The Madness of George III

THE English people have seemed on several occasions to more than half credit the report that Queen Victoria had become clouded in mind, not, perhaps, from any special evidence of insanity in the case, but from the fact that she is the granddaughter of George III., who was insane for nearly one sixth of his long reign. Mention has also been made of the connection of the English royal family with the old French monarch, Charles VI., who became demented. There is an old theory, which still obtains credit in England, that it is the grandchildren rather than the children of the insane who are in danger of inheriting mental disease. It is somewhat remarkable that the English monarch who reigned longest, and a French monarch also celebrated for his long reign, should each have fallen a victim to mental disease.

Much has been written concerning the influence which the insanity of George III. had upon the political events of his reign, but little has been said concerning the influence that it exerted upon his private character, his social feelings, and his domestic life. His misfortune as far as possible was concealed from the world, but such fragmentary accounts of it as remain reveal to us, with much that is painful and humiliating, some of the finer feelings and impulses of his character, and afford a somewhat different picture of the august monarch from that which we are accustomed to derive from the instructions of a certain respected document read on Independence Days.

The influence of insanity is usually sympathetic. It has been said that genius is a disease of the nerves, and one of the compensations that Providence makes for the sufferings that arise from exquisite sensitiveness. Be that as it may with the intellect, insanity seems to refine the affections, to enlarge one’s charity, and to endow one with clearer perceptions of the sorrows and anxieties that rob life of its common comforts and privileges. It gives one a responsive nature; it untunes the harp, but it tunes it again. It is a curious fact that the best-read authors during the reign of George III. seem to have derived their enlarged sympathies with mankind from this extraordinary discipline. Old Burton was long dead, but his Anatomy of Melancholy, which was written to lift the vapors from his own mind, still retained its popularity. The Odes of Collins, which were just rising into appreciation, were written in the lucid intervals of madness. Dr. Johnson, whose voluntary testimonies to the king’s private virtues and goodness of heart have been named by Thackeray as one of the props of the throne, was a most unhappy victim of the English malady, and wrote Rasselas and The Vanity of Human Wishes under a cloud which for a full half-century threatened the destruction of his intellect. Gay and jolly Oliver Goldsmith, pedantic Boswell, and even Garrick had their moods. The poetry of Cowper embodied the most sorrowful of all experiences. Haley wrote with the shadow of insanity upon his hearthstone, and Beattie with the recollection of his insane wife ever in mind.

The discipline of insanity has refined many rough natures and quickened many cold hearts that otherwise might have passed as misanthropes in the world. Among these may fairly he classed George III. “ Few princes,” says Lord Brougham, “have been more exemplary in their domestic habits or in the offices of private friendship. But the instant his prerogative was concerned, or his bigotry interfered with, or his will thwarted, the most bitter animosity, the most calculating coldness of heart, took possession of his breast and swayed it by turns.” This disposition made him unpopular at times, and, but for a correcting providence — the chastisement of his constantly threatening affliction — might have lost him his throne. His frequent mental distresses made him humble, and kept his heart open to the unfortunate and the poor. Like Lear, he could look upon the meanest of his subjects and say, —

The king was first attacked by insanity in 1765, when he was twenty-seven years old. It was in the spring-time. As is usual with the first manifestations of disease of this kind, when constitutional, he soon recovered.

In the latter part of the autumn of 1788, the king appeared to be nervous and restless, unsettled in mind and apprehensive. Returning from a long ride one bright October day, he hurried by, entered his apartment with an anxious, distressed look upon his face, and, flinging himself into a chair, burst into tears, exclaiming, “ I am going to be mad, and I wish to God I might die! ”

The apprehension of an attack of insanity is a most fearful thing; few scenes of suffering not associated with guilt and crime can compare with the terrors of a man who is conscious that he is no longer master of himself, that his will is losing the power to restrain his intellect. What may he not be left to do? We have read of the poet Collins sobbing and mourning in the shadowy aisles of Chichester Cathedral, whither he was accustomed to resort to seek for solace in prayer and in the music of the organ; of Dr. Johnson trembling day by day for nearly half a century lest the bitterness of the melancholy he had suffered in early manhood should return; of Charles Lamb and his poor insane sister going across the fields to the neighboring asylum, weeping and bitterly wringing their hands, because the distressed girl knew that the season of darkness was coming again; of the prayers of Cowper amid the solitudes of Olney and on the banks of the Ouse, and the concealed anxieties of the overworked brain of Southey amid the seclusion of Keswick. The most dangerous and distressing period of mental malady is that when the passions and emotions are partly unchained, and the consciousness of right remains, without the power to pursue it.

