George III - The Genius of The Mad King

This astonishingly lifelike portrait of King George III

was moulded in wax by the famous Madame Tussaud two centuries ago.

The year was 1809 and the King was about to mark his golden jubilee.

Soon afterwards, he would vanish from public life -

the king who went mad.

Yet George III reigned longer than any king in British history,

through tumultuous change.

He was the last king of America and the first in Australia.

On his watch, the United Kingdom and its flag were created

and Napoleon defeated.

He was a great collector, a champion of science, art and music,

especially his beloved Handel.

His reign ushered in the Industrial Revolution,

his political battles helped shape the monarchy today.

We have Buckingham Palace thanks to him.

And all the while he was writing, writing.

Now, for the first time,

George III's private papers are being opened up for anyone to see.

We can all discover a man whose devotion to his family

and his coronation oath not only drove him

but at times overwhelmed him.

That manic monarch,

so hauntingly captured by Madame Tussaud,

can finally be revealed.

George III was halfway through his reign

when his first bout of mental illness began.

It lasted four months,

and then he wrote fondly to his wife, Queen Charlotte.

"My dearest Charlotte,

"I cannot but be deeply impressed by the consideration of how much you

"must have been affected by the long continuance of my illness."

His remarkably lucid words show how aware he was of his own predicament,

a king desperate to avoid the family arguments

that could trigger a repeat.

"Though I do not mean to decline giving that attention to public

"business which may be necessary,

"yet I propose avoiding all discussions that may,

"in their nature, agitate me, and consequently must, for the present,

"decline entering on subjects which are not necessarily before me."

"I shall ever remain, my dearest Charlotte,

"your most affectionate husband, George R."

This poignant and surprising letter has remained buried for 200 years.

Now it is just one piece of a fascinating new historical jigsaw.

Windsor Castle is the treasure chest of royal secrets.

Here, in the Round Tower,

are the personal papers of all British monarchs

and their families, from George III right down to Elizabeth II.

They've always been out of bounds except to a few select historians.

Documents that you're wanting to keep forever, you think about

a strong place to put them, and in the case of Windsor Castle,

the very strongest place to put them is inside the Round Tower.

And the Round Tower is built on the site where William the Conqueror

founded the castle in 1070.

The outside walls of the Round Tower

were built in the mid-12th century, so a very sensible,

very secure place to keep papers.

-Nowhere safer.

-Nowhere safer.

What's happening here at the top of these 104 stone steps

is history of sorts, too.

Nearly two centuries after George III's death,

all his private papers,

hundreds of thousands of them, are being released to the world.

Now, some may ask, why has it taken so long?

But here, in this fortified royal vault,

it's ground-breaking.

Never before has a group of academics been allowed

inside the inner sanctum

to rifle through these invaluable documents.

So the first visit of scholars from Kings College London,

partners in this project, was a kind of royal revolution.

If you could break yourselves into groups,

three or four for each table.

THEY CHATTER

Can we sit down?

Yes, please do.

I'll go for 1780 and 26 too.

Are we allowed to actually...

-Oh, absolutely.

-..fondle them.

-I think that's the idea.

-Ah.

Turbot, lobsters and shrimp.

Exactly and a John Dory.

The second course, we've got some impressive roasted poultry,

starting with a pea fowl.

He seems quite fond of the peacock, too.

You know when you look at an archive,

that was a piece of paper held by the person who wrote it.

And it was their passions, their views on the world, their troubles,

their difficulties and their successes as well.

And that's what makes seeing original documents

so exciting and so compelling.

George's great collection covers not just the King,

but the Queen and all their children.

I understand you've made an interesting discovery already.

-Yeah.

-I wonder if I could just ask you about that?

It's rather a heart-rending one.

It's a short note from Queen Charlotte to

Lady Charlotte Finch, the governess,

with a little paper included.

Just labelled, "Prince Alfred's hair, cut during his..."

Illness?

1782, at the lower lodge, I think, Windsor.

And then a lock of Prince Alfred... Little Prince Alfred, who died,

a golden lock of his hair sewn into it

for her to remember him by, and thanking her for looking after him.

What does it feel like to come across something like this

when you've just arrived here in the archives?

It's very...

I mean, it's incredibly touching,

but actually it's rather shocking

how bright and shiny

and now this lock of hair looks.

You know, it could just have been cut off somebody's head.

So it brings things alive while really being very moving,

thinking about the death of a small child with golden curls.

George III's papers won't be restricted to scholars

who can make the journey to Windsor Castle,

they're going public.

Every single document has been digitally photographed,

and there are some 350,000 pages,

so that we can all see them online anywhere in the world.

Household ledgers,

exchanges with prime ministers like Lord North and William Pitt,

all the correspondence within the King's family,

every private paper is coming out of the shadows.

Wherever you are, you can work on George III,

you can get into the heart of the Hanoverian Monarchy.

Whether you want to know who his under footman was

and how much he was paid,

or his relationship with a prime minister,

they will both be there and, curiously enough,

you may find there is a connection between those things.

