Winter 1788.
King George III is hallucinating,
violent and abusive.
Out of my sight!
He's losing control of himself and the country.
This is a crisis.
Britain can't have a mentally ill king!
As a last resort, a medical maverick who runs an asylum is summoned.
Can he save the King?
In this series, I'm reinvestigating some of the most dramatic
and brutal chapters in British history.
It wasn't just one generation.
It was three generations losing their lives.
Bam, bam, bam.
These stories are part of our national mythology,
harbouring mysteries that have intrigued us for centuries.
It's chilling to think that this could actually be evidence
in a murder investigation.
But with the passage of time, we have new ways to unlock
their secrets, using scientific advances and a modern perspective.
It's a horrible psychosexual form of torture. Absolutely.
I'm going to uncover forgotten witnesses,
re-examine old evidence and follow new clues
to get closer to the truth.
It is one of the great British mysteries.
It was one of those moments, I'm afraid, for historians,
that makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.
Oh, wow.
I find George III an intriguing king.
He was conscientious and intellectually curious.
He built this observatory to watch the transit of Venus
across the sun in 1769.
He ruled for 60 years, but he was plagued by bouts of mental illness,
which were barely understood in his lifetime.
The madness of George III has been raked over for centuries
by medics and historians.
But I want to look beyond the diagnosis at the man himself,
and I want to use newly released papers to understand the pressures
in his private and public lives that may have brought on his illness.
How did Georgian Britain deal with having a mentally ill king?
And how did his illness change Britain?
I'd say I know a fair bit about George III,
but I don't know nearly enough about his mental health.
And now's the perfect time to take a look at it,
because new evidence has come to light.
Just a few years ago, the Royal Family granted unprecedented access
to his personal papers.
This treasure trove of documents is stored at Windsor Castle.
So far, 225,000 documents,
that's diaries, letters and medical notes,
have been published online.
But there are still more secrets to be revealed.
I've been here to the Royal Archives before, but this is the first time
I hope to get my hands on documents that will take me behind the scenes
into 1788, when the King fell ill.
I've asked the royal archivist to bring out a unique private diary.
It's an eyewitness account of George III's illness as it escalated.
There we are. Thank you so much.
This is great, thanks.
This is an amazing thing to get to see.
It's the diary of Robert Greville.
Journal of His Majesty's most serious and afflicting illness.
He was one of the King's equerries,
which means he spent a lot of time with the King.
And on Sunday 9th November, he's writing about
"great agitation and much incoherence
"in thought and expressions".
It's fascinating that he's actually with the King.
This is like a front line report from the King's bedside.
What else are we going to learn?
Oh, "Finally he goes to sleep after having talked for 19 hours
"without scarce any intermission."
Poor man.
So what's happening on November 24th?
"We found the King violently agitated and very angry,
"but more particularly with Dr Warren,"
one of the medical advisers.
"The King advanced up to him and pushed him."
So Greville's getting pretty upset, actually.
He says that "the general conduct of the physicians has not
"been decided or firm".
They simply don't know what to do.
"They appear to shrink from responsibility."
Greville says here that "a report has been sent to Mr Pitt",
the Prime Minister, stating that "His Majesty had passed
"a quiet night, but that he was entirely deranged".
George had at least five personal doctors,
and they were all flummoxed.
In the 1780s, the medical profession still clung
to a centuries-old notion about mental illness.
When George fell ill in 1788,
his doctors at first still believed
they needed to get this disease out of his body.
They gave him drugs to make him vomit.
They used blisters to draw out what they thought
was bad blood from his body.
And they used these little suckers...
Got these off the internet.
I love the way they're actually called Little Wrigglers.
These are leeches.
Look at them wiggle.
They're just like tiny little monsters.
Oh, he's sucking the side there.
And the idea was that these would be applied to George's temples...
..and that they would suck the madness out of his brain.
The King is bled, blistered and purged.
Nothing works.
But if he doesn't get better soon, his illness could trigger
a constitutional crisis.
In 1788, Europe is a tinderbox.
Peter III of Russia has been murdered in a coup.
And in France, the scent of revolution is in the air.
It's a dangerous time to have a mentally ill king.
Investigating the medical mystery of George's condition is not
without potential pitfalls.
George's illness wasn't just misunderstood in his own lifetime.