The sufferings of the king during the first apprehensive days of his malady were painful to witness, and his conduct was most humiliating for the monarch of a realm whose empire followed the sun. “ He awoke,” says one of Sheridan’s correspondents on one occasion, “ with all the gestures and ravings of a confirmed maniac, and a new noise in imitation of the howling of a dog.” He seemed tempted with suicidal thoughts, and required constant watchfulness and restraint. “ This morning,” says one, “ he made an attempt to jump out of the window, and is now very turbulent and incoherent.”

The king grew worse during the last days of fall. On the 29th of November he was removed to Kew, where he was to experience almost unspeakable horrors. Here he grew worse, his disease became settled, and the sad particulars of his conduct during the dreary months of December and January have, perhaps with commendable prudence, been withheld from the public eye.

The king’s illness not yielding to the treatment of the court physicians, the queen and her advisers thought proper to bring to their assistance some one particularly skilled in diseases of the mind. Their choice fell upon Dr. Francis Willis, a highly-educated minister and physician, who seemed to possess great natural power in influencing those whose intellects were disordered, but who were yet capable of moral restraint. His advice in cases of this nature was sought by people of the highest rank, and he often had thirty patients under his charge. Miss Burney, who has left us many pleasing pictures of the domestic life of George III., describes Dr. Willis as a “ man of a thousand,” open-hearted, dauntless, and high-minded. Soon after his arrival at the palace, it was decided that he should have the moral management of the king.

The first interview of Dr. Willis with the king was rather odd and amusing. The royal patient, like most insane people, could he very sarcastic, and he turned a sharp tongue on his new medical adviser.

” Are you not a clergyman? ” asked the king,

“ Yes. ”

“ And are you not ashamed to leave your calling and turn doctor? ”

“ Our Saviour himself went about doing good.”

“ Yes,” answered the king, “ but he did not get seven hundred pounds a year for it.”

It was decided that the moral management of the king required seclusion both from his family and from the ministers of state. He was also, when violent, subjected to mechanical restraint.

Distressing indeed must have been the spectacle presented by the English monarch at this period of his incapacity; how distressing a single anecdote will show. During his convalescence some friends of the royal household were passing through the palace accompanied by an equerry, when they observed a straitjacket lying in a chair. The equerry averted his look as a mark of respect for the king. The latter, who had joined the company present, observed the movement and said, “ You need not be afraid to look at it. Perhaps it is the best friend I ever had in my life.”

The political effects of the king’s illness are sufficiently known to the reader of English history. It was the ministerial policy to represent the malady as a temporary and an accidental misfortune; the aim of the opposition was to represent it as incurable; and these differences produced the most violent disputes in Parliament, involving as they did the question of the regency. Early in January the king gave evidence of recovery. Willis was the first of the king’s physicians to perceive it. In reply to the committee of the House of Commons, when asked if he saw any present signs of convalescence, he said, —

“ About a fortnight ago his Majesty would take up books, but could not read a line in them; he will now read several pages together, and make very good remarks upon the subject.”

The king had some calm days in February, and his full recovery came with the singing of birds and the budding of flowers. Summer-time brought again the old tranquillity to the palace. One of the first excursions that the king made after his recovery was to an almshouse, where apartments for the insane were being provided.

The king’s third attack of insanity began in February, 1801. He was put under restraint for only about a month, though his complete recovery did not take place till the following summer. Twenty-three years, not unclouded by apprehension, elapsed between the first and the second attack, and thirteen years, shadowed by continual anxiety, between the second and the third.