This was done absolutely with the permission and

authority of the Queen, who herself has approved this exercise

and is keen to make these collections available.

If I may introduce you to Professor Ed Byrne,

Kings College, London.

The Queen decided to open the whole Georgian papers project herself,

with the British and American academics involved.

Doctor Karen Wolf, William and Mary College.

And Mr Peter Barber, head of the map collections at the British library.

Your Majesty, we've laid out some items here in the library.

Exploring the entire collection will take several years,

but some of the early finds were presented for the launch,

including this schoolboy essay on kingship.

This is a essay by George III discussing his role in relation to

Parliament.

"The supreme power in England is divided into two branches -

"the legislative, vested in the King,

"the Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament, the executive,

"belonging to the King alone."

The King was grappling with the issue of being a monarch

of a country in transition from an older form of monarchy

to the form that we begin to see emerging during his reign, and his

ability to think these problems through on paper is a critical part

of the development of the modern monarchy.

But he's very much one of the founding fathers of the engaged

constitutional monarchy we have today.

These documents have not been seen and will really help transform our

understanding of this period.

All through his life, George was obsessive about recording it.

Here is his memoir of the moment he was elevated from Prince of Wales

to King, aged just 22.

Curiously, he refers to himself in the third person,

as if observing the making of the monarch.

"The Prince of Wales was riding at a little after eight

between Kew Bridge and the six-mile stone when a messenger told him

"an accident had happened to the King.

"The Prince returned to Kew and ordered his attendants to be silent

"and pretended his horse was lame."

It was October 1760.

George's father was already dead,

so he succeeded his grandfather

to the thrones of both Britain and Hanover.

But, unlike the earlier Georges,

George III had been born in Britain and was proud of it.

The Royal archives disclose how the making of this monarch had begun

back in his childhood.

Here we have George's very own instruction manual,

written for him when he was just a boy of ten by his father.

"Instructions for my son George."

It contains advice he would try to follow for most of his life.

"If you can be without war, let not your ambition draw you into it.

"At the same time,

"never give up your honour, nor that of the nation."

And there are some useful tips for a young Hanoverian king.

"Convince this nation

"that you are not only an Englishman born and bred,

"but that you are also this by inclination."

Wise words that, as king, he took to heart.

"Born and educated in this country," he proudly told Parliament,

"I glory in the name of Britain."

That's conscious, that's deliberate.

He's made himself into a British monarch,

and English is his first language,

unlike his grandfather and his great-grandfather.

And his interests are English, his culture is English.

The United Kingdom, the technical phrase we use, and the Union Jack,

they both come on his watch.

There's financial advice from his father, too.

"Employ all your hands and all your power to live with economy."

Then he warns about the national debt.

Which, "If not reduced, will surely one time or other

"create such a disaffection and despair that

"I dread the consequences for you, my dear son."

He goes on, "The sooner you have an opportunity to lower the interest,

"for God's sake, do it."

In the event, interest rates stayed constant

all through George III's reign,

and Britain was at war for most of it.

But from the start, he wanted to do things differently -

from the way he ran the country to the way he travelled.

After 33 years of George II,

a new reign demanded fresh symbolism for the young monarch.

The result was this, the grandest,

the most over-the-top vehicle in royal history.

Weighing four tonnes and costing £7,500,

the golden state carriage took George III to Parliament in 1762

and has been used in every coronation since.

As successive monarchs have remarked,

it's both very uncomfortable and very slow,

but then it was never designed for a smooth, speedy ride.

It was to be a work of art all by itself,

a statement of resurgent British prosperity and power.

George III was personally frugal,

but he understood the power of his public image.

He's painted in ceremonial garb for the great state portraits that are

sent round the country to hang in town halls and other places.

But when he attends public functions,

he's wearing conventional, comfortable clothes.

He's got this funny man of the people aspect to him

that he likes going out,

riding with his children round Windsor and asking farmers,

"How do you do?"

"Well, friend, where are you going? Hey? What's your name?

"Hey? Where do you live? Hey, hey?"

And in Windsor, he'll walk round the town or pop in on people.

He understood it was best to appear

to be a perfectly ordinary human being

who happened to be filling the office of King.

But in reality, there was nothing ordinary about George III.

He arranged his own marriage to Charlotte,

a German princess he'd never met, who bore him 15 children.

He was driven by his sense of duty to his family and his country.

He was methodical, pernickety, a man with never an idle moment.

The digitisation of his personal archive allows us intimate access

to a deep thinker with a good brain,

an enquiring mind, a very complex monarch.

It's quite an exciting moment because this is the first chance

we've had to see the documents

from the Georgian papers appearing online.

And we can see here there's a range of essays George was writing,

including this very striking selection

of draft essays on despotism.

But when we actually get to the document itself,

George's writing about despotism as a problem,

and it's this wonderful, clear handwriting,

and even those people who are not specialists, I think,

will be able to read pretty straightforwardly this sort of stuff.

