Bad Blood: Stuarts to Hanoverians Fit to Rule: How Royal Illness Changed History

For centuries, kings and queens have been set apart

from the rest of us, depicted as god-like giants

or virile warriors,

or fertile mothers of the nation.

But if you strip away the regal facade,

the reality is very different.

We've had mad monarchs and bad ones, and sexually inadequate kings

and infertile queens.

In this series, I'm going to reintroduce you

to our monarchs as human beings, people rather like you and me.

I'm going to investigate their medical problems,

study their doctors' reports, read their private letters

and examine their most intimate possessions.

I'm going to reveal the chinks in the royal armour,

because I believe, ironically, that the lives of these kings and queens,

the survival of the monarchy, the fortunes of the nation, have

been determined not so much by their strengths but their weaknesses.

In this programme, I'm looking at a new chapter in the history

of the monarchy, from the decline and fall of the Stuarts to the

coming of a new dynasty, the House of Hanover, Georges I to IV.

These kings and queens weren't just accountable to God,

but to their people and to parliament.

Now, if cracks appeared in the monarchy,

parliament could step in and take control.

They could depose a king, manage the succession

and lay down the law, not only on how a monarch should rule

but, most importantly, who should rule.

Their mental and physical weaknesses became evermore important,

because not only did their subjects observe them, they exploited them.

On the 10th of June 1688, the reigning Stuart monarch,

James II, succeeded where so many of his predecessors had failed -

he'd produced a son, a healthy male heir.

Traditionally, the arrival of a royal baby should have

resulted in national celebrations,

but this time the birth of a son was to trigger the king's downfall.

The problem with James II was that he converted to Catholicism.

In a country that was now firmly Protestant,

Catholicism meant tyranny.

It meant absolute rule like they had on the continent.

And James didn't help matters with his autocratic manner.

He appointed his Catholic friends to high office.

He seemed really to believe that he was semi-divine, appointed by God.

And once he had a baby boy, a male heir to follow on from him,

it looked like Catholicism was on its way back.

Many of James's subjects were determined to stop that.

The Protestant elite would no longer sit back

and allow biological inheritance of divine right to determine who

would govern them, and they now engineered a coup.

Their choice of leaders were James's nephew William

and his own daughter Mary.

Ten years earlier, James had married off his daughter Mary

to her cousin William of Orange, the ruler of the Dutch.

These two were both staunchly Protestant and for them

matters of religion would take precedence over family loyalty.

In November 1688, William landed with an army

and within days James had fled into exile on the continent.

The coup was achieved so swiftly that for William and Mary

and their supporters it became known as the Glorious Revolution.

Soon afterwards, William and Mary met here at Whitehall Palace,

with both houses of Parliament, and were offered and accepted the crown.

This event marked a cataclysmic break with the past.

It was the beginning of a whole new stage

in the history of the monarchy.

William and Mary didn't assume the throne through divine right,

they were given the right to reign by Parliament.

In effect, their people had decided that they were fit to rule,

and now the people would hold William and Mary to account.

Up there on the ceiling, their great-grandfather James I

is shown rising up to Heaven as one of the gods,

but the new king and queen were to have their feet

kept very firmly on the ground.

William and Mary showed this change in royal status

not only by words but by actions.

Earlier monarchs had performed a ceremony called

touching for the king's evil.

People suffering from the disease of scrofula, the king's evil,

would queue up in order to be touched by the reigning monarch

in the belief that the power to heal lay in royal hands.

These ceremonies were performed here at the Banqueting House.

But William and Mary immediately refused to do this,

believing that they were only human like the rest of us.

This Glorious Revolution had changed the political constitution.

But some things hadn't changed -

a monarch was still expected to reign and reproduce.

It was now William and Mary's biological constitution

that would determine whether they were up to the job.

And now that they were the servants of their people,

their physical and mental condition would be judged as never before.

This is as close as we're going to get to meeting William

and Mary face to face.

These aren't some dodgy 1970's museum display, these items,

with the clothes and the jewels and even the hair, are 300 years old.

These waxworks were made shortly after their deaths

and they form part of a tradition of making an effigy of a king or

queen for use in their funeral.

Mary here is in her early 30s.

She was a statuesque woman, nearly six feet tall.

And although she was quite plump,

she was considered to be a great beauty,

in contrast to William, her husband,

who doesn't quite match the image of the conquering hero.

He was born a sickly child

and even as an adult he wore a body brace to help with his hunched back.

He was four inches shorter than his wife,

a fact that's glossed over here by his being placed on a little stool.

William's diminutive stature was just a joke

to many of his new subjects,

but his chronic ill health had some serious consequences.

From childhood, William had suffered from asthma.

His problems were worsened by his move to England

and his new home in damp and smoky London.

Within a year of the invasion, William's health had got so bad

that his doctors advised him to move out of the capital.

So William and Mary set up home at Hampton Court,

out in the countryside.