The recovery of the king from his second attack thrilled the nation with joy and awakened a spirit of loyalty from sea to sea. London, on the night following the day on which the king resumed his functions, was a blaze of light from the palaces of the West End to the humblest huts in the suburbs. But the great illumination was a rising splendor, which only had its beginning here; it flashed like a spontaneous joy over all the cities of the realm. Gala days followed gala days; the nights were festive; the release of the king from his mental bondage seemed to lighten all hearts. On the 23d of April the royal family went to the old cathedral of St. Paul’s in solemn state to return thanks to God. It was an imposing procession. The bells rung out, the boom of the cannon echoed through the mellowing air, and light strains of music arose on every hand. As the king entered the cathedral between the bishops of London and Lincoln, the voices of five thousand children burst forth in grand chorus, “ God save the king.”

At the sound of the jubilant strain, the king’s emotions overcame him. He covered his face and wept.

“ I do now feel that I have been ill,” he said to the Bishop of London, as soon as he could restrain his tears.

The joy of the nation was sincere. As delightful to the king must have been the days that followed, when he set forth with the queen and a part of the royal family for a long tour to the west of England. The roads were lined with people and spanned with arches of flowers; girls crowned with wreaths strewed flowers in the streets of the villages through which he passed; bells were rung, the bands were out, all was festivity from London to Weymouth. Wide must have been the contrast between this new freedom and good Dr. Willis’s straitjacket.

Weymouth at this time possessed rare charms for the king. Unvexed by ministerial disputes and the cares of state, free from the last shadow of the clouds that had darkened his mind, with a humble heart, feeling that he was after all but a dependent man among weak and dependent men, he joined the peasants in their sports, he caressed their children, he gave pious advice to old women and wholesome counsel to ambitious lads and buxom lassies; he wandered through the hay-fields with the mowers, and was rocked by the common sailors on the foamy waters of Portland Roads. His intercourse with the peasantry at this period gave him a popularity that he never outlived.

The familiarity of notable monarchs with their poorer and meaner subjects has ever been an engaging theme with the historian and the poet. Thus we have the child-charming stories of Henry VIII. and the miller of Dee; of King John and the abbot; of Edward IV. and the tanner; of Philip of Burgundy and the tinker, which, with some shifting of scenes, is told in the Induction to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. About few monarchs have so many pleasing anecdotes of this kind been related as about George III. This humility was a result of his great afflictions, aud a most fortunate one for his popularity, since in the eyes of the people his charity covered a multitude of political errors.

After the first beating of the storm of affliction upon his own head, he had a sensitiveness that would never allow him to witness a scene of suffering without emotion, however humble might be the condition of the sufferer. A volume of anecdotes might be collected to illustrate this gentleness of character when want or woe was presented directly before, him. He was walking one day, during the hard winter of 1785, unbending his mind from the cares of state, when he chanced to meet two little boys, who, not knowing whom they were addressing, fell upon their knees in the snow, and, wringing their hands, said, —

“ Help us! We are hungry; we have nothing to eat.”

Their pinched faces were wet with tears.

“ Get up,” said the king. “ Where do you live ? ”

“ Our mother is dead, and our father lies sick, and we have no money, food, or fire.”

“ Go home,” said the king, “ and I will follow you.”

They at last reached a wretched hover, where the king found the mother dead, having perished for the want of the necessities of life, and the wretched father ready to perish, but still encircling with his bony arm the deceased partner of his woes. The king’s eye moistened, and he hurried back to the Queen’s Lodge and related to the queen what he had seen. He not only immediately relieved the present necessities of the family, but gave orders that the boys should he supported and educated from the royal bounty.

The king surpassed all other monarchs in the whimsical play of “good Haroun Alraschid.” He loved nothing better than to meet his poorer and meaner subjects incognito, and learn their good opinion of him. He once played the part of Saxon Alfred as well as that of the Persian caliph, and turned a piece of meat in a cottage. When the old woman returned, what was her delight at finding a royal note, with an inclosure. It ran, “ Five guineas to buy a jack.”

On board the Southampton, a famous vessel of the olden time, he made himself as jolly with the sailors. One of the tars professed to be a poet, and composed an ode of voluntary laureateship on the occasion, which was sung in the presence of the king. Two of the stanzas run as follows: —

The “ splicing of the main brace ” here referred to, which greatly pleased his Majesty, consisted in serving out an extra dram to the sailors. The words were sung to the music of the bagpipe.

George III. was fond of children. All crazy people are, in their better moods. Walking one day near Windsor, he met a stable-boy and asked, —

“ Well, boy, what do you do, and what do they pay you ? ”

“I help in the stable, sir; but they only give me my victuals and clothes.”