In modern times, another suspect diagnosis has stuck.
This essay was published in the British Medical Journal in 1966.
It's by a couple of psychiatrists, MacAlpine and Hunter.
They looked at George's medical records and argued
that he had a rare genetic blood disorder called porphyria.
This idea really stuck, notably in the stage play by Alan Bennett.
When this was turned into a film, there was actually a caption
on screen suggesting that George had porphyria.
But historians have been divided about this,
and now there's a rival diagnosis.
I'm meeting an eminent psychiatrist who led a recent review
of the Mental Health Act in England and Wales.
He's also been examining the papers from the Royal Archives.
Can the new evidence settle the question of what was wrong
with George once and for all?
Simon, how do you feel about diagnosing dead people?
There are some concerns here, aren't there?
Oh, yeah, very much so. In medicine in general and psychiatry,
it's a very dangerous thing to do.
The only reason that we can do this with George
is because the documentation so extraordinary.
Why do you think that porphyria was so warmly welcomed
as a theory in the 1960s?
MacAlpine and Hunter were, it now, turns out,
ardent monarchists, and they wanted really to remove
the taint and the stigma of mental illness from the Royal Family.
And porphyria did run in the Royal Houses of Europe, by the way,
it just didn't affect George.
But they wanted to kind of help the Queen out by taking away
the taint of mental illness.
What was really the King's condition, do you think?
The best evidence we have from George is the observations
of his behaviour.
We've had for some time now what we call diagnostic criteria,
and in which you can fill in a computer program
and that will then tell you what is the most likely diagnosis.
So you have your computer program and you can put George
into it and see what comes out?
You can indeed.
Employment? Employment, King.
Residence, Windsor Castle.
Grandiosity, a bit difficult in a king to diagnose that, actually.
Excessive self reproach.
He was a great one for beating himself up.
Poor sleep - very, very common.
Reduced need for sleep, reduced appetite.
He's having hallucinations.
Yes, he's having some hallucinations, which is common
in very severe mania.
At times when he had to be restrained, for example,
there was also a lot of violence and things like that.
And so now they've ticked what the diagnosis is.
And it comes up as the most probable diagnosis is what we now
call bipolar disorder.
Not a concept they had... At the time.
No, not at all. Any doctor reading that now,
it would just shout bipolar at you, it really would.
I'm convinced...
..but can you tell me what causes it?
I wish I knew. I don't.
Nobody knows. What we do know is there's very compelling evidence
that what we call life events, so major traumas in your life,
bereavement or being a victim of crime or, you know,
divorce, something like that,
it doesn't cause bipolar disorder, but what it does do,
it will then trigger an episode and you'll have a full-blown illness.
So it's sensitive to what's going on in our environment.
Is there a particular life stage at which people generally start
to experience it for the first time?
Yes, it usually starts in younger people.
So the peak age is somewhere between 20 and 30.
So if George had it, we could expect perhaps to see some evidence
of this in his 20s?
He had an episode in 1765.
It's unclear what it was.
And the records, as I understand it, simply have never been found.
Mm.
This earlier episode in 1765 is intriguing.
George was 50 when he had his first documented
bout of illness in 1788.
But if bipolar disorder usually strikes between 20 and 30,
were there earlier signs?
Here's George in his coronation robes in 1760.
He was just 22.
Doesn't he look young but full of confidence?
It was only a few years after this, in 1765,
that we get this mysterious incident of illness,
when he disappeared from public life for a while.
And there are now quite a few historians who are suggesting
that this was perhaps his first experience of the mental illness
that would come back with a vengeance in 1788.
There were tantalising clues that the Royal Family
was covering something up.
The daughter of the King's hairdresser,
Charlotte Papendiek, wrote later,
"It was Her Majesty The Queen's wish to prevent the public
"from discovering the nature of the King's illness."
But this is all gossip, not fact.
I can't find any doctor's notes in the Georgian papers,
but there is this.
Now, here's a really fascinating
nugget of information from 1765.
George has called in his ministers to a meeting
and he tells them he wants to make plans for a regency.
He wants to make provision for the administration of government
in case of a minority which God prevent.
So that means should George die or become incapacitated,
and if his children weren't old enough to take over,
what would happen?
He wanted his wife or his mother to step in as monarch.
