King George III and the Prince Regent
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Burlington saves you up to 60% off other retailers' prices every day. Will it be the low prices or the great brands? Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow. I told you so. Styles and selections vary by store. Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. What is the truth about the madness of King George III?

What condition caused his suffering? And how has fascinating recent analysis challenged long-held theories? And how true are the stories about his son, the Prince Regent, and his overindulgence and love of excess? George III was somebody who took being a king very, very seriously. I mean, he tried to be a good king in spite of all his faults. He lost America. He had a very dysfunctional family. In the end of the day, he comes across as a bit dull, but otherwise a solid monarch.

If we know any one fact about George III, it's the fact that he was the Mad King. Eventually, he was completely consumed by this sort of strange form of madness that was in his blood. It was at that point that Prince Regent started eyeing up the throne for himself.

For most people that knew George IV, they disliked him. He was described as a cowardly, contemptuous dog by one of his aides. He was not a nice person. George IV was a pleasure-loving, lascivious, hard-drinking, hard-gambling, venal, vindictive, nasty, small-minded ruler. The worst monarch this country has ever had. In this episode, we're joined by royal historian Tracy Borman.

as we tell the remarkable story of the private lives of King George III and the Prince Regent. In October 1760, at the age of just 22, George William Frederick became the third Hanoverian King of Great Britain and Ireland.

He was only heir to the throne because in 1751 his father, Frederick, Prince of Wales, had died from a lung abscess, which was believed to have been caused by a blow from a cricket ball. But what kind of man had ascended to the throne and why was he known as Farmer George?

George III came from a line of German kings. He is the first of the Hanoverians who tries to project the fact that he is English, he is British. He's a 22-year-old and he says to the country, "I am British. I was born in this country, not in Germany." He wanted to be regarded as totally British.

He became a monarch quite young. He was quiet. He wasn't as intellectual as some of his predecessors, but he wasn't as abysmal as others of his predecessors as well. He was kind of average in intelligence.

George lived like a country squire. He was interested in agricultural matters. He was interested in frugality, in penny-pinching. He was interested in his little scientific projects. He was not interested in fashionable society. He was not interested in making a splash. He wanted a very simple and very plain existence.

This was the era of arranged marriages, and after a thorough official search through a list of the available women in Europe, it was decided that Charlotte, the daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, was a suitable match for the new king. Their wedding took place in the Chapel Royal at St. James's Palace. Amazing as it sounds now, George had never met his future wife before the day of the wedding.

You'd think that unpromising start might have made a successful union unlikely, but this was to be a very happy marriage that lasted for 57 years and produced 15 children. At a time when it was almost expected that a king should keep mistresses, George never did.

Lots and lots of women from around Europe had been assessed. Many had been found to be inappropriate. And finally they fixed on this Princess Charlotte. And she was chosen not because she was a great beauty, but because she was thought to be sensible and okay and open to the way of life in England and marriage to George as well. Here was George who married Charlotte, who was known to be this philistine.

rather unattractive German princess who he had never met, who he stayed absolutely faithful to throughout his marriage. George was very different to many of the monarchs who came before and afterwards in that he really was devoted to his queen, whom he didn't know that well. It was still a formal marriage. But the letters between them, particularly when he became insane later in life, they're extraordinarily tender. These two had a very special bond and he was faithful to her.

For the period and the several hundred years beforehand, that makes George almost unique. Buckingham Palace is one of the most famous buildings in the world, but it certainly wasn't the grand building it is now when King George purchased it as plain old Buckingham House in 1761. He bought it as a London retreat for his family, while his main and favoured residences were Kew Palace and Windsor Castle.

In 1761 George III buys this house, Buckingham House. It's quite close to St. James's Palace. It's intended to be a kind of family home, but to be honest it was a pretty ramshackle place. It was a kind of a hunting lodge and it's nothing like the building that you see today. So there was no grand facade. It's really a kind of a retreat almost, but right next to the palace.