“Be content,” said the king, in a philosophical mood; “ I can have nothing more.”

Kew House, or the old palace at Kew, still exists, and with it are associated some of the most pleasing as well as melancholy incidents of the court life of the last century. Here, amid the charming gardens, Queen Charlotte had her Little Trianon, which bore the name of the Queen’s Lodge. Here was the Royal Nursery; here, in the cool shade of the flowering trees, Frederick, Prince of Wales, used to listen to the wit of Chesterfield and the insidious reasoning of Bolingbroke; and here the king passed the happiest hours of his better years and the most wretched days of his existence.

Its relics still remain, reminding one — oh, how sadly and vividly! — of a generation gone. The easy-chair in which Queen Charlotte died, the old harpsichord that belonged to Händel, on which the king used to play, the king’s prayerbook, his walking-stick, all recall the best days of the English court.

Miss Burney (Madame d’ Arblay) and others have left a few glimpses of the king’s life at Kew during his periods of incapacity. These occasional views are often amusing, and it is for this reason that they were not allowed to fade away with the general history of the king’s domestic life during these dark periods.

One day Miss Burney was walking in the garden at Kew, when she saw the king, whom she supposed to be very insane, coming towards her. To avoid meeting him, she ran off at full speed. But the king was not to be disappointed in his chance of meeting a pretty woman, and so ran after her. The king’s attendants were alarmed and ran after him. But the king proved the swiftest runner, and soon caught up with the charming queen’s maid, and, throwing his arms around her, kissed her. He then informed her that he was as well as ever he had been in his life, and that he wished to talk with her on affairs of state. Miss Burney was at first terribly frightened, but soon gained her self-possession and enjoyed one of the most pleasant interviews with the king that she ever had while in the service of the royal household.

Another time, as the king was breakfasting at Kew, the great scarcity of beef which was then prevailing in England became the subject of conversation.

“Why do not people plant more beef? ” asked the king.

Upon being told that beef could not be raised from the seed, he seemed still incredulous. He took some bits of beefsteak, and went into the garden and planted them. The next morning he went out to see if they had sprouted, and found there some snails. Thinking they were oxen, he was heard calling out, “ Here they are, here they are, Charlotte, horns and all! ”

Age at last battered his decaying tabernacle, and his life became more Learlike as the twilight shadows began to fall. His sympathies seemed to take a wider range, and his charity to gather new sweetness, as the evening of age came on. In 1786 a poor insane woman, named Margaret Nicholson, attempted to assassinate him as he was in the act of stepping from his carriage. The king, on finding that she was insane, remembered his own frailty, spoke of her with great pity, and tried to disarm the popular prejudice against her. In 1790 John Frith, an insane man, attempted the king’s life, and another lunatic shot at him in 1800, for each of whom the king was moved to extreme pity when he understood the nature of their malady.

George III. had fifteen children. His favorite was the Princess Amelia. In her early days she was a gay, lighthearted girl; but as she grew older she became affectionate and reflective, yielding to the deeper sentiments of her emotional nature, and making herself the companion of the king in his decline. She once told her experience in life in two fair stanzas, that have been preserved : —

In 1810 she was attacked with a lingering and fatal illness. Her sufferings at times were heart-rending to witness, but her sublime confidence in God kept her mind serene, and brought the sweetest anticipations of another and a better world.

The old king lingered by her bedside, her affectionate watcher and nurse. They talked together daily of Christ, of redemption, and of the joys of heaven. “ The only hope of the sinner is in the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ. Do you feel this hope, my daughter? Does it sustain you? ”

“ Nothing,” says an English clergyman who witnessed these interviews, “ can be more striking than the sight of the king, aged and nearly blind, bending over the couch on which the princess lies, and speaking to her of salvation through Christ as a matter far more interesting than the most magnificent pomps of royalty.”

As she grew weaker, he caused the physicians to make a statement of her condition every hour. When he found her sinking, the old dejection and gloom began to overcast his mind again. He felt, like Lear, that he had one true heart to love him for himself alone. This love was more precious to him than crowns and thrones. The world offered nothing to him so sweet as her affection. She was his Cordelia. One gloomy day a messenger came to the king’s room to announce that Amelia had breathed her last. It was too much for the king: reason began to waver and soon took its flight. “ This was caused by poor Amelia,” he was heard saying, as the shadows deepened and the dreary winter of age came stealing on.