Over the next few years they completely remodelled the dank

and rambling Tudor palace into an airy baroque masterpiece,

reminiscent of the palaces they'd left behind in Holland.

William's physical health improved, but it was still poor enough

for his subjects to question his fitness for his duties.

Now, these little clothes look like they belong to a child,

but actually they were William III's.

-Royal socks...

-Yes.

..And a W at the top to show that they belonged to William himself,

and the tiny vest.

Look how small his chest was, this was his asthmatic chest.

So here we've got a man who has health problems.

He has asthma, he's very small, he's got some sort of

curvature of the spine and he's moved out to Hampton Court

cos he's got breathing problems -

his little chest can't cope with the fog in London.

What does this mean?

Well, the main problem was that he's removing

himself from the centre of power.

And he's not bringing all the courtiers with him,

they have to make the trip out,

and they feel that they're being cut-off from power.

And so it fuels this sense that he's a foreigner, he's not one

of them, that he might not be ruling in the interests of the elite.

William is also childless.

This is a big problem and he gets pamphlet criticism for it.

One of them says he's got no children

because he's an un-performing puny prig.

Underperforming, well, quite possibly, yes.

Mary never did get pregnant and her lady's maid was always

reputed to have said the problem wasn't with Mary but with William.

He just couldn't get it up, so to speak.

So there may well be fertility problems there or

he may just not have been interested or

he may have been gay as many of the rumours suggested.

He grew up in a very masculine environment

and spent most of his time on campaign with men.

Parliament was frustrated with William's performance as king.

He'd produced no offspring and they believed that he was

subordinating their interests to his old grudge against France.

But William was equally frustrated with them,

cursing the pageantry of the British system.

This was especially the case because King Billy believed that he

was fulfilling the royal role he'd signed up to -

a Protestant promise to defend the nation against Catholicism.

Over the years, he'd spend more and more time on his anti-Catholic

campaigns abroad, leaving his wife Mary to rule in his stead.

For Mary, it was a daunting proposition.

Being thrust forward like this only reminded her of her

inadequacies as a woman, as a would-be mother and,

worst of all, as a daughter who'd utterly betrayed her father.

Mary was effectively the regent whilst he was away

and she exercised government on his behalf.

Was she any good at that?

Well, it wasn't something that she wanted to do at all and,

if we look at her memoirs, she actually says quite explicitly

that she doesn't think women should do politics, so to speak.

"My opinion having ever been that women should not

"meddle in government, I have never given myself to be

"inquisitive into those kinds of matters."

She's very insecure about doing this,

she doesn't feel confident and is always terrified that she's going

to make a mistake and that William's going to be cross with her.

Mary also has tremendous difficulty, doesn't she,

with the role of being a daughter, a good daughter?

She does, because she's actually taken part in deposing her father.

And this is something that does weigh very heavily with her and

she was never, obviously, never happy about doing it in the first place.

But her father is putting the emotional pressure on her

all the time and he writes to her

in very, sort of, emotionally blackmailing terms and...

-Putting on the guilt.

-Absolutely.

So we have this letter here threatening that the

curses of an angry father will fall upon her, that she

has broken the fifth commandment and can never be forgiven.

It's a very, very difficult situation for her

and would have put her under enormous psychological stress.

Despite William's physical frailty and Mary's mental fragility,

they were a pretty good king and queen.

But I do get the sense this is at a high personal price,

that they'd both rather have been somebody else, somewhere else.

Mary was quite explicit about this.

"As queen," she said, "I must grin when my heart is fit to break.

"I must talk when my heart is so oppressed I can scarcely breathe."

And William spoke of the heavy burden he had to carry.

Monarchy was no longer a right to be enjoyed -

it was a task to be endured.

Tragically, although Mary had been much healthier than her husband,

at the age of 32 she caught smallpox and died within a week.

William continued to reign alone for the next eight years

until he had a riding accident in the grounds of Hampton Court Palace.

For the king who'd ridden into battle on numerous occasions

the cause was rather ignominious -

his horse had tripped on a molehill.

This statue of William III was put up following his death and if

you look closely at it you can see that the horse's back leg is just

making contact with the molehill - the horse is just about to trip.

From this point onwards,

the king's exiled Catholic enemies over the sea in France

would raise a toast to a certain gentleman in a black velvet coat.

This was the velveteen mole that made the molehill

that caused the death of the Protestant King.

Despite all the sacrifices William and Mary had made

for the monarchy, they'd failed in their most important royal duty.

They died childless. Biology had let them down.

But the newly-empowered Parliament had stepped in to manage

the succession and they'd already chosen a replacement.

It had been decided that Mary's sister Anne would succeed

if William and Mary didn't produce an heir.

This would ensure that a Protestant would remain on the throne.

What parliament hadn't foreseen and couldn't control

was that biology might not deliver once again

and that Anne would also have difficulties bearing children.

Anne's gynaecological record was horrific and saddening.

In 16 years she had 17 pregnancies.

