Hello hello hello and welcome to english learning for curious minds by leonardo english the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your english
I'm Alistair Budge and today we are going to talk about George III, the British king known to history as the Mad King.
But as we will discover, the story is a great deal more complicated than the label suggests.
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Okay then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
It is October
1788 at windsor castle the king of great britain is behaving strangely he is talking without stopping for hours sometimes through the night
His words make no sense.
He speaks to people who are not in the room.
He wanders the corridors of the castle in the early hours, agitated and incoherent.
Then one afternoon, he walks up to an oak tree, takes hold of the branches,
And begins a conversation with it.
He is apparently under the impression that he is speaking with the King of Prussia.
His courtiers do not know what to do.
The King, King George III, appears to be going mad.
Now, if you know anything about George III, it's probably that he was the mad king, the one who lost America, the one in the musical Hamilton as a comic, petulant villain who sings about how the colonists will come crawling back to him.
The one who ended his days raving in a locked room at Windsor Castle.
All of that might be true, but it is far from the whole story, because for most of his 60-year reign, the longest of any male British monarch in history,
George III was a serious, devoted, rather ordinary man who just so happened to be king.
A man who woke up before dawn to check on his crops, who wrote articles about farming under a fake name, who was unusually devoted to his wife.
In today's episode,
We are going to try to set the Mad King label aside for a moment and look at the full picture.
We'll start with who George really was before his illness.
We'll look at the turbulent kingdom he was theoretically the head of.
We'll look at his illness and the treatments that were almost certainly making him worse.
And we'll end with a question that historians and doctors are still arguing about today.
What was actually wrong with him?
So George III was born in 1738.
As the name suggests, he was the third king called George.
The other two were his great-grandfather, George I, and his grandfather, George II.
And compared to the Georges that came before him, he was something of a fresh start.
The two other Georges were both German, essentially, from the House of Hanover.
Neither could really speak much English, and they had never bothered to learn.
George III was different.
He had been born in London, educated in Britain, and was determined to present himself not as a German prince who happened to wear the British crown, but as a British king.
He was also unlike most other kings.
While many European monarchs were flamboyant, extravagant, obsessed with courts and ceremony and mistresses, George was frugal and hard-working.
He got up early he ate simply he loved his wife he had fifteen children with her and by most accounts he loved his children too he was the first british king to be formally educated in the sciences
He had his own astronomical observatory.
He collected maps.
He collected clocks.
He had an enormous personal library that, after his death, was donated to what became the British Library.
65,000 volumes.
But his real passion was agriculture.
Under the pen name Ralph Robinson, he wrote articles about farming methods for a publication called the Annals of Agriculture.
His readers had no idea they were reading dispatches from the King of Great Britain.
And it wasn't just theory either.
As the expression goes, he was more than happy to get his hands dirty, to roll up his sleeves and do the physical work himself, rather than leave it to others.
He kept a working farm at Windsor.
He went out before dawn to check on his livestock.
He would walk his own fields and sometimes engage in conversation with labourers who would assume he was just another farmer and would chat away happily about crops and prices and the weather, never guessing who they were talking to.
This was where the nickname came from, Farmer George.
It was meant by some as a mockery.
The implication was that he was too simple, too earthy, too undignified to be a real king.
But the British public, apparently,
Rather liked it
A king who knew the price of wheat who went to bed at a reasonable hour who had not been caught in any scandalous affairs that was a king you could trust
He had other qualities too
He was devoted to his wife and a loyal husband
It was not a love marriage as the term goes it was an arranged marriage a political match she was a german princess he was an unmarried king and they were both incredibly young
She arrived in England, met George the following day, and married him the very same evening.
She was 17, he was 22.
These things rarely went well, but this one did.
By all accounts, George adored her and was faithful to her for their 57-year union.
He bought her a house, a place called the Queen's House, which he had enlarged and redecorated specially for her.
You can visit it today, and perhaps you have.
You might know it by its later name, Buckingham Palace.
He was, in short, a dutiful, domestic and decent man, someone who might have lived a quieter and happier life had he not been born in line to the throne.
So, this is the man who became known as the Mad King.
A farmer, a husband, a father, an avid reader, a man who loved clocks.
Not the monster he is sometimes portrayed as.
Now, some monarchs are remembered in the history books for their cunning and intelligence, their ability to navigate international politics, manage internal unrest, and leave the country in a stronger position than how they found it.