Now, this could be a complete coincidence,
but the timing suggests to me otherwise.
Perhaps this year George realised that there was something
seriously wrong with him,
something that might stop him from doing his job as king.
If the trail runs cold here, let's leave the younger George
and move forward to 1788
and George's first official bout of illness.
If episodes of bipolar disorder can be triggered by traumatic events
or extreme stress,
what was happening in George's personal life
in the run-up to '88?
There's something at the Royal Academy I want to see.
By 1783, George had 15 children.
The older ones, particularly the Prince of Wales,
were causing him all sorts of trouble with their overspending
and their womanising.
But he really doted on the two littlest boys.
Tragically, George's toddler, two-year-old Alfred, died suddenly.
Then eight months later, four-year-old Octavius died too.
Infant death was common,
so you might think parents were used to dealing with this kind of loss.
This is such a poignant image.
It's an engraved copy of a painting George had done...
..to commemorate his two lost little boys.
This is Prince Alfred, who died first.
And he's in heaven already,
and he's welcoming in his brother, Prince Octavius.
Octavius dies.
And there's angels here to look after them both.
George had the original of this on the wall of his bedchamber,
so that when he woke up in the morning,
the first thing he'd see were his lost sons.
That alone, I think,
speaks volumes about what this loss meant to him.
It seems to me that this could have been a trigger
for his breakdown in 1788.
But to prove it, I need a window into George's mind.
You might think that's impossible.
But I've come to Kew Gardens, the playground of Octavius
and Alfred, to meet a professor who's doing something unique.
He's examining George's hallucinations and delusions.
How do you know what the King's delusions were?
Well, we have very few direct records of what the King says,
but we do have what the pages and attendants who are looking
after the King when he was asleep or in the night,
told the doctors the next morning.
From those you get these often very brief references to things
that he is said to have believed or imagined, but which, when you put
them all together, it's quite a substantial body of material
that just lets you see inside the King's mind, really.
And do you think you can see evidence of specific trauma,
bad things that happened to him in his life, that you see sort of
being processed through these delusions?
Well, there are particular incidents relating to his children.
He was a very devoted father.
And when they were lost at different phases of his life,
they then reappear to him in his delusions,
in really very moving ways, actually.
What sort of delusions is he having about his lost children?
There's a very particularly moving incident that takes place
on Christmas Eve 1788.
So this particular night, what the King recalled is
thinking that the pillow of his bed is Octavius
and he has come back... Oh! This is so awfully sad.
It's all then described here.
It says he had the pillow in the bed with him, which he called
Prince Octavius,
who he said was to be new born this day.
The reason this is so upsetting is because you just have the image
of him holding the pillow like it was the baby.
Yeah, that's the recurring trope, actually, for the King,
because when his daughter Amelia dies from TB,
after she's dead, he begins to imagine having conversations
with her, and that she's had holes drilled in her coffin
and in fact survived burial and has come back to talk to him after that.
That's a very strange delusion, which, again,
echoes this earlier incident with Octavius.
The fact that this comes up in his delusions, not only in this illness,
but in his later illness too, suggest that that's the trigger.
Arthur, do you feel that this research is giving you
a really extraordinary insight into the mind of a king?
There's a sense in which one of the things that's happening to him
in his illness is he becomes disinhibited and will actually
perhaps articulate things that he otherwise
has been suppressing or repressing in his mind.
And in a way, it's his illness, it's his so-called madness,
that allows us to know him. Absolutely.
We don't get to those bits of his mind otherwise.
I've been left feeling really sad about what Arthur
had to say about George's love for his children
and his grief for their loss.
It's easy to forget that he wasn't just a king,
he was also a human being.
The death of these children was not marked by formal court mourning.
They were considered too young.
So George doesn't have this as a way to help him process his loss.
He represses his grief
and it clearly festers, bursting out during episodes of mania.
It's clear to me there's concrete evidence of personal trauma,
which could have triggered a bipolar episode.
But I also want to look at the political pressures on George, too.
I know this was a tricky time to lead a country.
George was staring down the barrel of a new world order.
An account of the rise and progress of the late tumult.
Dead bodies in the streets of London.
This is serious stuff.
Newspaper headlines from the 1780s reveal a time of huge turmoil.