He was a man of simple, modest tastes. He was Farmer George. He didn't really want to spend that much longer in London than he had to, so he tended to appear in St James's Palace, but then he would retreat to Kew or to Windsor as quickly as possible. You know, the urbane life wasn't for him. George got the nickname Farmer George because he wasn't really interested or suited to the politics and high international diplomacy. What he really loved

was plants and flowers and farming. The time he spent at Kew and at Windsor in his garden were the happiest times in his life. King George may have been a lot of things, but he certainly wasn't a traveler. In fact, he spent his entire life in southern England. He even took his family on holidays to the delights of the southern coast. And he loved bathing in the sea, but not as the average person does it today.

One of the king's favorite holiday resorts was Weymouth in Dorset, which has a famous beach. But the king wasn't a sun lounger like we see today. When George went bathing, he did so in a manner befitting his royal status.

As the monarch, not just of England, but Britain as well, in a burgeoning empire, you need some time out. So he went to Weymouth. And the reason he went there was to take the waters for its kind of health-giving and therapeutic benefits.

So you have to imagine George III going down to the beach. This is not like a modern beach holiday. I mean, he would go down in what was described as a bathing machine. So he'd be pushed down to the sea and thereby was a band that would be playing God Save the King as if it wasn't there. And then he would emerge in some kind of bathing robe, because obviously you didn't show your body off in those days, and process down to the sea and cover himself in seawater in the hope that this would take away all his various ailments.

He went every year to Weymouth to do this because George, in his heart, was a creature of habit. He liked plain things. He liked to just do the same thing that he would always do. George's passion for bathing and medicine wasn't his only intellectual interest. At the Science Museum in London, they have some unique artifacts from the King's life. Tracy Borman has been given special permission to take a look with one of the curators, Jane Desborough.

Wow! Now these look intriguing objects. What are they? So here we have two objects from the King George III collection. On the one hand we've got the very shiny and high-end instruments made by the George Adams family of instrument makers for George III.

So tell me what this was for. So this is mechanical powers apparatus and that means mechanical powers are pulleys and levers. The demonstrator would use the different weights on these different series of pulleys and this is very important at the time because

Although people had always been interested in different pulleys and the way that great weights such as stones or cargo could be lifted, they really wanted to work out the principles behind efficient lifting and choose the right kind of pulleys for the job that they needed to get done.

We think of George as a Spartan, modest, almost quite a backwards figure. It's since come to light that there was another side to him and this kind of veneer of simplicity cloaked a brilliant mind. And he was incredibly sort of scientifically acute and he's almost left a kind of 800 sort of gadgets that he used to kind of play with and measure almost on a daily basis. And we still have his

calculations based on the transit of Venus which occurred during his reign. And the entire thing is absolutely meticulous. It's almost like he's a bit of an obsessive. So this was completely sort of hidden by the image that he used to portray to the public.

This is a model pile driver. The full-scale version would have been used in the construction of Old Westminster Bridge. Oh really? As you can see, it was floating on the river. There were horses that operated the capstan. If I show you on the main model here, so the horses would have turned this capstan. That would have lifted this weight over here that would have been taken up to the top and then let go to drive the piles into the riverbed.

So given this was a huge part of his life and there are what 800 objects you said in the collection, why has it been forgotten?

I don't know, I mean that's something that we were here really want to push so that people understand the other side to George because it is so important and fascinating and he should be known as that person who was so intrigued and into everything. It's been a total revelation for me, it's really changed my opinion of George so I'm very grateful to you for showing them, thank you.

George was a much more complex man than he's often given credit for being. He was fascinated with the arts, he was the patron of the Royal Academy, he had a massive collection of books, which later became the essence of the British Library. He was a man who was fascinated with intellectual pursuits and engaged in them.

And he was what we would think of as an enlightened monarch, a man of his time.