12 of them ended in miscarriage or stillbirth

and of her surviving children, the oldest only lived 11 years.

Anne's friends said there was nothing more moving

than to see the queen and her husband mourning together

as the little coffins mounted up.

Sometimes they would weep together,

other times they just sat in silence, hand in hand.

It was unimaginably awful.

To this day, no-one really agrees on the reason behind Anne's suffering.

At the time, doctors were beginning to manage the dreadful

uncertainties of pregnancy, with new technology such as the forceps.

Unlike us, they also believed that they knew the cause of her

condition, but it depended upon a view of the body that had

prevailed since medieval times.

Clearly there's something wrong with Anne.

What did contemporaries think it might have been?

They would have explained it in terms of her humeral constitution.

At this time, bodies were understood as made up of four humours -

blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm.

And they had qualities of hot, dry, cold and moist.

And as she became progressively larger, shall we say,

they would have understood it as having an imbalance in her humours,

and so they would have explained her constitution

as her being cold and moist.

Predominantly, she had things like watery eyes, for example,

and that would have affected her reproductive capacity.

So in a book like this, it explains one of the causes of abortion

or miscarriage as being due to viscous, slimy, slippery,

phlegmatic, watery humours,

so that the conception would slip out of the womb -

it would be unable to stay within the body

and, therefore, more likely to miscarry.

Clearly, women don't experience birth problems

because they're too slippery.

Do you think there are any more convincing

explanations for her problems?

In these sorts of books of advice, Jane Sharp's work on midwifery...

Oh, yeah.

..She says quite clearly that fat, overindulgent city women who

eat too much and have access to far too many delicacies are far

more likely to have difficult labours and a hard time childbearing

than your labouring women who were leaner and healthier as a result.

Even today, if somebody's overweight,

if they're obese and they want to have children,

the first thing they're told to do is to lose weight!

Yes, absolutely.

They were well aware at the time that these kinds of issues

with body size had an impact on one's reproductive capacity.

By the time Anne became queen in 1704,

she was described as being sick with grief.

All of her children had died and

after so many complicated pregnancies

she had no chance of producing any more.

She took the throne knowing that she was the last in her line,

that she was a stopgap queen,

and that Parliament would choose her successor.

And this meant that she was deeply in thrall to her politicians.

This period was the golden age of Parliament.

The packed House Of Commons saw debates that were lively

and violent and passionate!

It also saw the beginnings of the two-party system -

people talked about the rage of parties.

These weren't modern political parties with manifestos

and an elected leader, they were rough, loose groupings.

On one side were the Whigs, who were a bit more go-ahead

and interested in matters of finance.

On the other side, the Tories,

more conservative and deeply devoted to the Church of England.

The rise of the two-party system presented a further

challenge to the monarchy -

how to satisfy two opposing factions at the same time.

For Anne, there was a fine line to tread between pleasing the few

and alienating the many, because the politicians knew that

if they could exploit any weakness exhibited by the royal family,

the personal and political rewards were potentially enormous.

This is Blenheim Palace.

It was owned by John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough,

a prominent Whig politician, and built

after his victory against the French at the battle of Blenheim.

At the time, it was bigger, better and more costly

than any of the royal palaces.

But its building was deeply contentious

and led to public riots, because it was commissioned for the Duke

by Queen Anne herself and she paid for it with public money.

After his victory, you can see why the Duke deserved his palace,

but you can also see why other people would be jealous

and make accusations of favouritism.

Anne herself was very well aware of this danger.

She said, "I mustn't put myself in the hands of any one party."

But the real problem wasn't Anne's preference for a political party

or a male favourite, the problem was her relationship

with a woman, the Duke's wife, Sarah.

This is Sarah, the Duchess of Marlborough,

surrounded by all of her children.

She was notoriously powerful at the court of Queen Anne.

Sarah held all the top jobs - she was Mistress Of The Robes,

she was Keeper Of The Privy Purse.

In portraits you sometimes see her with her golden key of office.

This key unlocks the queen's private rooms.

It was like the key to the queen herself.

Because of her access,

Sarah was a powerful friend to her political allies, the Whigs,

but she was dangerous if you crossed her, and some people thought

there was something unhealthy about her relationship with the Queen.

So these are early 18th Century playing cards

with scenes from life at court.

They're like little windows into the palace.

They're rather good, aren't they?

And this one shows Queen Anne in private with all of her attendants.

These are the ladies of the bedchamber.

Now, queens had always had ladies of the bedchamber, but Sarah is

so prominent amongst them that this causes problems, doesn't it?

Yeah, I mean, she was far more than a servant.

They were very close friends by this point.

What's unusual about this level of intimacy between

a queen and her subject?

Well, I think what they started to do that was unusual was

to talk to each other as if they were equals.

And, you know, as we can see from letters like this that Anne,

this is one from Anne to Sarah, they decided to take on names

in their correspondence of Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman.

So Anne writes in the persona of Mrs Morley

and she calls Sarah Mrs Freeman.