It is very clear, isn't it?

"When we examine the annals of the world

"from the beginning of government unto this day,

"we shall find the generality of nations groaning under the

"yoke of despotism."

Groaning under the yoke of despotism.

He's very clearly putting himself on the side of the angels, isn't he?

Yes, he's considering himself as someone

who's not going to be that kind of monarch.

This is understanding how to avoid being a despot and how to

be a good and patriotic king.

But there was one place where George III was seen

as a despot - America.

With the six-pounder right here, I could use it to scare the enemy.

-Is that true, yes or no?

-CROWD:

-Yes.

-And I could use it to take the enemy out, is that true?

-CROWD:

-Yes.

I love artillery, don't you?

The struggle over American independence

shattered some of the young king's aspirations.

It was actually Parliament in Westminster that

imposed taxes on the colonies.

I need a fairly tall guy to work the other side

of the gun, to be my loader.

What began with protests like the Boston Tea Party

escalated into revolution.

The Americans chose to take things personally.

Look at all these volunteers.

The bad guy was the king.

Step up to the gun.

Even today, they relish their victory at the Battle of Yorktown.

Here, at Yorktown, the artillery is behind earthworks.

What's a good target for my artillery?

Those two British frigates in the river.

Everybody step into the gun.

Good thing the British are not really coming today, huh?

You know, George III was a mean, nasty monarch.

And he was imposing taxes out of his own selfishness,

and then he went crazy.

He's a handy villain for people to have.

Guys, if you want to cover your ears, now is the time.

Fire!

This portrait of the King wearing a red coat was

one of George's favourites.

Ironically, it was by an American artist, Benjamin West,

and it portrays the King as a man of action.

He famously said at the time,

"If others will not be active,"

a dig at his prime minister, Lord North, "I shall drive."

And the Royal archives reveal his compulsive interest in every aspect

of the war effort.

You really see it with these lists that he compiles.

This is a memorandum he wrote to himself

about how many troops would be needed in America.

This is written early in the war.

He is saying,

we're going to need at least 38,000 troops over there and he lists

where they'll be stationed and distributed.

And it has such details like the need for...

"52,000 blankets and 4,200 watch coats.

"Wagons and harness for 68th Battalion,

"277 wagons and 1,117 sets of harness."

We tended to think about George as this kind of aloof figure

who was above the frays, above politics,

but when you look at his papers, when you look at

his interactions with his ministers,

he's very much engaged in the operations of government.

The King kept a close eye on what the American rebels and their French

allies were up to.

This is a remarkable one,

a list of the French fleet copied from government documents

written in French showing the number of cannons on each ship.

I was very surprised to find it in the King's handwriting.

-What does that tell us?

-It tells us he didn't have a secretary

and it also shows his voracious interest

in every detail of this war.

It's perhaps surprising today's Americans

are giving their last king a place of honour.

They're making a new image of him two and a half centuries after

destroying their last one.

In this Brooklyn studio in New York,

they specialise in recreating the past.

They're building a George III

for the new Museum of the American Revolution,

and they're modelling it on the gilded statue

of George as a Roman emperor that once stood in Bowling Green,

on the southern tip of Manhattan.

The Royal archives show that one of the King's own sons

visited Bowling Green in the middle of the American war.

Prince William, the future King William IV,

was on active service with the Royal Navy at the age of 16.

Writing home from New York, then still under British control,

he tried to cheer his father with news of a great crowd crying

"God bless King George,"

but he added that he walked past the pedestal of the statue

of Your Majesty. The King must have known that five years earlier his

statue had been torn from its plinth by revolutionaries shortly after

the American Declaration of Independence.

It was gold and blinded people when they looked at it.

It was a mark of, we've made it as a civilisation and a culture.

And you see in that moment the sort of the desecration

of royal authority.

You see that the Americans sort of shift their anger from Parliament

to the person of the King.

They put ropes around the statue

and then the Sons of Liberty on the ground began to pull.

Alas, it probably wasn't as exciting as they might have hoped

since it was made of lead and very weak,

it might have just bent at the ankles and fallen straight down.

A little bit like the image of Saddam Hussein

when he was pulled down in 2003 in Iraq.

And that lead was melted down into 42,088 musket balls.

And, even to this day, they are finding musket balls

that came from King George's statue on revolutionary war battlefields.

So the king ended up being fired back at the king's men?

That's exactly right. The ultimate insult.

The Royal archives reveal fresh evidence of the stress

of war upon the King.

He felt he had to bolster the government and make sure his

long-serving prime minister, Lord North,

had stomach for the fight.

What is amazing about this letter,

and again one of the benefits of actually being here

and seeing letters first-hand,

is that there have been constant drafts.

He's clearly finding this a difficult letter to write.

Yeah, he's agonising over this part here, isn't he?

Yes, and you never normally see letters that are this messy.

And obviously the one that he sent out

would have been a fair copy of this.

But you can also see his thoughts at the time of writing this letter.