George the third might have been a perfectly decent man in many respects but he was not one of these monarchs and it just so happened that he was landed with a series of incredibly tricky problems to deal with
Not immediately, I should say.
When he became king in 1960, things were looking pretty good for Britain.
Shortly afterwards, the country emerged victorious from the Seven Years' War, winning Britain vast new territories across North America, India and the Caribbean.
But this victory was a double-edged sword.
The country was drowning in debt and George was now responsible for a vast, difficult to govern empire across the Atlantic.
And then within 15 years,
This empire had started to fracture.
The American colonies had been growing increasingly restless.
Taxation without representation, trade restrictions, a growing sense that London was governing people it did not understand and did not particularly care about.
George and his ministers did not handle the situation well.
Reforms were proposed and then reversed.
Taxes were imposed, dropped and then re-imposed.
The colonists were given every reason to stop trusting the intentions of the British Parliament.
And what came next?
Well, it came pretty quickly.
By 1775 it was war.
By 1776 the colonies had declared independence.
By 1783 it was over.
Britain had lost.
George III is often cast as the villain of this story, at least in the American popular memory.
The reality is a little more complicated.
George was a constitutional monarch, not an absolute one.
In other words he could influence policy but it was the british parliament that ultimately called the shots that did the real decision-making
He was stubborn certainly
He resisted american independence for longer than was sensible and he was not a mere helpless spectator
But he was not single-handedly responsible for the decisions that led to revolution and ultimately American independence.
What the loss of America did, undeniably, was wound him.
He took it personally.
He felt it as a failure.
He even wrote a draft letter of abdication, where he would step down from the throne before deciding to stay.
And then the French Revolution began.
Napoleon appeared.
Britain found itself in almost constant war with France for the best part of 20 years.
George III, Farmer George, he was not cut out for this.
He was a quiet man who wanted to grow turnips and read about astronomy.
And there he was, presiding over one of the most violent and consequential periods in modern history.
The pressure was relentless.
And in the autumn of 1788, when he was 50 years old, something broke.
The first serious episode begins in October 1788.
The symptoms arrive quickly.
He becomes agitated and cannot sleep.
He talks without stopping for hours, sometimes through the night, the words tumbling over each other until they lose their meaning.
He sees and speaks to people who are not there.
He shakes the branches of an oak tree in Windsor Great Park, apparently believing himself to be in conversation with the King of Prussia.
His household is terrified.
Charlotte, his wife, is terrified.
Doctors are called.
And this is where the story takes a dark turn.
The year is 1788.
Nobody understands mental illness.
There is no real vocabulary for it, no framework, and certainly no treatment that could do anything useful.
What doctors had instead was a set of interventions built on theories about the body that were already centuries out of date.
George's regular physicians have no idea what to do.
They start by bleeding him.
They give him laxatives and emetics, medicines designed to make him vomit.
They apply what were called blistering agents to his legs, caustic chemicals that raise painful blisters on the skin in the belief that whatever is wrong inside might somehow exit through the wound.
This is mainstream medical practice in 1788.
And
You don't have to have a medical degree to guess that none of this does any good.
After several weeks, a specialist is brought in.
His name is Francis Willis.
He is an unusual figure, a clergyman as well as a physician, but he has a reputation for treating the mentally ill. Parliament is desperate for the king to recover and is willing to try anything.
Willis believes that mental illness is caused by what he calls over-excitement.
The cure is control.
His method is simple and it is brutal.
When the king falls into one of these episodes, when he shouts or attacks the attendants around him, or becomes impossible to manage,
Willis orders for him to be put into a straitjacket, those jackets where your arms are tied down securely around your body so you cannot move, the ones that are sometimes used for violent prisoners.
He is left in it, thrashing and shouting until he exhausts himself and goes quiet.
Whenever he is calm, he is rewarded.
He is allowed to see Charlotte and the children.
He is permitted small comforts.
When he becomes difficult again, back into the jacket it is.
Willis also chains the king to his chair when he deems it necessary.
When the talking becomes uncontrollable, he has him gagged, a cloth put around his mouth so he cannot talk.
The King of Great Britain, monarch of one of the most powerful states in the world, is being managed like a dangerous animal.
The grim irony here is that Willis was considered a relatively enlightened practitioner.
