Madness Of King George: Lucy Worsley Investigates

How did George III’s mental illness change Britain? Lucy Worsley uncovers Royal papers and explores how an attempt on his life by a mentally ill working-class woman changed psychiatry forever.

Lucy begins her investigation with the crisis of winter 1788, when the 50 year-old King fell ill, and explores the stresses in George’s personal and public life that may have triggered his mental health crisis.

At Windsor Castle, in the Royal Archives, Lucy has access to the Georgian Papers and the private diary of Robert Greville, George’s equerry, who describes the King as talking for 19 hours at a time, being violently agitated and angry. Doctors were at a loss to understand the Kings illness and the country was on the brink of constitutional crisis.

Using a 21st century understanding of George III’s condition as bipolar disorder, Lucy follows the clues and accounts of his hallucinations. She hears suggestions that grief over the deaths of his two young sons may have played a part in his illness, alongside ideas of democracy spreading across Europe, making this a challenging time to be a King.

One of the innovations of George’s reign, the direct petitioning of the King by his subjects, led in 1786 to a woman called Margaret Nicholson attempting to stab him as she presented him with a petition. George, himself only two years away from his own major mental health crisis, declared: "Poor woman, she is mad, do not hurt her" and these words became iconic. The King’s own illness was widely rumoured and whispered about, and he and Margaret Nicholson became the most famous ‘mad people’ of the time, stimulating vital debate about the nature and treatment of mental illness.

George’s condition in 1788 forced the Royal family to consult a medical outsider: a so called ‘mad doctor’, or early psychiatrist, called Francis Willis. Willis’s papers reveal that he involved the King in a combination of treatments including walking in the grounds of the palace. George recovered - temporarily - and the country celebrated.

Margaret Nicholson would remain incarcerated at Bethlem asylum for the rest of her life. An MP friend of the King’s, who’d seen his illness at first hand, began a public enquiry into the scandalous conditions at Bethlem, leading to the start of reform in public asylums around the country.

Publicity contact: GJ

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