George had absorbed all the official information coming into the

government, but in the Royal archives, there are some tantalising

unofficial sources too -

a private network of secret agents reporting directly to the King.

Secret Service is getting 40,000.

That's... That's quite a big increase.

It was only 32 before.

And this is actually, it was quite a revelation to me,

he had a spy who wrote to him regularly called Aristarchus.

In this particular letter, he says you've been seen walking around the

Queen's garden in disguise at night-time...

..and the French are planning to assassinate you

while you're doing that.

And these letters are entirely unpublished,

they're not mentioned in the major biographies of George III.

So we've come across a sort of Georgian James Bond.

Yes. With the difference that Aristarchus was in his late 60s,

and he was clearly a lot less agile than Bond.

Also, unlike Bond, he keeps having to ask to be paid.

Britain's defeat in the American war was a bitter reverse for the King.

"America is lost.

"Must we fall beneath the blow?"

But George swallowed his pride,

and three years later, he graciously welcomed

the first American ambassador to Britain.

Away from the national stage,

the King's attention to detail was just as intense at home.

No previous monarch had devoted as much care to the raising

of royal children as George III and his queen.

Can I ask what it is you've got there?

These are letters from Queen Charlotte to her governess,

Lady Charlotte Finch,

and they're talking about the setting up of the Royal nursery.

She is saying that she's allowed to have two days off,

which is to be at liberty, but when she's in the nursery,

she is to think of the children almost as her own,

which is quite a modern thought, I think.

In his first year as king,

George had drawn up his own shortlist of potential brides.

Charlotte came top and the proposal was dispatched.

He was 23, she was 17.

A princess of the German duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

He sent an envoy to fetch her across a ferociously rough North Sea.

The voyage took two weeks.

You are expected to step up to the plate and become a British queen

just like that.

It's a terrible journey and the rough seas, the crossing.

She didn't speak English, she didn't write English,

but the King and she got on like a house on fire.

Only a few hours after first setting eyes on each other,

Charlotte and George were married and crowned King and Queen

a fortnight later.

A year on, Queen Charlotte was adapting to her new life.

This is her first letter in English written to Lady Charlotte Finch,

who was looking after her first-born prince, just six weeks old.

"I hope, when I come to town, that your little jou jou

"will be dressed in his frock.

"The King and I embrace the pretty dear little man.

"Your affectionate Charlotte."

Lady Charlotte Finch would be with this fast expanding family

for more than three decades.

The King kept height charts of all his children

in his typically exact way,

measuring them to the nearest 16th of an inch.

His ambition was to create a model royal family and to make sure people

saw them, too.

They were a very fertile couple.

15 children born from 1762 to 1783.

So that's quite a tough schedule for Queen Charlotte.

Soon after their marriage,

George had bought the house that would later

become Buckingham Palace and renamed it the Queen's House.

While the King was carrying out

official duties nearby at St James's Palace,

the Queen's House was home.

And with his belief in the central importance,

not just of the sovereign

but of the Royal family, he provided the template for his granddaughter,

Queen Victoria, and in so many ways for the modern monarchy.

Here we have material in relation to the history of science.

King George III's scientific instruments were presented

to King's College London,

and they are now on display in the Science Museum,

including here, Eardley Norton's famous clock,

which was in Buckingham House library and was given to him

for his 27th birthday and is regarded, really,

one of the finest clocks in the collection.

-Does it work?

-It does work.

It will chime in just a few minutes, I should think.

This astronomical clock had pride of place on the desk in George III's

library and embodies the King's devotion to both arts and science.

It not only tells the time in a 24-hour format

but keeps track of the tides all round the British Isles,

the movement of the planets and the phases of the moon.

Do you have things, too, from George III?

Well, we hold the George III science collection.

-Oh, right.

-Yes. Which is going to be redisplayed

in a more central part of the museum very soon.

We passed it on Monday. It looked terribly full.

It is, absolutely. We get something like 24,000 people a day.

Oh! It looked like it.

And here we have what is rightly considered a landmark

in astronomy and navigation, this is George III's account

of watching the transit of Venus in Richmond Park,

demonstrating his interest in astronomy and science.

Really contemporary developments of the day.

The King's document described what was going to happen when

the planet Venus was seen to pass between the Earth and the Sun,

timed to the nearest 30 seconds.

And it's uncanny to realise George III

was directly contemplating the 21st-century.

Morally speaking, none now living will see the same phenomenon again,

which will only happen again in 1874 and again in 2004.

George was so excited that he had the King's Observatory

built in time for the occasion in Richmond Park.

On the day itself, he and the Queen went to the top.

Though today it's in the midst of restoration,

we can retrace their steps to the cupula,

where the roof could be opened to the sky.

Up here in the cupula is where the King and Queen actually watched

the 1769 transit of Venus, though not on this particular telescope.

But 250 years later, it's all in full working order.

Just wind this handle and suddenly, with a bit of help from some WD-40,

the aperture opens to reveal the heavens to the royal gaze.