George decided to grant some new rights to Catholics.
Seemed like a generous and liberal thing to do,
but it went horribly wrong.
There were anti-Catholic riots and sectarian violence on the street.
This newspaper article here describes a Roman Catholic chapel
being set fire to, what they call "the mob" are out on the streets.
They're waving revolutionary flags, actually.
Things are on the brink of enormous trouble.
The 1780s weren't just an age of reason, but an age of revolution.
And it wasn't just Britain that was on the brink.
The King of France had faced an assassination attempt,
and the American War of Independence was coming to a head.
Here's Cornwallis, defeated at Yorktown,
doing the walk of shame.
They're taking down the British flag,
and they're putting up the American flag in its place.
So George would have hoped to have added to his empire,
but instead, he must have felt that he had effectively lost America.
These crises coincided with the start of the mass news era.
George had nowhere to hide. He was exposed.
And I found an extraordinary letter
which suggests George was afraid he was failing.
Now, this is just the most fascinating document
from the Royal Archives of 1782.
It's a letter that George III has drafted saying
that he's going to hand in his resignation.
"I am therefore resolved to resign my Crown."
Extraordinary. No king had abdicated for 1,000 years.
And just think of the huge stink that there was
when Edward VIII abdicated in the 20th century,
at a point when the monarchy was much less politically significant
than it was here in the 18th century.
George has clearly agonised over his decision.
There's all sorts of crossings out and underlinings in his letter.
And there's a real sense of alienation here
and disillusionment.
Now, he never actually sent his letter of resignation
to Parliament, but it shows the mind of a king in turmoil.
George is under extreme pressure to make monarchy work
in this new era.
He must evolve or perish.
George styled himself as a new, slightly more accessible
kind of a king.
His line was that he was going to listen to people's grievances
and respond to them.
Now, ordinary working people didn't have the vote,
but they could make political points through giving the King petitions.
They were able to take their problems straight to the top.
Crowds gathered at the gates of St James's Palace,
waving their petitions, begging the King for help.
And in August 1786, something happened
that I think must have increased the pressure
on his already vulnerable mind.
As it says in the newspaper,
"His Majesty was stepping out of his post chariot
"at the garden entrance to St James's..." Just over there.
"..when the attack was made upon his life.
"The woman by whom the desperate attempt was made,
"had been observed waiting for the King's arrival for some time."
The woman advanced from the crowd
and presented a paper folded in the form of...
When the woman aimed a blow with a knife at His Majesty's breast...
..Concealed in a piece of paper.
The knife cut the King's waistcoat.
The knife was instantly wrestled from the woman.
And he hastened into the palace.
"The woman was immediately taken into custody
"and on examination appears to be insane."
I'm fascinated by this assassination attempt,
when a mentally ill woman and a soon-to-be mentally ill king
came face to face.
Who was she and how did George react?
This is a woman called Margaret Nicholson.
She's a 36-year-old spinster
and needle woman.
And she felt that something needed to be done to improve her life,
so she petitions the King.
So she's writing him letters saying,
"Dear King, I want you to do this for me."
Yeah, well, you know, if only it was that clear.
What sort of things?
So here's one of Margaret's petitions.
She thought she was due a property settlement of some sort.
She thought she was due a decent marriage,
possibly to the King himself,
if only he'd rid himself of his ghastly foreign wife.
Do you think that she was suffering from
some sort of mental health issue?
Well, that's an interesting question.
She petitions the King something like 20 times
just between April and August of 1786, by her own testimony.
On 2nd August 1786, she's clearly had enough.
So she turns up one more time.
The King gets down out of his carriage,
she's ushered towards the King.
I expect they've all seen her before, they know who she is,
and she's got her little piece of paper again.
But the piece of paper this time conceals a dagger. Yeah.
And then immediately, and this is the interesting thing, I think,
he immediately says,
"The poor woman is mad, do not hurt her."
And we know he said that straight away
because just about two hours later,
one of the young pages who'd been attending the King testifies
these were the words the King used.
Do you think that when he gave this compassionate reaction
towards Margaret Nicholson, "don't hurt her",
do you think that he saw a fellow sufferer?
He immediately identifies what's wrong with her.