And, you know, they're young women at this point who are casting

themselves as if they are just ordinary bourgeois,

middleclass housewives talking to each other.

This seems to me quite dangerous really,

because, even though contemporary friendship was framed as

two women as equals, this is the Queen and her servant!

Yeah, and by the time Anne's queen it's a very subversive

and dangerous relationship in the eyes of many people.

Why were the male courtiers and politicians so frightened of Sarah?

They believed that she had much more direct political influence

than in fact she had.

She is seen as the Whigs' agent trying to constrain the Queen

and make her do what the Whigs want.

But what's interesting is that

it's Sarah herself who starts to drop hints.

When she feels threatened that other women are later going to

usurp her position and come into that role, she starts to say

that Anne's relationships with women are unnatural.

So Sarah herself is using this sort of scurrilous language

about lesbianism as a way of attacking Anne?

She's saying, "Unless you keep me as your favourite, I will reveal all."

Yeah, she keeps all of Anne's letters

and she refers to them as her "vouchers of truth."

And from about 1708, she starts making veiled threats

that if she's not kept in favour, she will publish these letters.

In the end, Sarah's threats and the growing public disquiet

became dangerous for Anne.

In 1710, the writer Jonathan Swift published an article accusing

the Marlboroughs of embezzling funds intended for Blenheim Palace.

Anne finally had to banish her favourite from court.

Anne presents a paradox as queen.

Despite her problems with her gender and her gynaecological issues

and her unfortunate choice of friends,

she was a very diligent monarch.

She attended more cabinet meetings than any other king or queen

and we can give her the credit for good intentions.

As she said herself, "Those who come after me may be more capable,

"but they cannot discharge their duties more faithfully."

Although Anne may not have been the greatest monarch,

her subjects became very affectionate towards her,

recognising a good queen who had done her best.

And in 1714, when she'd been languishing in bed for over a year,

they were truly distressed.

Anne had suffered from ill health for her entire life.

The consequences of her obesity, her gout

and her 17 pregnancies had finally caught up with her.

I believe that this bed was commissioned

for a very special purpose - that she intended to die in it.

This was a queen whose mortality could be publicly acknowledged,

who was human like the rest of us.

Anne's death brought the weakness of the Stuart family to a head.

With her, they finally lost the throne.

This dynasty's various failings had given their people

additional strength and power.

Parliament had repeatedly stepped in, either to correct or to

compensate for the weaknesses of the various Stuart kings and queens.

Parliament had executed Charles I, forced the exile of James II,

chosen a successor for William and Mary.

And then we had Anne, the most tragic queen in British history -

theologically fit to rule, but biologically cursed.

When Anne's medical problems threw the succession into doubt,

Parliament once again stepped in.

They passed the Act Of Settlement, setting out who should rule

after her and, more importantly, who shouldn't.

It now became law that no Catholic could ever again sit on the throne.

Parliament were absolutely desperate to find

a Protestant successor to Anne.

At this point, they overlooked no less than 50 of her relatives

on the grounds that they were Catholic.

Eventually they settled on this rather unprepossessing candidate,

Georg Ludwig, ruler of the tiny German principality of Hanover.

He was short, he was quiet, people called him a blockhead

and he was German.

But at least he was Protestant.

In August 1714, the diminutive Georg Ludwig arrives in England

with his German entourage in tow.

Georg landed just over there in Greenwich to make his

formal entry into London

and he was crowned in Westminster Abbey on the 20th of October.

But pretty soon questions were asked about his qualifications

for his new job.

It became clear that his English wasn't good enough

for him to understand the coronation ceremony.

He got a bit bored. Things had to be explained to him in Latin.

Soon afterwards he had to make his speech to open Parliament

and again his language skills let him down.

He started to read out his speech, he struggled, he gave up,

one of his subjects had to finish it for him.

It wasn't a very gracious way to begin a new reign.

Where Georg failed in terms of language and likeability,

he was a great success in terms of biology.

Unlike the previous Stuarts,

this new Hanoverian had produced children -

a daughter and, even more importantly, a son and heir.

This new George, George II, received a warm welcome from his subjects

because of the smoothness of the succession.

But he too had image problems.

Like his father, he'd been born in Hanover.

He spoke English with a thick German accent.

He was just a little bit too foreign.

Also like his father, though, George could perform.

He and his wife Caroline produced no less than eight healthy children.

The Hanoverians had won the battle against biology, but in producing

a royal family they found themselves waging a very personal war.

The toxic relationship that developed between George II

and his eldest son Frederick would tear this family apart.

Even worse, it would threaten the power of the monarchy

just as much as the infertility of the Stuarts.

In 1737, Prince Frederick's wife became pregnant.

What he should have now done was tell King George

and Queen Caroline so that they could make preparations

to be present at the birth of their first grandchild.

They had this right to ensure that a true heir to the throne

was being born.

On the night that her waters broke,

the royal family were all here at Hampton Court Palace.

