The Madness of George III
Extras
The Madness of George III by Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett admits to first finding a fascination for George III whilst studying in the sixth form at Leeds Modern School: answering a question on the king in his scholarship paper for Cambridge University. Failing to meet the required grade and after enduring a spell of National Service he eventually entered Exeter University to read history and studied George as part of his degree.
He freely admitted that he thought the eighteenth century was 'not an inspiring period'... whether by the Whig interpretation or not, there are none of those great constitutional struggles and movements of ideas that animate the seventeenth and dramatise the nineteenth. The politics are materialistic, small-minded, the House of Commons an area where a man might make a name for himself but where most members were just concerned to 'line their pockets'.
In the 1980's Bennett rediscovered his affection for George III when reading some of the medical history connected with the time. 'The Royal Malady' by Charles Chenevix Trench catalogues the king's illness and the so-called Regency Crisis whereas 'George III and the Mad Business' by Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine suggested that the king's illness was physical, not mental. They proposed that he was suffering from porphyria: a physical illness that affects the nervous system, a symptom of which is the discolouration of the urine. The disease is periodic, unpredictable and hereditary. From a dramatist's point of view it is more useful if the king's malady was of a 'toxic condition, traceable to a metabolic disturbance rather than due to schizophrenia or manic depression'.
Once 'the king is himself again' the audience can take pleasure in his eccentricities, enjoy the obvious discomfiture of the doctors and the sentimental conclusion that 'Mr. and Mrs. King' are reunited in regal domesticity. Bennett was concerned not to make the play too heavily political in content. Any account of politics will allude to parallels in the contemporary society of the audience. He was sure he did not want a political text that would overshadow the madness of George III. The politics were necessary, 'amusing, intriguing, but incidental'.
One factor that Bennett needs his audience to understand is the set up of the government surrounding a monarch in 1788. The king would have taken control of the working of the nation; choosing his chief minister, a politician who could summon enough support in the House of Commons to give him a majority. Unlike the government of today: the majority in the Commons determines the choice of Prime Minister. At one point in his process of rewriting the play over four separate occasions Bennett even considered calling the audience in to each performance a quarter of an hour early to give them a 'curtain lecture on the nature of eighteenth-century politics' to eliminate the need for detailed political explanations within his text.
Alan Bennett resolves his play with the recovery of the king with the continuity of his reign reinstated without alluding to the possibility of a medical relapse. He does not attempt to foresee the future of the king or that of the queen or their unfortunate children: he merely reflects on the period of George III's reign that had so compelled him to start writing years before. Bennett wrote that 'little, if any, personal message can be drawn from the play other than the knowledge that one's own mortality is directly linked with one's sanity'.
King George III
King George III, born in 1738, was brought up by his mother, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, when his father, Frederick Prince of Wales died. From the time of his birth he became an integral part of the squabbling between his father and his grandfather, George II.
On the death of his father, George, at the age of 13 he became heir apparent and his education consequently became a political controversy. He became king on the death of his grandfather in 1760 and proceeded to exert his newfound authority, accepting the resignations of Pitt and Newcastle.
In 1761 he married Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Germany, and proved to be an unusually faithful husband. Their eldest son, George Prince of Wales, was born in 1762. In true Hanoverian tradition the relationship between the monarch and his heir was strained.
The American colonists balked at many of the Acts that Parliament was passing, particularly the Stamp Act. George III used his influence with Parliament to make the ministers see things the way he was seeing them. Soon his efforts were rewarded; the Townshend Acts, which were taxes on lead, glass, paint and tea, went into effect in 1766.
In 1775, the American colonies revolted against Great Britain. After the American colonies successfully became the United States of America, many other colonies throughout the world tried to gain independence as well. For a long time after 1776, Britain was constantly at war, until five years before King George's death.
In 1785 the Prince of Wales secretly married the Catholic widow Mrs. Maria Fitzherbert. Without the king's consent the union was illegal (Royal Marriages Act 1772) and so the Prince of Wales ineligible to inherit the crown.
Porphyria (possibly inherited from Mary Queen of Scotts) struck George III at various times, affecting his mind, and rendering him emotionally imbalanced and extremely sensitive to light.
By October 1788 George III was thought to be quite mad. With the continued assistance of Dr. Willis he recovered by March 1789 forcing the plans to make his eldest son Prince Regent to be dropped. His madness returned in short spells during 1801, 1804 and 1810. After the death of his daughter Amelia in 1811 he was thought to have become permanently insane. The Prince of Wales was finally made Regent in the same year, and took the crown in 1820 when his father died.