So even, whether or not, yeah, it's a little bit close to home
for him, or he recognises a fellow sufferer,
the incident provoked a huge public conversation in the newspaper press
and elsewhere about whether or not Margaret Nicholson was mad,
because if she's going to be put before a law court,
it's going to have to be on a charge of high treason.
George's words "do not hurt her" became iconic.
They were in newspapers, in print, it was wonderful PR for the King.
His compassion towards Margaret
brought mental illness into the open, but what happened to her?
Was she treated kindly, as he'd asked?
There's no evidence of a public trial, but there is a folder
in the National Archives with her name on it.
Margaret's case went right to the top.
It was the Privy Council, the King's advisers, who decided her fate.
Oh, yes!
Look at all of this!
So, it's clear that they've done a pretty thorough job.
They've examined Margaret herself. She has...
Oh, she's said here that she never meant to kill the King,
but just wanted to get his attention.
And they've also talked to her brother.
He says that she came to London 20 years ago
and that she'd worked as a housemaid.
But she'd been sacked from that job and she had been ill.
He says that she's been
"breaking out into fits of laughter in the night".
And the brother also says this, it's extraordinary.
He says that "reading Milton's Paradise Lost
"and such high-style books had contributed to turn her brain".
That's such an 18th-century thing, isn't it?
To imagine that reading fancy books can make a woman mad.
So, what are the Privy Council going to do?
What she'd done, an assassination attempt, was treason.
She could have faced the death penalty.
But they didn't go down that route.
So, instead, they turned to the Vagrancy Act and they used that
to have her shut up in Bethlem, better known as Bedlam.
This is Georgian England's most notorious madhouse.
They get her assessed by one of the doctors from Bedlam,
this is Dr John Monro,
and he says that never in his life had
he seen a person more disordered.
That's really quite a strong statement, isn't it,
from the man who runs England's most notorious madhouse,
that he's never seen a madder person than Margaret.
It makes you wonder if he's overstating the case,
so that they can all, with good conscience, lock her up.
And she's not the only one.
In November 1788, George succumbs to all the political
and personal pressure and becomes seriously ill.
After weeks of failed treatment,
his doctors take an unprecedented step and lock him up.
Not in Beldam, of course, but in Kew Palace.
The King's eldest son senses an opportunity to seize power.
He tells everyone his father is unfit to rule
and calls for a regency.
Daily bulletins are tied to the gates of Kew Palace,
but they are heavily censored
and don't explicitly mention madness. Speculation runs rife.
So, here we have two infamous so-called mad people,
a seamstress and a king,
tied together by this assassination attempt.
I'm so intrigued! And it was the same with the public back then.
They couldn't get enough of the story.
These are just a small snapshot of the many, many different images that
were being produced. A lot of the facts were few and far between
and a lot of embellishment was going on. So, here we have Margaret
in Bethlem... Oh, my goodness! Is that her there?
That's supposed to be her... Oh, wow! ..and this image is kind of
extraordinary. It shows this violent, strange, terrifying figure.
She's clutching straw. Straw is used as bedding
in asylums. Ah! She's kind of involved with these two figures,
two of the leading revolutionaries of the day.
So, here we've got rational masculinity... Mm!
..and here she is, looking...
Well, this is the archetype of the mad woman, having crazy hair.
Exactly. Kind of Medusa-style.
Yeah. Clearly, people are making money out of Margaret Nicholson.
Was there a real market for this? Absolutely.
Waxworks were being made, people would pay to see waxworks
and her lodgings were described as being besieged.
One I always find particularly fascinating is
the obsession around the knife.
Very quickly, it became common for enterprising innkeepers to
announce that they had the original knife and some of them
didn't have the knife, but they had a fork, which was the partner...
I particularly love the idea of, come to my pub,
where you will see the fork that went with the knife that might
have belonged to Margaret Nicholson. Absolutely! Absolutely.
When the King himself became ill,
how was he treated by this sort of media of the 18th century?
I think one of the really striking
and surprising things is that there was very little cultural
treatment of the King, so one of the very few images
we have of the King when he went mad is this one, Filial Piety,
and it shows the King looking perhaps ill,
but none of the kind of typical iconography around madness
is being applied to him.
On the left-hand side,
we have the Prince of Wales, who's sort of obviously drunk.
We've got the kind of political backdrop of the regency crisis
in 1788.