But instead of summoning his parents,

Frederick got his wife, bundled her down this staircase,

pushed her into a carriage, and drove her through the night,

15 miles over bumpy roads to St James's Palace.

This was his wife's first child!

This is frightening and dangerous for her!

But to Frederick,

it was more important that he annoyed his parents.

Queen Caroline's servants woke her up with the news

that labour had started.

"I'll go to my daughter-in-law," the Queen said.

But the servants said, "You'll have to go to St James's Palace."

She did.

She got in her coach and there was this farcical midnight chase.

When she arrived, it was too late, the baby had been born.

And when King George II heard about it, he exploded with rage!

This was a declaration of all-out war.

In an earlier age, this royal family feud might have remained

private or at least confined to court circles.

But now, with print culture everywhere,

the monarch's family business was everybody's business.

The Gentleman's Magazine has a series of letters

between the King, the Queen and the Prince of Wales about this event.

You know, this is Dallas on-screen, in a sense,

and that's what you're getting played out here in this book.

Who starts it, then? The King goes first, doesn't he, I think?

The King goes first.

-He shouldn't have done that.

-Absolutely.

And basically, "Not only shouldn't you have done that,

"but we had made all these preparations for it and I'm

"absolutely furious, I'm completely furious at what you've done."

What do you think the root cause was of all this bad blood

between the father and the son?

It would be nice to say that it's just something that

runs in the Hanoverian blood, but it isn't.

This is something that goes to the heart of monarchy

and it's the first time really,

after the Hanoverian succession, that we've got a big family

on the throne and as soon as you get family, you get family politics.

It's really ironic, isn't it, that the Tudors and the Stuarts

struggled so much with fertility,

they couldn't provide heirs very easily,

then with the Hanoverians, we've almost got too many of them?

Entirely so. That's exactly the case.

The whole notion of monarchy depends upon the fact that you've got

to go and have an heir and a spare, if possible,

but at least you've got to have an heir.

And once you've got an heir that's fine, but you set yourself up

with a whole other series of issues and problems.

And the primary problem you've got then is that

you've got a reminder of your own mortality standing next to you.

And as that person becomes an adult

they can start a rival court and they can lure off people.

They're the promise of the future,

they're the hope for the future, and so there's all kinds of tensions,

envy, jealousy, fears of mortality, never mind the fact that the parents

may not actually like the son or the son may not like the parents.

It's called the reversionary interest, isn't it?

Because all he can do as Prince of Wales

-is offer the reversion of posts...

-That's right.

..When they fall empty, when the King dies. So, it's all "here's one for the future."

Yeah, here's one for the future and, of course,

if you are on the outs with the king as a politician,

it provides you with an alternative court.

You can move over to go and, you know,

side with the Prince of Wales for a while.

So when we think back to Henry VIII,

to disagree with the king was treason,

you could even lose your head for it.

But by the 18th century, it is possible to disagree with

the king safely, you just become a member of the Loyal Opposition.

Yes. His Majesty's Loyal Opposition - some place where people

who are disaffected with the current monarch can safely congregate.

This addition of politics to a family row caused a complete

breakdown of communication soon after the baby fiasco.

What I find almost tragic is the way that this

quarrel between parents and child was never resolved.

A few months later, Caroline lay dying.

This is a very intimate sketch of the queen on her deathbed.

She'd been suffering from an umbilical hernia.

The treatment had been botched by her doctors.

This was ironic, because Caroline had been a huge

supporter of science and the medical profession.

During the ten days it took her to die, her son Frederick

repeatedly tried to inveigle his way into the palace to see her.

We just don't know whether this was more politics

or whether he genuinely missed his mother.

Either way, because of the inversion of normal family relationships

Caroline still insisted that she hated her son.

And when she died, it was without ever having set eyes on him again.

Once again, the royal family's dysfunctional behaviour

gave the politicians the chance to exploit

the weaknesses of the monarchy to their own advantage.

And the situation would have a very personal effect on George himself.

Queen Anne's physical health had caused her untold mental anguish

and the psychological mind games played out between father, son

and the politicians had an equally dire effect on George's wellbeing.

George found it incredibly frustrating dealing with

politics and politicians.

He'd always had a terrible temper.

Sometimes he used to kick his hat

and even his wig around the room during a tantrum.

"The Devil take Parliament," he'd shout, "the Devil take this

"whole island, as long as I can be out of it and go back to Hanover."

And his frustration had its effect on his health.

All his life he'd suffered from angina or chest pains, particularly

after dinner, and when he died in 1760 it was of a heart attack.

When his body was cut open, they found that the right ventricle

had burst and that the whole organ was full of coagulated blood.

It's as if he died of crossness.

A picture of the King's autopsied heart was published in

The Gentleman's Magazine,

as if for the entertainment of the reading public.

And there was a sense by the middle of the 18th century, that the

monarchy had become just another part of the London tourist industry.