This was in 1810. The remaining ten years of his life were passed, with the exception of few brief intervals, in the long night of mindlessness, and the last eight years were still more deeply shadowed by the loss of sight. In May, 1811, he appeared once outside of the castle of Windsor, and henceforth, the people saw him no more. Withdrawn from all eyes but those that watched his necessities, in silence and in darkness, crownless, throneless, sceptreless, there was for him neither sun, moon, nor stars, empire, wife, nor child. The seasons came and went, — the springtime lighted up the hills and autumn withered the leaves, the summer sunshine dreamed in the flowers and the snows of winter fell; battles were fought; Waterloo changed the front of the political world; Napoleon fell; the nation was filled with festive rejoicings over the battles of Vittoria, the Pyrenees, and Toulouse, but he was oblivious of all. His sister died, his beloved queen died, his son, the Duke of Kent, died — but he knew it not. He was often confined in a padded room; his beard grew long; he seemed like a full personification of the character of Lear. Once he was heard repeating to himself the sad lines in Samson Agonistes, —

Some incidents of this period are very touching. One day, while his attendants were leading him along one of the passages of the castle, he heard some one draw quickly aside. “Who is there?” asked the king.

He was answered in a well-known voice.

“ I am now blind,” said the king.

“ I am very sorry, please your Majesty.”

“ But,” continued the king, “ I am quite resigned; for what have we to do in this world but to suffer as well as to perform the will of the Almighty? ”

He at one time supposed that George III. was some other person than himself, who was now dead. He professed to feel great respect for the deceased monarch. He was once heard saying, “ I must have a new suit of clothes, and I will have them black, in memory of George III.”

In the summer of 1814 he had some lucid intervals. In one of these he was visited by the queen. Once, on entering the room, she found him singing a hymn, and playing sweetly upon the harpsichord. When he had finished singing, he knelt down and prayed. He invoked a blessing upon the queen, his children, and the nation, and concluded with a petition that God would avert his own dreadful calamity if it was the divine will; if not, that he would give him resignation to bear it. One morning he heard the bell tolling at Windsor.

“ Who is dead ? " he asked.

“Mrs. S—, please your Majesty. ”

“Mrs. S—? She was a linen-draper. She was a good woman, and brought up her family in the fear of God. She, has gone to heaven, and I hope I shall soon follow her. ”

As the world receded, leaving him nothing but solitude, he fancied that the angels came to visit him and to minister unto him. Old friends long dead came back again; they wandered about his lonely rooms and sat down in the empty chairs; they clustered around him at the time of prayer. His heart was ever turning to the past, to the friends of more than a half-century before. The following passage from Lord Eldon’s papers indicates the intense spirituality that in his partly lucid intervals was ever present in his mind: —

“ The king had been allowed to preside over the state council. It was agreed that if any strong feature of his malady should appear during the sitting, Sir Henry Halford should, on receiving a signal from me, endeavor to recall him from his aberrations, and accordingly, when his Majesty appeared to be addressing some statesmen of a past generation, whom he had long survived, Sir Henry observed, ‘ Your Majesty has, I believe, forgotten that — and — both died many years ago. ’

“ ' True, ’ replied the king; ‘ they died to you and to the world in general, but not to me. ’ ”

Music seemed to collect his thoughts and soothe his feelings, and the piano and harpsichord were his favorite instruments. In 1811 he, for the last time, made the selection of pieces for a grand sacred concert. It comprised Händel’s famous passages descriptive of madness and blindness, the lamentation of Jephthah on the loss of his daughter, and the list ended with God save the King. The performance of the last moistened all eyes, after what had gone before.

Thus passed the last ten years of the monarch’s life, in a gradual decline, amid an obscurity lighted by occasional gleams of reason and always full of the keenest pathos; until, in 1820, the great bell of St. Paul’s announced his final release.

The popularity of George III. was largely due to his humble piety, and to his familiarity with his poorer and meaner subjects. Each of these characteristics was the result, in a measure, of his mental misfortunes. It was because the king never dared to forget that he was a man, that the people always loved to remember that he was a king.

Hezekiah Butterworth.