There were many institutions in England where the mentally ill were treated far, far worse, chained to walls, exhibited to the public or simply left to rot in their own filth.
Willis, at least, believed that patients could recover and that this method was the most effective way of bringing about a recovery.
Meanwhile, in Parliament, a crisis is unfolding.
Parliament runs the day-to-day business of government, but many of the formal powers of the crown, such as appointing ministers and giving royal assent to new laws, these require a functioning king.
Someone needs to exercise these powers in his place.
The question of who that should be and on what terms consumes the House of Commons for months.
Then George recovers and the crisis becomes, for the moment, moot, irrelevant.
By February of 1789, George begins to improve.
By April, he is well enough to return to public life.
The recovery is met with national celebration, fireworks, services of thanksgiving in churches across the country, and a grand ceremony at St. Paul's Cathedral.
Farmer George, or rather King George, is back.
Sadly, it would not last.
Further episodes followed in 1801 and again in 1804, each one longer and more severe than the last.
And then in 1810, following the death of his youngest daughter, Princess Amelia, he began to decline for the final time.
By 1811, it was clear that he would not recover.
His eldest son, the future George IV, was appointed Prince Regent to govern in his place.
George III was now confined to Windsor Castle.
By this point, he was old, blind and partially deaf.
In his final years, his mind was gone entirely.
He wandered the corridors at night, white-bearded and gaunt in his dressing gown, talking to people who had been dead for decades.
He lived like this for nine more years before his death in 1820, aged 81.
So you might be asking yourself, what was actually wrong with him?
This is the question that historians and doctors have been arguing about for more than a century.
For most of the 20th century, the accepted answer was something called porphyria, specifically variegate porphyria, which is a hereditary blood disorder.
The theory was put forward in 1966 by two medical historians who suggested that George's physical symptoms, such as discoloured urine and muscle weakness, these pointed to a metabolic disease rather than a psychiatric one.
In other words, he wasn't a madman.
This was a physical disease, not a mental illness.
The theory gained significant support in the early 2000s when scientists analysed samples of George's hair and found arsenic at levels roughly 100 times higher than those in healthy people.
The suggestion was that his doctors had been inadvertently poisoning him with arsenic-based medicines, which would have triggered and worsened any underlying condition.
But from around 2010 onwards, this theory began to fall apart.
A systematic review of George's actual medical records found that the two researchers had been highly selective.
They had emphasised the physical symptoms and quietly downplayed or simply omitted the psychiatric ones.
The current consensus is that George III is likely to have had bipolar disorder.
Specifically, bipolar disorder type 1, the kind characterized by full manic episodes.
The racing thoughts, the inability to stop speaking, the delusions, the grandiosity, the weeks of extreme agitation, followed by periods of relative normality.
These are not the symptoms of a blood disease, they are the hallmarks of severe mania.
As for the arsenic levels in his hair, these were accurate, the finding was not exaggerated.
This was most probably a consequence of the treatments he received, rather than a cause of his illness.
Today, as you may know, bipolar disorder is a condition that can be managed with medication and therapy, and many people with bipolar disorder type 1 lead full and productive lives.
But George had no luxury.
Instead, he was strapped into a jacket and chained to a chair.
And while the physicians might well have believed they were doing the right thing, indeed the only thing they could, they were almost certainly making it worse.
The bleeding, the purging, the blistering, these would have weakened him physically.
And the trauma of being restrained repeatedly, put into a straitjacket or tied to a chair, all this can hardly have calmed a mind already in crisis.
It may well have intensified his fear, agitation and confusion, and triggered further manic episodes.
George III died on the 29th of January 1820 at Windsor Castle, aged 81.
He'd been king for 59 years and 96 days.
In that time, Britain had lost America, defeated Napoleon, expanded its empire across six continents and began the Industrial Revolution.
The world he left behind looked almost nothing like the world he had inherited.
He had watched almost none of it, not in the last decade anyway.
So, to wrap things up, the Mad King remains one of history's most durable caricatures.
In American memory, he is a tyrant.
In British popular culture, a figure of pity or of gentle comedy.
The reality was neither tyranny nor romance.
It was a conscientious, earnest, somewhat ordinary man, placed on the throne during an extraordinary age, and then crushed by an illness nobody around him had the tools to understand, let alone to treat.
Okay then, that is it for today's episode on George III, the Mad King.
I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learned something new.
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You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
I'm Alistair Budge.
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