One guidebook said that you should go and see

the lions at the Tower Of London,

you must see the tombs at Westminster Abbey, see the plays,

see the operas and the royal family.

The greatest tragedy was that all the anxiety and loathing between

the father, the mother and the son had proved totally unnecessary.

Frederick actually predeceased his father George,

dying of a blood clot on the lung.

All the efforts the politicians had made to play father

and son off against each other had been pointless.

In the end, the crown actually passed to George II's grandson,

yet another George, the third in a row.

The only winners in this sorry situation were

the newspaper-reading public.

The health of their new ruler would provide

the juiciest royal soap opera of them all.

Like Queen Anne, George III presents a paradox.

He did have one enormous weakness -

his episodes of so-called madness that have come to define his reign.

On the other hand though, he did rule for 60 years.

One of the longest reigns of any British monarch.

When George was suffering from his episodes of madness

he was imprisoned at Kew Palace,

isolated from his court,

even kept apart from his wife and children.

These are George's clothes that show some of the signs of his illness.

We know this shirt belonged to him, it's got GR and a little crown.

And it's been made extra big, there's extra fabric under the arms,

so that his pages could dress him

when he wasn't able to do it for himself.

The waistcoat is even more poignant.

You can see how the shoulders have been enlarged

so that his servants could put it on him,

and down the front there is food, or maybe dribble.

When he couldn't feed himself

he was fed from a cup with a spout, like a child.

The royal servant who gave this waistcoat

to a souvenir hunter apologised.

He said, "This is the only garment that was available.

"The others were just too soiled."

Although his doctors tried desperately to find a cure,

no-one could really agree what the problem was.

For a long time, George's illness has been attributed to

a physical genetic blood disorder, porphyria.

But now doctors are beginning to question this diagnosis.

One of the symptoms of porphyria is blue urine

and George's medical records show that he had this.

But doctors looking recently at these records

have noticed that he was being treated with extract of gentian.

This comes from a root of the plant that has deep purple flowers.

It's still used today as a pick-me-up.

If you take this, your urine will go blue.

So did George have porphyria or was the blue urine

just a symptom of his medicine?

Clinical neurologist Dr Peter Garrard has been studying letters

George wrote before enduring his madness

with the same techniques he uses to diagnose his modern patients.

So I've got a letter here that George wrote

while he was coming to the end of his period of illness,

his first period of illness.

And the one you've got in your hand

was written just before he started to become ill.

And what are the main differences between them?

What are we looking out for?

One of the most striking things about this letter is

the length of the sentences.

If you look at the letter that you've got in your hand

there are maybe 400 words

and it's divided up into five or six sentences and that's...

-That's normal.

-..And that's the kind of way in which you or I

would divide up our letters.

But if you look at this letter, which is much longer,

it's maybe 500 or 600 words, there are only two sentences in it.

So he's writing these massively long sentences

and that's something that seems to be

a feature of the kind of verbal verbosity that's associated with

the manic phase of a psychiatric illness like bipolar disorder.

It's almost like he's giving out an explosion of words

and this matches what his doctors are telling us as well.

They describe how he suffered from "an incessant loquacity,"

and he would talk and talk until the foam ran out of his mouth...

-Right.

-..And he can talk no more. It's a harrowing image.

-He talks himself completely out of words.

-Mmm.

And he's probably having difficulty expressing his ideas concisely

because, if you look at one of these hugely long sentences,

not only is it long but it's also very complex.

In fact, if you model that in a simple way by counting

the number of verbs that he uses in that second sentence,

you can count as many as eight.

So eight verbs in a single sentence.

Sentences that you or I use typically contain one or at the most two verbs,

so it's highly complex.

You can also look at how sophisticated the word usage is

at the individual level.

So he starts to introduce words which attract very

high sophistication scores.

Words here like "unattentive" or "the utmost."

So it's like the reading level of the language is increased?

Yes, that's a very good way of putting it.

Isn't it quite unusual that he's using more sophisticated words

when he's ill? I would have expected the other way round.

Well, it's well-known that this kind of creativity is

a feature of the manic end of the spectrum of mood disorders.

So at one end we have the kind of extreme pathological levels

of sadness that we refer to as depression, and at the other end

we have these harmful and abnormal levels of happiness

or euphoria, and that's the state which we refer to as mania.

I think that these letters have great similarities with the kinds of

verbal activity that people that we treat and see today with mania show.

And do you think, then, that the evidence of these letters

shows that George wasn't suffering from porphyria, that he must

have had some sort of psychiatric disturbance, a period of mania?

I don't think there can be any doubt any more

that the porphyria hypothesis is completely dead in the water,

and that this was a psychiatric illness,

and that these periods that his doctors described, these are

reflections of, classic reflections almost, of manic behaviour.

At the time of George's madness of 1789,

its causes were hotly debated,

but its political effects were a far more serious concern.

The King wasn't dead, so couldn't be written off completely,

but he was totally incapacitated and holed up at Kew Palace.