And then all the King had to do was walk over here,

start winding this handle,

and the whole cupula moves around to find the sun.

And after all that it was probably just as well the clouds parted

and it stopped raining just in time

for the transit of Venus on June 3rd, 1769.

Using a reflecting telescope,

the king was the first to spot the outline of Venus,

just as people did on June the 8th 2004.

The forecasts were right!

If Georgian astronomers could measure the transit precisely

from different places on Earth,

then they could work out the distance from Earth to Venus

and, in turn, the size of the whole solar system.

And they did.

He takes his job very seriously.

He's studious, he collects sheaths of paper, diagrams,

scientific materials.

He is processing knowledge

on a proto-industrial scale as part of his role.

So he's the best informed chief executive this country has ever had.

It's an area of great polymaths, and I think people have argued that

by the end of the 19th century, you just can't know about it.

But in those days, you could know about geology, farming, astronomy,

an interest in science, an interest in all sorts of other things,

and I imagine he would have been quite fun to have dinner with.

I don't know. On his good days, obviously.

George III was always on the move.

His constant journeying between his palaces in London, Kew And Windsor

exasperated his family and court.

Queen Charlotte wrote to her brother...

"Our life, if you can call it life, is nothing but hurry.

"We are often in three places in a week."

Yet, paradoxically, George never went very far,

never beyond the south coast, no further north than Worcester.

But he travelled far and wide in his mind.

George championed the long-running quest to calculate longitude at sea.

He was a driving force behind the voyages of Captain Cook,

who was originally sent to the South Seas

to observe the transit of Venus.

This exquisite map plots all three intercontinental voyages by Cook,

who went on to plant the British flag in Australia and New Zealand

and went in search of the Northwest Passage.

It was drawn by the King's daughter, Sophia, at the tender age of 14.

George's papers include secret instructions for Cook,

with crucial advice.

"Treat any locals you find with respect."

"Endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship with them,

"making them presents of such trinkets that you may have on board

"and they may like best.

"Inviting them to traffic and showing them every kind of

"civility and regard."

George isn't going to go round the world in a ship,

that's not the job a king does, but he does know who's doing that,

and he is reading what they are writing,

and he is following everything they're doing.

He brought the world to him.

He would have loved television.

The whole point of his library and much of his archive

is to collect that information so he can process it.

George's only seafaring was the odd day trip to review the fleet,

as we see here, with the King in his blue garter sash

standing at the stern.

This Englishman by inclination never set foot on foreign soil,

not even to visit his throne in Hanover.

And there was much to keep him at home.

For the first half of his reign, George III was intimately and often

bitterly involved in domestic politics.

This is the 1780 general election.

Here in the archives,

we even find his private intelligence

on the likely voting habits of each MP.

Celebrity candidate, John Wilkes,

one of the most famous radicals of the 18th century...

Like those early essays,

these papers show a king pondering his own role

and the national interest.

Pro, for the King.

He thought he was bringing in a new form of politics,

he felt that the political system was indeed incredibly corrupt.

The King said he'd always wanted

"to extinguish all odious party distinctions"

and to get the greatest talents of the day

to unite for the common good.

But politics didn't work like that.

This is really exciting because what we are looking at here

is a series of letters that we've called "the King's experience"

of one of the most important political crises

of the 18th century, and indeed of longer.

So we're able to trace this correspondence

on a virtually day-by-day, even hour-by-hour, basis.

The King was involved in an increasingly tetchy horse trading

to get the leading politicians of the day to form a new government.

It reached a crisis on March the 23rd, 1783.

"Lord North, not having heard from you since the directions

"I gave you yesterday, I must desire you will come instantly."

It's a summoning of one of the key negotiators in this process

of trying to form a new ministry.

And we can see here the label he's attached to this,

noting not only the date and where it was sent from

but the time of day.

30 minutes past ten.

With his time stamping, rather like today's e-mails,

George was ahead of his time.

But these are messages being hurried back and forth across London,

rather like cycle couriers might now hurry them across the capital.

So you could have several letters going back and forth

in the course of a single day, late into the night,

early in the morning,

as people are actually called in to see the monarch.

And this is a Sunday as well.

I mean, we're on the weekend. Yes, 23rd of March, 1783.

The politicians were bargaining with the King over who should be in the

cabinet, and the Duke of Portland, in line to be prime minister,

was no pushover.

So this is the final offer coming from the Duke of Portland.

If that's no go, the Duke says that's it.

And then he's writing off to Mr Pitt, William Pitt,

the future prime minister,

who will be his next and last throw of the dice here.

"Mr Pitt is desired to come here,

"the Duke of Portland has wrote an answer that ends in a declining to

"prepare a plan for my inspection.

"Consequently, the negotiation is finally ended.

"Queen's House, March the 23rd, 1783.

"48 minutes past 8pm."

That's sort of dinner time on a Sunday night in March.

-That's right.