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But of course, when most people think of King George III, they think first of his so-called madness, the recurring bouts of mental illness which affected the king from 1788 until the end of his life. For many years, the cause of the king's illness was believed to be an inherited condition called porphyria, but very recent research has shed some doubt on that.

Dr. Peter Garrard from St. George's University in London has studied the King's madness in detail and strongly suggests that the widely held belief that he had porphyria is in fact wrong. Surprisingly, he says he knows that from his detailed analysis of the King's handwriting. Tracy Borman meets with Peter to find out more.

So Peter, what does your research tell us about the handwriting of George? I know you've looked at this in quite some depth. We have this timeline of texts and scripts of King George which go through a period, several decades of his life, and pass through periods where he's mentally healthy, mentally unwell. And what we found was that those two types of language that he used in his letters during those two periods could be teased apart

the features of the two periods were different. So here's a letter that King George wrote in, I think, 1786. It's written in this beautiful script, lovely straight lines. It's a letter to one of his members of his government, my good lord, very politely signed off with this beautiful signature at the end. And this is from a very healthy, mentally healthy period of George's life in 1786. So that's two years before this index period of madness.

It's beautifully written, it's very neat and orderly, reflecting his mind at that stage.

So there's always been a certain amount of mystery about what the King was suffering from. I mean, the external symptoms were talking at a massive rate for hours on end, foaming at the mouth, saying the most bizarre things. Was that caused by a disease of the blood? I mean, people talk about his urine being blue and that it was porphyria. Some people say that it was bipolar and it was actually the medicine that was turning his urine blue. So there's a bit of a mystery as to what he actually had.

This is a nice sequence of four letters written 1779. And I think perhaps we can see in this that it's slightly less precise than before. The lines are nice and straight, but there's perhaps a little bit more variation in the size of the letters. You can see that there's something less ordered about it, this first one there in particular.

And then when we look at this one down here dated 1805, that is quite different, isn't it? Yes. Well, this is probably one of the last letters that King George wrote in his own hand.

It's difficult to know whether to attribute the untidiness of this to his cognitive decline or to his visual decline, and I suspect there are elements of both in that. It's absolutely fascinating, though, isn't it, to see this written record of George's health in this way. There are a lot of theories about George's quote-unquote madness.

Some believe that he may have had a kind of manic depressive bipolar disorder that he was suffering from. But he was most certainly suffering from some sort of mental disability. The House of Hanover was probably one of the most dysfunctional royal dynasties in British history. Many of them never got along. And King George III and his son, also named George, carried on that family tradition.

Where King George was thrifty and down to earth, his eldest son was excessive and self-indulgent. The king certainly wasn't very fond of him, and apparently the feeling was mutual. The Georges, the Hanoverians, were very well known for having colossally dysfunctional relationships down the generations, and for fathers and sons not to get on. But the relationship between George III and George IV was one of the most spectacularly dysfunctional and diametrically opposed.

For as abstemious and frugal and miserly as George III was, George IV was extravagant, lazy, a womanizer, a glutton, didn't care about being a good ruler, was in it for himself, had no moral fiber. He was completely the opposite of his father.

In 1783, at the tender age of 21, the Prince had fallen in love with a lady called Maria Fitzherbert. Apparently he became infatuated with her, and many people thought it was never going to work. Maria was a twice-widowed commoner, six years his elder, and worst of all, a Roman Catholic. The act of settlement of 1701 barred the spouse of a Catholic from succeeding to the throne.

But the prince obviously didn't see this as a problem because he married Maria in secret in 1785. One thing that the Hanoverians liked more than anything else was a secret marriage. And this is what George IV did. He married without permission before his father died. His uncles had done the same thing. It was forbidden, but he did it anyway. And this kind of set the tone for the rest of his life.

his father had had to pay his gambling debts and had to pay off women who were blackmailing him because he basically offered them huge amounts of money to go to bed with him and then not paid them and then there was maria fitzherbert his secret wife his catholic wife that the prince regent had married much the horror of his father so his father had absolute contempt for his son uh his son in turn

In the early part of the reign, obviously he couldn't do anything to get his own back on his father, but once the madness descended, then there was the opportunity to get his own back on his father.