I suppose, here, what's really going on is that they're using
the situation to make the Prince of Wales look bad. Exactly.
The madness of the King is being downplayed.
I think it's a bit of a no-go area.
A mentally ill king is simply unmentionable,
so the press feeds the frenzy with Margaret instead.
She even becomes the star attraction at Bethlem, where the
upper classes come to ogle at the mentally ill.
A mad king is extraordinary, but if I want to understand
mental illness at the time,
I need to investigate Margaret's story, too.
These two statues are the very last surviving
bits of the Bethlem Hospital, where Margaret was incarcerated.
It was demolished in 1815.
They represent the different types of madness that people
believed existed in the 18th century.
This one is melancholy madness, he's calm and still,
and this one is raving madness, he's trying to burst out of his chains.
These two were over the entrance when Margaret arrived.
Not exactly a warm welcome.
In the 1780s, doctors still thought they could treat people with
mental illness by purging it from the body.
I'm hoping that Bethlem's archivist can help me
uncover the details of Margaret's treatment.
We actually have her admission record here,
which would have been created when she first came in to the hospital.
And we can see Margaret's name... Margaret Nicholson. There she is.
Do you know how they would have diagnosed her,
what sort of an illness they thought she had?
The hospital would have been split into male and female wings
and it would have been split into
melancholics and ravers. And where do you think...she fitted into that?
I mean, I think, generally, she's described as quite a quiet,
withdrawn patient, I think, a lot of the time, so I would be surprised
if she was moved apart from the melancholy patients.
These categories are not super subtle, are they?
No, they really aren't.
And what were the conditions like in the hospital?
They were probably not very good. So, people were bled,
people were given medication that would make them vomit
or purge themselves in other ways.
Mm. It was known round about this sort of time,
there's a new strain of thought that's saying this isn't working,
but Bethlem is still persisting in this.
So, is there some information about what happened next to Margaret?
Does she appear again?
Yes, so, we will see her again
in the Incurable Admissions Register,
so the Incurable Ward would have been the long-stay
section of Bethlem. You say that, but the name...
It's a very depressing thought. It is, yes! These are people who are...
Long stay. ..probably lifers... Mm. ..by this point.
It says, "A motion was made that Margaret Nicholson be no
"longer confined in her cell by a chain." Oh!
So... So, what year is... What year is this?
1791, so this is four years.
So, she's been in chains for four years.
She's regularly clapped in irons. Yes. Goodness me!
I'm thinking what this means.
Does this mean that the hospital committee have decided that
she's so peaceful
and not hurting herself that they don't need to bother doing that?
Yes. But what is also interesting in this is the implication that she
is well enough to be unchained,
but she is still in the Incurable Wing.
And that might be because she's this special patient,
what she did received national attention, therefore
the bar for her recovery is higher than it is for anybody else.
It also perhaps implies that the hospital has been told not to
release her... Not to release her. ..in any circumstance. Oof!
Mm. She has been, if you like, disposed of by the state.
It's pretty clear that at Bethlem,
they were still committed to doing things the old way.
Patients in cells, chains.
And it's rather devastating to think of Margaret being written off,
almost, with that word "incurable".
I found these old lantern slides in the archives.
This one is of Dr Thomas Monro.
It was his father who incarcerated Margaret
and Thomas takes over Bethlem from 1792.
Asylums like his were a law unto themselves.
Bethlem hadn't updated its treatment plan in 100 years.
But there was a new school of thought that mental illness
was an illness of the brain
that needed to be treated in its own way.
Some of these new ideas were to be found in this book.
It's the first proper book about madness as a mental illness.
It's called A Treatise On Madness by Dr William Battie.
This was really radical stuff,
and he suggested that it was wrong to chain up mentally ill people,
nor was he in favour of shock treatments,
things like making people vomit.
Instead, he proposed quiet and fresh air and exercise,
which sounds extraordinarily modern, doesn't it?
That's what people are still recommended to do to this day.
Battie's book was published in 1758,
so that's 30 years before the King got ill.
But it was George's illness
and Margaret's too that raised the profile of his work.
It went mainstream and people started to implement it.
So, while Margaret was written off as incurable,
did these new ideas reach George?
In winter 1788, George is delusional, aggressive,
sleepless, and time is running out.
A Regency Bill has been prepared.