-And that's gone off to Mr Pitt,

there is some runner rushing through London with that and then...

Here's the very brusque note that's going out at the end

of what's been a long day, no doubt, for the King,

where he just wants to make sure everybody knows where we stand.

He's saying, right to the Duke of Portland and Lord North.

"The Duke of Portland, I shall not give him any further trouble."

And Lord North was yet again in the doghouse.

"Lord North must therefore see that all negotiation is at an end.

"35 minutes past 10pm."

The King felt let down by scheming politicians.

There was no point, he thought, in going on.

Just how serious the situation we've now got to becomes apparent

if you look at the next document in the sequence,

which gives me a bit of a frisson when you read it.

"A long experience has gradually occurred my mind to accept the time

"when I shall be no longer of utility to this empire.

"That hour is now come."

This is a draft of abdication.

-Gosh.

-So George is at the end of the line trying to work out what to do

with this inability to form a government

which he can have confidence in.

He wants to be the person who ends party,

brings together the most able to work in the national interest.

And what this speech is basically saying is, "I've failed."

What we see here, he's really troubled here, isn't he?

-Yes.

-There's a lot of redrafting and crossing out going on.

This is written at a state of high agitation, I think.

And you do get a sense of the troubled mind,

the blotches and the scrawlings and scratching out,

and we begin to come to the end of the line,

and this is the key passage.

"I am therefore resolved to resign my crown and all the dominions

"appertaining to it to the Prince of Wales,

"my eldest son and lawful successor,

"and to retire to the care of my electoral dominions."

This is somewhere alongside that Edward VIII speech, I think,

in terms of the emotions that are on display here.

And again, some ironies in this document

because these electoral dominions he's talking about, like Hanover,

his roots he feels are in England. This is an exile.

But on reflection, George didn't sail off to Hanover.

After all, he had plenty of family matters to sort out.

This whole left column is the Prince Regent's dinner.

And more meat and things on the sideboard.

13 loins of veal.

There's something sausages.

Yes. A large capon roasted.

Yeah. Or two.

The King's eldest son,

who would one day be Prince Regent and then King George IV,

was infamous for his problems with wine, women and money.

It's not hard to chart a link

between the King's eventual breakdowns and turmoil at home.

It had been a model family when the children were young,

now came trouble.

His sense of his position as a monarch makes it difficult for him

to be anything other than a control freak with his family.

He's seen what happens to monarchies when they get out of control,

when the family structure breaks down,

when people cut loose and go off and do their own things.

He's very frightened of that.

The stability of the monarchy is an essential prerequisite for the

stability of Britain.

By the time he turned 19, the Prince was already going off the rails,

as the King reported to his prime minister.

"I am sorry to be obliged to open a subject to Lord North that has long

"given me much pain,

"but I can rather do it on paper than in conversation.

"It is a subject to which I know he is not quite ignorant.

"My eldest son got last year into a very improper connection with an

"actress and woman of indifferent character."

The King made clear a multitude of letters had passed between them,

which the actress was using to blackmail the Prince.

So the King had asked an intermediary to buy her off.

"He has her consent to get these letters on her receiving £5,000,

"undoubtedly an enormous sum,

"but I wish to get my son out of this shameful scrape."

Lord North didn't disappoint this time.

He'd ordered up the cash, roughly £750,000 in today's money,

for what he called "special service".

A sort of slush fund for the King.

While several of George's sons

were packed off to Hanover to learn some German self-discipline,

his eldest son became even more of a problem.

The King was infuriated by his scheming with the opposition

in Parliament and also by his debts.

Some years later, under a new prime minister,

the King had the correspondence with his son copied into a book and wrote

a stern note to say he was passing it to the PM.

"I choose to deposit this copy with Mr Pitt,

"that should the subject be mentioned in Parliament,

"he may be fully apprised of the uniform conduct I have held,

"the wishing to save a son,

"at the same time, not forgetting what, as a king,

"I owe to my people."

All this was perhaps a key trigger

for the King's first major breakdown in 1788

and his incarceration at Windsor and Kew,

sometimes in a straitjacket.

It has been suggested it was the genetic disease porphyria,

but modern opinion regards it as a form of bipolar disorder.

Reading the case records, which are very detailed of course,

and the statements by lots of people who saw him,

it wasn't just he was talking very fast,

he was talking ridiculously fast,

leaping around from subject to subject, not making much sense,

clearly very excitable, very irritable,

sexually inappropriate at times,

all of those things would suggest a diagnosis now

we would call mania or hypermania.

The equerry, who remained with the King,

kept a daily journal of what he called

"His Majesty's most serious and afflicting illness"

while the King's physicians bickered over the proper treatment.

In despair, they asked for the help of an obscure doctor from

Lincolnshire, a landmark moment for psychiatrists.

December the 5th, 1788, is a kind of big day for us

because they admit that they are defeated

and they call upon Francis Willis,

who is a clergyman but he's also a doctor,

and he is a specialist in lunacy.