Who was going to rule in his place?

The king's illness now became a ferociously fought over

political battleground.

Its effects were felt not only by the king,

but also by his son, his politicians, and the whole nation.

During the episodes of so-called madness, George disappears.

What does this mean for the politicians?

Well, clearly when he's first incapacitated in 1788 to 1789,

there's a big debate about what powers should be given

to his son, who is going to act as regent.

And there's a really fierce debate about what powers to give -

whether the regent should exercise full kingly powers or not.

I like the caricature here that shows us

there's a literal tug of war between the Whigs and the Tories.

-And here's George's son sitting by...

-Yeah.

..And the Whigs and the Tories are literally having a tug of war

over the crown, aren't they?

That's right, the government and the opposition

are really fighting over this, because the opposition is friendly

and well disposed to the prince regent, who likes them.

And they hope that if he's given full kingly powers

that'll help them to come into government.

Whereas the government, which has supported the old king

and doesn't really much like his son,

is fearful that if he does get full regal powers they'll be out.

So this is a battle between government and opposition

ins and outs as much as it's a battle between Whigs and Tories.

What would have happened to politics if the King had just

disappeared off the scene, gone mad for the rest of his life?

Well, presumably this really would have mattered even more,

because then there would have been a decision as to what

kind of powers to allow the prince regent to have.

And this is what the real battle's about.

It reveals a lot, I think, about the nature of monarchy

and the powers the monarch still has.

The monarch is still the linchpin of the whole political system.

You still need the support of the king

if you're going to form a government.

Ironically, in this moment of great weakness

the monarchy had actually revealed its strength.

George's pain was shared by the whole nation, who feared

the consequences of the power struggle if he failed to recover.

So when George did unexpectedly get better in 1790,

the nation breathed a sigh of relief.

# God save the King

# God save the King... #

To the joy of his people,

George returned to rule for another 20 years

until his gradual decline.

Here we've got a couple of George's signatures from 1803,

1809 and there's a very clear deterioration, isn't there?

There certainly is.

I mean, the first one is a pretty legible signature.

The second one just looks like a splurge on the paper.

I suppose we've got to take into account that he is really

getting quite an old man by the time the second signature's there,

his eyesight's deteriorating.

I think these things need to be taken into account.

I think people have got the wrong idea about George.

They've overlooked the fact that his reign was 60 years long,

-pretty stable on the whole, and he wasn't...

-Yep.

..Mad for all of that time by any means, was he?

Certainly not.

I mean, the last few years he was clearly incapacitated,

but most of his long reign he's fully active

and playing the full part of a constitutional monarch.

Despite his bouts of madness, George was one of the longest reigning

and most successful British kings,

his weaknesses even reinforcing the power of the monarchy.

But George couldn't escape the Hanoverian dynasty's fatal flaw -

the bad blood that set one generation against another.

Like his Hanoverian predecessors,

George III had no difficulty with fertility. He had 15 children.

These little items were all souvenirs kept by

the royal babies' wet nurse as mementoes.

Here's a tape measure recording their heights.

And she remembers the king being a kind father, who would

get down on the floor and play with the children under the table.

But despite this loving start in life,

all of the children would face future problems.

This little red sash belonged to Prince Frederick.

He would go on to resign as Commander Of The Army

because his mistress was caught selling commissions.

Little Prince William, owner of these gloves,

would go on to have ten illegitimate children with an actress.

Their sister Charlotte, owner of these mittens, would marry

a German duke who ended up on Napoleon's side against the British.

This is a lock of hair belonging to Edward,

who got expelled from the army for brutality.

And the blue sash here belonged to the Prince Of Wales,

the future George IV.

He had the worst problems of them all.

This stylish and flamboyant image is how George IV would have

wanted us to remember him.

But it's incredibly flattering, considering that contemporaries

saw him like this - overweight, self-indulgent and debauched.

Everyone knew that this king was a womaniser, a gambler,

a spendthrift, and addicted to drink and drugs.

It's hard to feel much sympathy for George, but his transformation

into one of the least fit rulers in British history

is actually quite tragic.

And to understand why, we have to go back to his childhood.

So this jigsaw of the counties of England was used to teach

the future George IV about geography?

Indeed, and he will visit each part of the country which is

shown on this map in later years - Ireland and Scotland,

and probably the first monarch of that era to do so.

I presume this was used at Kew Palace,

where he was sent with his brother to be educated away from,

actually, the royal parents and the other royal children,

and they had quite a strict timetable, didn't they?

Oh, they did, they worked until 8.00 in the evening on prep

and shared this kind of monastic existence,

cut off from the rest of the family.

The big problem was discipline, because his father had instructed

his tutors to instil knowledge into him with a rod, as it were.

Would you say that he was quite a talented student?

I think he was a good student, but the problem was

he was so rebellious and he objected to the discipline

and the system that his father had insisted on.

So half the time he was in trouble - rebellious, being beaten.