If the King is not better in three months, his son will take over.
In December 1788, the Royal Family make a bold decision.
They summon a man called Francis Willis,
who runs a madhouse in rural Lincolnshire, to come here to Kew.
Private madhouses begin to spring up from the 1750s onwards,
as new treatments are pioneered.
Willis is one of a band of so-called "mad doctors",
or, to you and me, early psychiatrists.
Let me introduce you to Dr Francis Willis. I'm calling him Dr Willis,
but I do know that his contemporaries might not have
agreed with me in doing that
because they didn't yet have the idea of a doctor of the mind.
Members of the Royal College of Physicians, for example,
would have said, "No, he's just the keeper of a madhouse.
"We don't count him as one of us."
So, I think it's quite an exciting decision that the Royal Family
have called him in. It's a sign of how desperate they were, I think.
He's a maverick.
This is a make-or-break moment for him and his nascent profession.
There's no higher-profile patient than this.
What on earth is he going to do?!
George was treated by Willis here at Kew.
The King's tin bath still survives.
This source is key to what happened to him.
It's a diary by Francis Willis and his son, and they start off
explaining what the previous doctors had given the King.
The answer is really powerful sedatives.
Here, he's been prescribed "30 drops of laudanum".
Now, that is opium dissolved in alcohol.
It's not a sustainable strategy. It's not going to make him better.
It might even get him addicted.
It's kind of like prescribing the King heroin.
Willis decides to put a stop to this and he radically reduces the dosage.
He also makes a bold decision to treat George just as he would
any other patient in his asylum, and bend the King to his will.
Oh, wow!
I've got a straightjacket for you. My goodness!
What... It keeps on giving.
What is with these arms?! They're so long!
How does it work? Here's the back.
It buttons up the back, so you put your arms in like that... Yeah.
..and it's done up. And why are the sleeves so immensely long?
So you put your arms in there... Yes. ..and then you hug yourself
and then you get tied round the back.
Oh! So it forces you to go like this, to give yourself a hug.
Yes. Once you've no longer got the use of your hands, your flight
and fight mode is turned off,
so that it could then support you to calm yourself down.
I was expecting something...barbaric,
something that was to do with restraint.
Compared to the manacles, which was what people were using before,
this is really soft. Oh! This is a big step forward.
Certainly, when I first looked at this,
I had the same feelings as yourself, it's like really scary
and the idea of being, you know, tied up, really.
But this is a treatment and most illnesses, you know,
most treatments are scary.
Let me show you some of the ways in which Dr Willis used
the straightjacket.
Well, he doesn't actually call it a straightjacket.
"The strait waistcoat was taken off from His Majesty at morning
"yesterday, but was put on again soon after two o'clock
"and was not taken off till nine this morning."
Goodness me!
So, he was kept in his strait waistcoat for the whole
of this particular night. Nowadays,
we use drugs and it's a chemical restraint. Yeah.
But sometimes, that's not appropriate either,
cos it's just treating the symptom,
it's not allowing your brain to rebalance and sort itself out.
That's really interesting that you're using the word
"rebalance the brain".
That's the language that Francis Willis used in the 18th century.
Now, even if Francis Willis had the best intentions
in the world, I do feel sorry for the poor King
because it says here "they beat me like a madman".
The King doesn't escape the brutal remedies of purges
and ice-cold baths, but there were also new ideas at play.
Willis is clearly picking up on the progressive
approach of William Battie.
While Margaret in Bethlem is chained and left to rot,
Willis is encouraging George at Kew to take the air.
And even though George does try to scale the giant pagoda,
a 50-metre structure,
Willis is confident his strategy is having some success.
If you leave it untreated,
an episode of mania can last between days or months,
and to this day, doctors don't really know why they come to an end.
But on 26th February 1789,
a bulletin appeared on the gates of Kew Palace.
Three months after he'd arrived, Dr Willis was able to announce
the entire cessation of His Majesty's illness.
It could be that the King's bipolar episode has simply run its course.
But it does appear that the King's been restored to
health by Dr Willis,
and not a moment too soon. The Regency Bill is only days away.
After months of political uncertainty,
George is ready once again to be king.
On St George's Day, there was a huge celebration of the King's
recovery here at St Paul's Cathedral.