So this is probably the first time what you might call a consultant

opinion in mental disorder

is summoned into the exalted world of medicine.

So it is a bit of a turning point.

They've turned to a specialist to get specialist advice,

and amazingly enough,

it would appear to them, his advice seems to work.

"My dear Frederick..."

We discovered an intriguing letter from the King to his second son

expressing concern about an old soldier

with health problems of his own.

"My dear Frederick,

"I desire you will send the enclosed by this night's post.

"I am sorry to hear the Grand Marshall

"has had two fresh strokes

"of apoplexy, as I fear he will not last long."

He sounds calm and collected,

yet it was written in the darkest days of George's own illness.

It's hardly the letter of a mad King.

"Believe me ever, my dear Frederick, your most affectionate father,

"George R. Windsor, December 28th, 1788."

I think you would say that is unexpected.

When you look at the descriptions of what he was like earlier that month,

that does seem quite a fast recovery,

but then that does happen in psychiatry,

and you do have moments of calmness in the storm.

That certainly happens as well.

On his recovery, he went on a visit to, of all places,

a madhouse in Richmond,

where he discussed the merits of straitjackets,

as his equerry recorded.

"Fortunately, His Majesty heard this ill-timed conversation without

"the least agitation."

Any diagnosis that we make,

you shouldn't take this as being an absolute certainty.

And I don't think we'll ever know fully

what was wrong with King George.

It was the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger,

who passed on advice to the King from his doctors.

Advice the King took to heart.

"Mr Pitt humbly begs leave to acquaint Your Majesty that he finds

"the physicians think it of the greatest consequence

"for Your Majesty's recovery to change the air.

"Fatigue in the meantime ought to be avoided."

So George set off with the family to Weymouth in Dorset.

It was the Royal seal of approval for British seaside holidays.

The public flocked just to watch the King have tea, go to the theatre,

take a boat trip around the bay.

But it was quite hard not to bump into the monarch,

for 14 summers he had his holiday home right here on the front

at Gloucester Lodge.

It was very public, and to begin with,

this was rather...exciting.

They were there for the King's health.

So when they went sea bathing, it was also incredibly public.

Every morning, he'd climb into a bathing machine just like this one

and it'd be wheeled out over the sands into the water,

and once he was there,

he'd be helped out by two assistants called dippers

who'd dunk him beneath the waves.

On his first morning,

there was another bathing machine alongside, it was full of musicians.

And as George sank beneath the waves,

the band struck up God Save The King.

There were long rides through the Dorset countryside, too.

Farmer George, as he was known,

relished swapping notes on crops and livestock.

The King loved Weymouth, come rain or shine,

and Weymouth loved the King.

His family had other ideas.

While his sons spent as little time as possible,

preferring the raffish charms of Brighton,

his daughters had little choice.

As Princess Mary complained,

"This place is more dull and stupid than I can find words to express."

The more his sons went their own way,

the closer the King clung to his unmarried daughters.

Their one solace was the bolthole

their mother had found back home at Windsor.

The King's illness and his outbursts terrified the Queen.

She was never quite the same again.

She desperately wanted somewhere to escape court politics

and her erratic husband, somewhere she could pursue a life of her own.

So she bought this small estate just below Windsor Castle and would

retreat here as often as possible

with her daughters to what she called "her little paradise".

They would drive down to Frogmore House for day trips.

It wasn't much of a paradise for the daughters.

While the Queen enjoyed tatting, a form of lace-making,

the increasingly frustrated princesses,

longing for households of their own,

did their best to while away the time.

It's a very female place.

One of the daughters, the artistic daughter, Elisabeth,

paints a whole gallery.

And to begin with, it's very much a place everyone likes going,

but as the Queen's temper worsens,

in a sense, it becomes a penance for the daughters to go there,

and they're remaining in this sort of Gothic nunnery.

They turned to whoever was near,

which was of course the equerries at court.

The King's youngest daughter, and his favourite, was Princess Amelia.

The Royal archives reveal that a teenage flirtation

with a soldier twice her age became an ardent love affair,

but one that was doomed in a way

that would trigger the King's final illness.

There are few Georgian documents in this great archive as human,

as intensely personal, as the correspondence of Princess Amelia.

There are these letters, hundreds of them, often undated,

often hard to read,

but all bursting with passion for the man she could never marry.

Charles FitzRoy was the King's trusted equerry,

and Amelia was smitten.

"My ever dearest and most beloved darling," she wrote.

And, "Oh, God, I am almost mad for you."

She sometimes signed her letters AFR, Amelia FitzRoy,

and wrote as if they lived together.

She's writing so frankly,

although it took me by surprise when I first deciphered it, because,

she says, "You're my husband." They haven't married,

but in this fantasy life where she is buying the tea kettles

and the silver and having them engraved, he is her husband,

and so she can write to him on any matter.

What gives this affair added poignancy

is that Amelia's life was to be cut short at 27.

She had tuberculosis.

She's near death, in extreme pain...

