been a slight shift toward a more enlightened approach, and doctors were prepared to recognize madness as a physical problem which was
theoretically open to treatment. Unfortunately, treatment had not kept pace with theory, and much of it still depended upon confinement and punishment. Many physicians continued to consider treatment of the mentally ill as beneath them and fit only for attendants. Basically, the medical treatment that George III received hadn't changed much in 200 years.

The Willises had at their disposal a complete, in-depth, contemporary understanding of how to treat the mentally ill. That is, they hadn't a clue either. Willis Senior confidently asserted that the King's illness was the result of “severe exercise, weighty business, severe abstemiousness and too little rest” and set about preparing his cure. The King, who had no idea what was coming to him, was at first quite relaxed about the arrival of Willis and in his lucid intervals was even able to joke with him about his treatment. “A parson and a doctor too?” the King enquired when he saw Willis's dog collar. “Our Savior, sir, went about healing the sick,” replied Willis. “Yes, yes,” said George, “but He didn't get seven hundred pounds a year for doing it.” The King even dubbed the dreadful iron contraption which Willis forced him into every day his “new coronation chair.”

Of course, if the official records of such events are to be taken seriously, royal patients are a lot braver and more courteous than the rest of us. After George IV had a sebaceous cyst removed from his head in 1821, entirely without the aid of any sort of anesthetic, he casually inquired of the surgeon, Astley Cooper, “So, what do you call these tumors?” Queen Victoria had a particularly nasty axillary abscess drained when she was fifty-one years old. When she came round from the chloroform, she is supposed to have opened her eyes and remarked, “A most unpleasant task, Professor Lister, most pleasantly performed.” The price of failure for a royal medic, however, has
always been high, as demonstrated by Bohemia's blind King John. When his surgeons failed to restore his eyesight he had all of them drowned in the Danube.