An eyewitness describes himself and his brother being flogged like dogs.

It alienates him and turns him into a rebel,

so he becomes obsessed with annoying his father by not performing, almost.

I think that when we look at George IV's childhood

we can see the seeds being sewn of the man that he will become.

Absolutely. In fact, his life could be seen, later life,

as a reaction against this kind of deprived, as he saw it, childhood.

And everything he did, the scrapes he got into, were a reaction.

As a result of his draconian upbringing,

George began to rebel against his father.

History was repeating itself

as the father-son relationship disintegrated.

George's self-indulgent personality is epitomised by his most

extravagant creation, the royal pavilion at Brighton -

a pleasure palace where he would party and indulge his enormous

appetites, literally at the expense of the public.

Here's a really graphic illustration of the king's self-indulgence,

George's breeches, with their 54-inch waist.

You can see here how his valet laced him into them at the back.

This curious object is a replica of what was called the king's belt.

Effectively, it's a corset.

When the painter David Willkie came to take a portrait of the King,

he was kept waiting for hours

while the royal servants trussed George up into this thing.

When the king finally appeared Willkie said,

"He looked like a sausage about to burst out of its skin."

As you might expect, though, Willkie didn't paint what he saw

but what the king wanted him to see.

His work shows a commanding, heroic figure,

with the sitter's weight problems carefully concealed.

George did have some talents,

he was stylish and had terrific visual flair.

His wife said he would have made a good hairdresser.

But George was the king, and with his fundamental character flaws

he simply wasn't cut out for the job.

In an age of endless satirical pamphlets and cartoons,

George was under greater public scrutiny than any previous monarch.

And quite frankly, his subjects weren't impressed

by his behaviour or sympathetic to his self-inflicted ill health.

This is an incredibly disrespectful image, isn't it, of George IV?

Well, it sums up all the vices that he is heir to, in a sense -

gluttony, an overfilled chamber pot, vials of laudanum.

That's a cure for stinking breath

that one over there in the background.

Oh look, Debts of Honour Unpaid and gambling dice.

Empty bottles down underneath the table.

And it's called A Voluptuary Under The Horrors Of Digestion.

-Digestion.

-Oh, he's eaten too much. Oh dear.

-That's it.

-The costume that he's wearing is significant here.

He's in a buff-coloured waistcoat, and bursting out of his

buff-coloured breeches, and he's wearing a dark blue coat.

This is the sort of uniform of the Whig Party.

Yes, it was, and he would have been wearing this to annoy his father,

as most of what he did at this period was to annoy his father.

You could say that George IV believes almost in nothing.

His whole early life and certainly his political opinions

are a reaction against his father.

His father had a very firm moral agenda, but George

went out of his way to violate every single one that he could.

And I think that's one of the kind of sad aspects of his reign,

is the way that he retreated from kind of,

what would you call it, sensible contact with the people.

-He became ill, he became a recluse...

-Mmm.

..And he cut himself off and lived at Windsor

whilst the world almost went on without him.

He is almost a political irrelevance.

We can really see this in this very striking caricature.

Here's George, enjoying himself with courtiers, party going on.

Outside we have despair, we have death, we have criminals

being hung, we have their wives and children begging for help.

And the chilling thing is that he's completely ignoring them.

That seems to be the most despicable part of his rule.

Absolutely. And this is a time of huge social changes

with the Industrial Revolution, with poverty,

and he is almost irrelevant to all that.

He is this clownish figure who's almost opted out

of doing anything sensible.

Through his bad-boy behaviour and consequent ill health,

George had weakened the power

and image of the monarchy more than any of his predecessors.

On a rare occasion he did try to stand up to parliament,

threatening to abdicate if it acted against his wishes.

Though the politicians just shrugged their shoulders

and told him to go right ahead.

By 1830, the year in which George died, he was almost blind,

delirious much of the time, a recluse.

He was clearly incapable of rule.

But he still hadn't lost his appetite.

Here's a description of his breakfast

in this last year of his life.

He had a pigeon and beef steak pie, of which he ate two pigeons

and three beef steaks.

Two thirds of a bottle of white wine, two glasses of port,

a glass of brandy, some dry champagne.

And the first of 250 drops of laudanum -

that's opium dissolved in alcohol.

All this sounds quite funny, but clearly it isn't.

This is a man who is genuinely sick.

On the 26th of June 1830, George's overindulgences caught up

with him and he died of a burst blood vessel in his stomach.

After the King's death, his obituary in the Times newspaper had

this to say, "There never was an individual regretted less

"by his fellow creatures than this deceased king.

"What eye has wept for him?"

Under George, the monarchy had become an irrelevance.

It would be left for the next generation to pick up the pieces.

In the final episode, I'm going to explore how the monarchy had

to reinvent itself after George IV's disastrous performance as king.

Although no longer political players,

the royal family were still national figureheads.

But with public opinion becoming more important

than their privacy, their physical and mental problems

would continue to challenge their fitness to rule.

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