Now, the Archbishop of Canterbury recommended that
George himself shouldn't attend.
He thought the excitement might bring on a relapse.
But George had other ideas. He said, "No, I'm going.
"My Lord," he said to the Archbishop of Canterbury,
"I have twice read over the evidence of the physicians on my case,
"and if I can stand that, I can stand anything."
Thousands lined the route to St Paul's,
and medals were struck to commemorate the occasion.
And here is one of them.
They're not actually that hard to find, cos so many of them were made.
This one came off eBay.
And on one side, we've got George's little face. There he is,
looking alive and well,
and on the back, the exciting story of what's happened.
It says, "Lost to Britannia's hope, but to her prayers restored."
Having a mentally fragile king appears not to have
destabilised the nation.
If anything, it humanised him in the eyes of his people.
The irony is that King George III was virtually the only
monarch left standing in Europe by the end of the 18th century.
But the story doesn't end there. There's another medal.
Dr Willis had his own medals struck. He paid for these himself.
They're different grades. This is the cheaper copper version.
And this is the deluxe shiny tin model.
We've got a picture of Dr Willis on the front and on the back, it says,
"Britons rejoice, your King's restored."
The message is, "I'm Dr Willis, I restored him."
It's the most fantastic bit of self-promotion.
A bit like an advert, really,
for this man you might almost call a psychiatrist.
And I think the significance is that this profession
of psychiatry is coming out of the shadows, it's getting respectable.
This is its moment of triumph, if you like,
captured in tin.
George may be restored to health, but Margaret gets no medal
and no redemption.
It would be 25 years before the government started to concern
itself with the horrific conditions inside public asylums.
During that time, the King did relapse in 1801 and 1804.
He convalesced for a while in the home of a friend,
an MP named George Rose.
Witnessing George's illness helped galvanise Rose and, in 1815,
he led a select committee, charged with investigating Bethlem.
These are the minutes of this parliamentary committee
that's looking into the "better regulation of madhouses in England".
They're calling all sorts of witnesses to give evidence
and a very dark picture is being painted
of existing conditions.
This part's really distressing.
We've got a witness who's seen "unfortunate women locked
"up in their cells, naked and chained, on straw,
"with just one blanket for a covering".
Now, George Rose clearly suspects that there have been
male keepers looking after female patients, which is
inappropriate, power could have been abused here.
And he's really going after Dr Monro,
who's in charge of the Bethlem Hospital.
Dr Monro says, "In Bethlem, the restraint is by chains.
"There is no such thing as chains in my private mental hospital."
And he's asked about this. Why the difference in standard?
And Dr Monro says,
"Well, it's because chains are fit only for pauper lunatics."
Isn't that shocking?
He says, "If a gentleman was put in irons, he would not like it."
Too right!
I don't think Dr Monro realised how much
he was going to damn himself by this statement. It caused a scandal.
People were offended by this idea of a double standard
for rich and for poor.
The fallout of this was so bad that Dr Monro had to resign.
This committee exposed the sexual abuse
and excessive restraint that had been rife for decades.
It was a watershed moment, a process of reform had begun.
Fearing further censure,
Bethlem started keeping individual patient notes.
Now, these books are from after 1815,
when they had to keep fuller records.
So I'm really hoping these might shed some more light on Margaret.
Because of the King's illness, and the reform that followed,
I can now at least find her in the records.
Oh, look at this!
It's progress reports,
in 1816,
1817, 1819...
By this time, she's been in the hospital for nearly 30 years.
It says here she's now in "an advanced stage of her life
"and is perfectly deaf.
"She's decent in her appearance and quiet and civil in her demeanour."
It sounds to me like she's better.
And then the records stop.
It's really fantastic to get a glimpse of a real person here.
And she doesn't seem like
either a criminal or a patient any more. She's just a quiet old lady.
Do you know what? I've got a little tear in my eye.
Reform really came too late for Margaret Nicholson.
She was incarcerated in Bethlem for 42 years
and died on 14th May 1828.
George III was suffering from chronic mania and dementia
when he died on 29th January 1820.
This encounter between George and Margaret
happened at...
In fact, it fed into this key moment of change for the science
of psychiatry
and for the reform of psychiatric asylums.
There's still so much more to learn about the complexities
of mental illness, but this was the starting point.