Royal Babylon (5 page)

The royal knockabout banter didn't last. The Willises' state-of-the-art equipment for the treatment of mental illness comprised a straitjacket, iron clamps, a chair and a length of rope. Additional treatment was in accordance with conventional guidelines: frequent bleedings, forced vomiting, a starvation diet, salivations, and afterward a cold bath. To divert “morbid humors” from the King's head they applied blisters—various types of irritants—to the skin on his legs. These humors were supposed to be drawn through the serum of the blisters and through the pus that formed as they became infected, thus creating running sores that lasted for weeks. For the final eight years of the King's life, his medical bill was a staggering
£
271,000.

The King soon learned to dread the Willises and their torture-chamber techniques. The regular court physicians observed with unintentional irony that they were nothing more than a couple of dangerous quacks, and not much saner than the people they locked up in Gretford. Doctors from all over the country flocked to denounce their methods and to offer their own equally useless remedies. Although the treatment the Willises offered was both shocking and brutal, they were only working to the standard theory and practice of the day, doing the best they knew how with the best techniques available to them. If they hadn't taken the King's money, someone else surely would have done.

This is the point at which King George III's reign starts to drown in myth. Many of the best-known stories about the King's outlandish behavior stem from a pamphlet published in 1789 by
Philip Withers, “History of the Royal Malady by a Page of the Presence.” The document was full of false or greatly exaggerated anecdotes about the King's eccentricities which are still repeated to this day, including the one about how he was supposed to have shaken hands with an oak tree, having mistaken it for Frederick the Great. Many other eyewitness accounts of George's odd behavior were tainted by political prejudice. William Pitt's pro-monarchist friends tended to play down the King's problems and exaggerate his remissions. The opposing Whigs, on the other hand, found more than adequate proof that he was mad in just about everything George said or did.

In 1789, in spite of taking on the chin everything that enlightened medical science could offer him, the King's condition improved. In February he was able to walk arm in arm in Richmond Gardens with his wife, Queen Charlotte. The Lord Chancellor visited him and reported back to his Prime Minister that the King was completely recovered: “There was not,” asserted the Chancellor confidently, “the least trace or appearance of disorder.”

The Willises claimed full credit for this temporary remission. Parliament responded with a fit of generosity, striking official medals to celebrate and voting Willis Senior an annual pension of
£
1,000 and his son John
£
550 pounds for life. Reverend Willis meanwhile had some medals struck of his own for promotional purposes. On one side of the medallion there was a profile view of Willis, while the other bore the legend “Britons Rejoice Your King's Restored—1789.” News of the Reverend Francis Willis's triumph spread all over Europe. It was received with particular interest in Lisbon at the court of the royal House of Braganza, home of the mad Queen Maria I.

In February 1801, King George III suffered a relapse. By this time, Willis Senior was over eighty years old and retired,
and his son had taken over the family practice, but both Willises were brought in again. They advised that the King should be forcibly removed to Kew Palace for further treatment. Again the King lapsed into a coma and was thought to be dying. This, however, was a much briefer illness, and by March 4 he was well enough to receive his Prime Minister Pitt, and to attend a meeting of the Privy Council. In spite of his apparently complete recovery, the King's sanity could no longer be taken for granted, and the royal family lived in constant expectation of a relapse. The Willises were retained as permanent consultants to oversee his aftercare.

In January 1804 George III was again seized with a short attack. By this time the King had such a morbid dread of the Willises that it was recognized that their presence might be counterproductive and make him permanently mad. Samuel Foart Simmons, physician to St. Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, was appointed in their place. Unfortunately for the King, Dr. Simmons also favored a regimen that wouldn't have looked out of place in the Spanish Inquisition and was not appreciably any less ruthless than that of his predecessors. After a few more weeks of hell, however, the King was apparently well again.

The final attack came in October 1810, shortly after celebrations to mark the seventy-two-year-old King's golden jubilee. Simmons was recalled, and the old King was laced back into his royal straitjacket.

The strain of the King's illness took a dreadful toll on his wife, Queen Charlotte. When George first came to the throne in 1760 as an unmarried twenty-two-year-old, there was then, just as there would be now, great public interest and speculation surrounding his choice of partner. A small army of emissaries was dispatched abroad to assess marriage potential and
report back, and George was invited to sample the obligatory short list of ugly, stupid, mad, loose and smallpox-scarred German princesses. A princess from Brandenburg was a frontrunner for a while, but was rejected when it became known that her adulterous mother had been locked up as punishment for having an affair with a courtier. Princess Frederica of Saxe-Coburg was struck off the list because she was deformed and believed to be incapable of bearing children: she died a spinster aged thirty-five. The fifteen-year-old Princess Caroline of Hesse-Darmstadt was considered, but her chances of becoming Queen of England vanished when it emerged that her father, the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, was mad. Finally, George settled for his third cousin, the seventeen-year-old Princess Charlotte. Ironically, he made his choice because he dreaded the possibility of introducing mental instability to the bloodline.

None of the female members of the House of Hanover were noted for their good looks. Queen Charlotte, however, was by all accounts extremely ugly. Contemporary descriptions of her range from “plain” to “hideous.” When the German Princess arrived in England to take her throne, Londoners greeted her with cries of “pug-face.” Charlotte requested a translation, and was told that it meant “God bless Her Majesty.” The King wisely chose his own wedding night to put an end to the British court ritual of “bedding,” to spare her the indignity of being stared at by a crowd of smirking strangers. After she had been in England for some time, Horace Walpole paid her the nearest thing she was ever going to get to a compliment when he noted, “The bloom of her ugliness is beginning to wear off.”

The King and Queen were out driving through a turnip field in an open carriage one day when George overturned it,
smashing the Queen's nose. This accidental reworking of her features was noted to have been a significant improvement.