..and this love for FitzRoy is her way of rising above that.

Some three months before her death, Amelia wrote a will

which was to prove highly sensitive to the Royal Family.

She left almost everything to Charles FitzRoy,

and to avoid any doubt, she itemised it.

"All," - underlined - "my personal property."

"Jewels, plate, trinkets of every sort, books, prints, pictures,

"chattels and every article of furniture."

The Queen, of course, if she knew, said nothing.

The King knew nothing.

October the 25th, 1810, was the actual day of the King's Jubilee,

50 years on from that momentous ride near Kew.

To mark the occasion, George appeared on the arm of the Queen.

It was his last public engagement.

He was now almost blind and had to stop writing.

His daily visits to Amelia had been emotional.

She was now fading, and that Jubilee day,

her brothers were summoned to make their farewells.

On November the 2nd, Amelia succumbed to the tuberculosis.

The King was distraught.

The news came in a letter from the King's doctor

to the Prince of Wales.

"It gives me pain to inform Your Royal Highness

"that the Princess Amelia is no more.

"I have just witnessed her last expiration."

And he notes the time - 12 o'clock.

In a separate letter that very afternoon,

FitzRoy made clear the Prince of Wales

had immediately been in touch.

He'd wasted no time with condolences.

He wanted FitzRoy to surrender his rights in the will.

The next day, FitzRoy agreed to hand over all Amelia's property to

the Prince and one of his brothers.

They were to be residuary legatees for their beloved sister,

the Princess Amelia, "In lieu of me."

So FitzRoy is elbowed out.

For them, it was just too incendiary an issue.

Over the next six weeks or so,

FitzRoy tried to retrieve his position,

in increasingly tense exchanges with the Royal solicitors.

He expressed,

"Most decidedly my objection to any part of the jewels being sold."

She'd wanted him to dispose of them as he thought best.

The princes replied, they were surprised at his tone.

The truth was they wanted to avoid a public scandal,

and the Queen was anxious to protect the King.

"There still remains one point to be broke to him,

"namely poor Amelia's will,

"the ignorance of which may lead to very unpleasant conversations."

But events had overtaken them.

Two days after Amelia's death,

the King had a relapse

and had to be confined in a straitjacket once more.

His doctors were quizzed about his prospects.

The archives contain their replies to a Royal questionnaire,

and within days, the King had agreed his son

should take over all his duties -

the start of what became known as the Regency.

The possibility that he has more than one affliction

becomes increasingly more likely as you get older.

Perhaps he suffers from dementia. We know he was blind.

That could have been the result of some of the things he was given,

by the way, or it could be that this is the late phase of his illness.

George was moved to the secluded north-facing part of Windsor Castle,

where although he couldn't see the view,

he would stand by the window and salute as he heard

the ceremonial guard march past below.

In a touching letter to the new Prince Regent,

the Queen said she'd been to see her husband.

"The dear King talked much of his family with great affection.

"He looks better than I have seen him

"after any one of his other illnesses."

But this time there would be no recovery.

The twilight of George III lasted nine years.

This startling drawing in the Royal Library

captures his isolation,

and was only seen after his death in January 1820, aged 81.

Even then, his family felt it would be better received

if changes were made,

befitting the man they called "the father of his people".

And words of mourning were added that Handel had set to music.

Biblical words, that George would have known well.

"Kindness, meekness and comfort were in his tongue.

"If there was any virtue and if there was any praise,

"he thought on those things."

"His body is buried in peace, but his name liveth evermore."

It had been an age of bloodshed and revolution,

but not in George III's Britain.

His contemporaries -

Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great -

these are revolutionary and dangerous figures.

They destroy things. Napoleon destroys everything.

George III makes everything secure and safe.

We need to put him back as the presiding figure

who has an active role interacting with the politicians,

the statesman, the scientists,

the warriors - and the scholars - who are creating a new Britain.

None of this great project would have happened

if the King hadn't been meticulous, obsessive even,

about filing everything that came across his desk.

And he was proud of it too - as, shortly before his final illness,

he told his prime minister, Spencer Perceval.

The King, Perceval noted,

"mentioned his having preserved every political paper

"that had come into his hands during his reign.

"That he had already arranged all of them

"from the time of Mr Pitt's first coming into office,

"so that he could lay his hand at once upon any one."

He added, "It's hard work."

Historians get very excited about unseen documents.

It's extraordinary, the riches of the archives.

Oliver can tell you I visited on Monday,

and I was practically levitating with enthusiasm.

It's really, really... Really quite rich and wonderful.

-Well, I think there's so much here.

-Yes.

-The early reign and everything.

The lasting legacy of George III is an enduring constitutional monarchy.

His advice to his own young sons captures the essence of his vision.

"A bad prince may be restrained, and it is fit he should be so,

"by the British constitution.

"A good prince can never be embarrassed, much less distressed,

"by the natural effects of it.

"A King of Britain who has been bred to govern on such principles

"will place himself deservedly in the highest rank of humanity."