Free Royal Babylon by Karl Shaw

with forty-page suicide notes to get her to agree to marry him. When he became Prince Regent in February 1811 he suffered three epileptic fits; he was almost exactly the same age George III was when he had his first mysterious “attack.” In fact, many of his symptoms were uncannily similar to those experienced by his father, but he was always very careful to keep quiet about them. When he was given news of victory at Waterloo in 1815, he became hysterical and had to be tranquilized with a large quantity of brandy.
    Although he had never set foot abroad throughout the war with Napoleon and spent most of it cowering in his Brighton Pavilion, years later he would embarrass his ministers by claiming he had fought at Waterloo. He would also describe how he had helped to win the Battle of Salamanca by leading a charge of dragoons disguised as General Bock. A favorite anecdote washow he had ridden the horse Fleur-de-Lys in the Goodwood Cup, an astonishing claim given that he was so obese that he was incapable of mounting a horse at all without being lifted into the saddle with a complicated mechanism involving cranks, winches, platforms and rollers. Were these fantastic stories the lies of a drunken braggart, or were they, as Wellington and others believed, the fantasies of a madman?
    George IV was an incredibly thick-skinned individual. Most of the time his powers of self-delusion served him well because it helped him avoid the painful truth about his own massive unpopularity. He was, however, like Bavaria’s mad Ludwig II, uncharacteristically sensitive about speculation that he might be insane. When
The Sunday Times
speculated that he might be suffering from a hereditary mental illness, George went berserk. He demanded that the Attorney General prosecute them immediately and pressed the Home Secretary to treble the duty on all Sunday newspapers. He became increasingly paranoid about rumors that his father’s condition was hereditary.
    We can make informed guesses about the nature of George III’s illness because his medical history was written down in great detail, but this was not the case with George IV. Although he consistently feigned illness to get his own way, whenever he became genuinely ill the details were always deliberately hidden from the public. He banned royal health bulletins because, he said, they only led to gossip.
    At best, George IV’s brother King William IV, the former Duke of Clarence, was a transient eccentric who left no mark on the monarchy. Many of his contemporaries, however, were privately convinced that he was as mad as his father. He frequently made a fool of himself in the House of Lords withrambling, muddled speeches in defense of slavery and, perversely for a man with at least ten bastards, pious attacks on adulterers. Most of the politicians who had dealings with the ill-educated and boorish “Sailor King” were of the opinion that he was an inadequate and embarrassing old man who was completely out of his depth and should have been left at sea. A large minority, however, took the more serious view that his confused behavior was another sign of the hereditary family insanity.
QUEEN VICTORIA
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    William’s niece Queen Victoria displayed obvious signs of manic-depressive illness after the death of Prince Albert. Her mourning was so intense and her behavior so erratic that some of her ministers thought her ghoulish cult of Prince Albert was a sign of something more sinister and that she, like George III, had lost her mind. The widowed Queen contemplated suicide and then spent the best part of forty years wearing black mourning clothes. She once scolded her eldest son for writing to her on paper that had insufficiently thick black borders. The Queen retained all of Albert’s personal equerries and grooms to keep his rooms exactly as he had left them. Every evening hot water was taken to his chambers and fresh clothes were