Whether there was a physical attraction or not, King George III and his wife bred like flies. In spite of her dainty build, the Queen was a tough woman who endured her fifteen pregnancies bravely, although she suffered frequently and horribly from post-natal depression. All but two of her children survived infancy. The first to die was Prince Alfred, who was a congenital invalid and survived less than two years. It was a sad comment on eighteenth-century child mortality that, according to a popular saying of the day, the Queen was not considered “a proper mother” until she had at least one dead child. Less than a year later, her three-year-old son Octavius was also dead, probably from the aftereffects of his smallpox vaccination—a dangerous procedure at that time.

While the rigors of almost continuous childbirths had destroyed her health, the King's mental illness broke Queen Charlotte's spirit. By the age of forty-four, her blond hair had turned white and she looked at least twenty years older. In middle age Charlotte was afflicted by attacks of erysipelas, causing her face to swell and turn an alarming shade of purple. Although she was naturally quite thin, by 1807 she had become so bloated that a courtier recorded that she looked as though she was carrying all fifteen children simultaneously.

Although the King and Queen—uniquely for a royal couple—had apparently enjoyed many long years of almost touching domesticity, the King's illnesses effectively ended their marriage. At first Queen Charlotte had been worried and a little embarrassed about her husband's condition, but in time her concern turned to sheer terror as his behavior became more unpredictable. During the day she made sure that she was never alone with the King, and at night she moved to a bedroom as
far away from his as she possibly could and kept the door locked. This rejection made the King extremely upset and he became even more violent.

Queen Charlotte had every confidence in the Willises and was quietly relieved that she didn't have the responsibility of looking after her husband. She colluded with the so-called kidnapping of the King in April 1801 when the Willises had him tied up and taken to Kew. After his third illness of 1804, the King and Queen ceased to have anything to do with each other more or less permanently. Although he had always been known as the only monogamous member of his dynasty, the King's mental state played tricks with his libido. He propositioned one of his wife's ladies-in-waiting, Lady Elizabeth Pembroke, with love letters and obscene suggestions. Lady Pembroke was seventy years old at the time.

The King did not recover from this last attack of illness. In 1811, his physicians testified that his mental incapacity was irreversible. Dr. Richard Warren informed Parliament, “
Rex noster insanit
: our king is mad.”

The old King spent the last eight or nine years of his life blind and deaf, alone in the north side of Windsor Castle. He lived in complete silence, white-haired and bearded, now and then picking at his harpsichord, or talking to dead friends, or occasionally indecently exposing himself to his servants.

         

Historians down the ages have offered their own verdicts on the King's condition, and madness theories have come in and out of fashion. The
London Chronicle
asserted that the King's problem “was owing solely to his drinking the waters of Cheltenham.”
Nineteenth-century royal biographers attributed the King's mental illness to his failure to take a mistress. For more than 150 years after his death the most popular interpretation of events was that George III had a manic-depressive or schizophrenic personality which sometimes tipped him over the edge into complete mental breakdown. The strange and excitable letters he wrote as a young man to his mentor, Lord Bute, were cited as evidence of an unstable and neurotic character. As a young king he was highly strung and often prone to bouts of depression—twice he became so depressed that he considered abdicating. The loss of the American colonies was regarded by contemporaries as the greatest disaster in British history, and the King's reputation suffered accordingly on both sides of the Atlantic. Many believed—an old theory hinted at again in the 1994 film—that his trauma over the loss of his colonies may have been behind his first breakdown, although by the time of his first illness the war in America had been over for six years.

For many years the central participants in the debate over George III's mental state were two medical historians, Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine. In the 1960s they published a retrospective diagnosis of the King's illness in a book called
George III and the Mad Business
. They argued that the King's condition was largely consistent with the characteristics of variegate porphyria, a hitherto obscure metabolic disorder which attacks the central nervous system. Symptoms of this disorder include delirium and hallucinations, paralysis, fits, stomach cramps, pains in the limbs and cataracts. The most persuasive evidence to support their argument could be found in the King's chamber pot. Porphyria takes its name from the brownish-purple porphyrins, not discovered in blood until more than half a century after George III's
death, which are often passed in the victim's urine. The early medical notes on George III reported a discoloration of the King's urine on four occasions: once it was described as “bluish” and on another occasion as “bloody.” Hunter and Macalpine concluded that George III was not clinically insane but was suffering from an inherited metabolic disorder.

Hunter and Macalpine went on to make a connection between George III's illness and similar physical problems encountered in previous royal invalids. In all, they found evidence of an inherited illness afflicting fifteen generations of the British royal family, traceable back to Mary Queen of Scots. If Hunter and Macalpine are correct, George III could blame his bad luck on the Stuarts, who transmitted the disease to the Hanoverians via James I's granddaughter (and George I's mother), the Electress of Hanover.

If the King suffered from porphyria it is reasonable to assume that he could have passed it on to some of his progeny. Hunter and Macalpine's medical detective work claims at least four of George III's sons as porphyria victims, including George IV, Augustus the Duke of Sussex, Frederick the Duke of York, and Queen Victoria's father, Edward the Duke of Kent. George IV's wife, Caroline of Brunswick, is also listed as a candidate for the disorder, as some aspects of her medical history were also consistent with porphyria. If the latter assumption is correct, porphyria was probably the only thing she ever had in common with her husband. Their only daughter, the tragic Princess Charlotte, would almost certainly have inherited it also, an extrapolation that could be applied to account for her mysterious death during childbirth.

The case for porphyria is tempting, but it is not now quite as fashionable as it was in the 1960s. For the historian, the
crucial question must be to explain how porphyria, which supposedly existed in a relatively benign form for generations, should suddenly manifest itself in the third George with such devastating virulence.