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Willis still employed the accepted methods of the time, which included physical restraint and blistering of the skin, and the king wasn't spared. Dr. Willis had trained first as a priest, and then in later life had retrained as a doctor.

And he'd had a huge amount of success treating wealthy and noble people for mental issues, which wasn't a branch of medicine that was particularly focused on at the time. So he was called in when all other avenues failed with George. And his techniques were to calm George down, to take him back to the nursery almost, as it were, and treat him like a child. However, he was not averse to using more traditional methods, so methods of restraint and coercion.

which would have been deeply humiliating for the king, the king who didn't have to respond to anybody if he didn't want to. By the year 1810, the king's mental and physical health had broken down to the point where even he accepted he couldn't carry on. And so Parliament, without the king's consent, handed power to the king's son, who became the Prince Regent in 1811.

He now had the control and power that he desired, and left his mad father to see out his final years locked away and out of the public eye. At the time when his father was in the grip of his madness, the Prince Regent was all too happy to see his father's mental state degenerate

to make him unfit to rule because he was ready to step in and take the throne. King George III died on January 29th, 1820, and the Prince Regent succeeded to the throne as George IV. By the time of his ascension on the 19th of July that year, the king was not particularly liked by the public. He was apparently lazy and quite possibly addicted to the opium-based drug laudanum,

However, it wasn't all bad for George IV. He had a particular interest in architecture and, with the help of the architect John Nash, began a substantial building program, shaping London and the royal residences the way he wanted them. In 1825, George instructed Nash to begin a remodeling of Buckingham House, modifications that would turn it into the Buckingham Palace we know today.

His architectural legacy is still all around us in London today. If you think of places like Regent Street, one of the most famous streets in the whole of London, that was his doing with Nash. There's Regent's Park as well, there's Carlton Terrace, and most importantly, perhaps, somewhere that's so iconic of London, Buckingham Palace, and we have him to thank for that.

George did not set out to do something tremendous. He wanted to basically restyle and refashion the houses that he lived in. He wanted to create something architecturally fabulous. And as a result, he ended up kind of reshaping the landscape of what we think of as modern London. So his relationship with John Nash was really quite extraordinary.

Another fruit of his partnership with John Nash was the transformation of the Marine Pavilion in Brighton into the spectacular Royal Pavilion. And what did George do with this incredible building?

Well, he threw huge lavish parties and banquets. If you didn't know anything about George IV and you went to Brighton Pavilion, you would realise that something very different is going on here. It's a really gaudy, extravagant demonstration, I suppose, of George IV's personality. The Prince Regent thought he had absolutely impeccable taste. He thought he was a connoisseur of the arts.

And then he built Brighton Pavilion. This is a place where lavish parties were had and gambling would happen sometimes all through the night. And it was just a kind of scene of complete dissolution and total debauchery and just full of society's rich, dissolute reprobates.

George IV was a professional glutton. He ate for England. Some of the banquets that he had at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton were mesmerizing. He used to actually import celebrity chefs from all over Europe, like Antoine Carême, to cook these enormous jellies that were shaped like Egyptian temples and pyramids. And he would guzzle them, and there would be so many different types of food. And it would be laid out in front of him, and he would just pour the whole thing down his gullet.

Towards the end of his life, George's indulgent lifestyle had taken its toll, and he was in terrible physical condition. Plagued by dropsy and gout, and just like his father almost blinded by cataracts, he clung on until the 26th of June, 1830, when, now bedridden, he suddenly exclaimed, "Good God, what is this? This is death," and took his last breath. He was 67 years old.

Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you liked this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you.

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