Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  One difficulty when writing the play was how to furnish the audience with sufficient information about the political set-up at the end of the eighteenth century for them to understand why the illness of the King threatened the survival of the government. Nowadays, of course, it wouldn’t, and the fact that there were seemingly two parties, Tories and Whigs, could mislead an audience into thinking that nowadays and those days are much the same.

  What has to be understood is that in 1788 the monarch was still the engine of the nation. The King would choose as his chief minister a politician who could muster enough support in the House of Commons to give him a majority. Today it is the other way round: the majority in the Commons determines the choice of Prime Minister. Though this sometimes seemed to be the case even in the eighteenth century, a minister imposed on the King by Parliament could not last long: this was why George III so much resented Fox, who was briefly his Prime Minister following a disreputable coalition with North in 1783. All governments were to some degree coalitions, and a majority in the Commons did not reflect some overall victory by Whigs or Tories in a general election. Leading figures in Parliament had their groups of supporters; there were Pittites, Foxites, Rock-ingham Whigs and Grenvilles, who voted as their patron voted. A ministry was put together, a majority accumulated out of an alliance of various groups, and what maintained that alliance was the uninterrupted flow of political patronage, the network of offices and appointments available to those running the administration. In the play Sir Boothby Skrymshir and his nephew Ramsden are a ridiculous pair, but, as Sheridan says (though the phrase was actually used by Fox), they are the ‘marketable flotsam’ out of which a majority was constructed. At the head of the pyramid was the King. All appointments flowed from him. If he was incapacitated and his powers transferred to his son, support for the ministry would dwindle because the flow of patronage had stopped. If the King was mad, it would not be long before the Ins were Out.

  As I struggled to mince these chunks of information into credible morsels of dialogue (the danger always being that characters are telling each other what they know in their bones), I often felt it would have been simpler to call the audience in a quarter of an hour early and give them a short curtain lecture on the nature of eighteenth-century politics before getting on with the play proper.

  The characters are largely historical. Margaret Nicholson’s attempt on the King’s life was in 1786, not just before his illness as in the play; but it is certainly true, as the King remarks, that in France she would not have got off so lightly. As it was, she lived on in Bedlam long after the witnesses to her deed were dead, surviving until the eve of the accession of George III’s granddaughter, Queen Victoria.

  I thought I had invented Fitzroy but discover that in 1801 George III had an aide-de-camp of this name, who was later the heart-throb of the King’s youngest daughter, Amelia. He was ‘generally admitted to be good-looking in a rather wooden sort of way, he had neither dash nor charm and seems to have been on the frigid side into the bargain,’ which describes our Fitzroy exactly. That he was playing a double game and was an intimate of the Prince of Wales is my invention.

  Greville is a historical character, his diary one of the most important sources for the history of the royal malady. However, Greville was not in attendance throughout as he is in the play. A fair-minded though conventional man, and clear-sighted where the King’s illness was concerned (and often appalled at its treatment), Greville along with the King’s other attendants was excluded when Dr Willis, ‘the mad doctor’, took on the case. Willis brought with him some of his own staff, presumably from his asylum at Greatham in Lincolnshire, and took on other heavies in London. In the play they appear only once, when the restraining-chair is brought in at the end of the first act, but in fact they remained at Windsor and Kew in constant attendance on the King until Willis eventually went back north. This was not, as in the play, immediately before the thanksgiving service in June 1789, but some months later.

  The number of physicians attending the King varied. They were known as the ‘London doctors’, to distinguish them from Dr Willis and his son. I have restricted them to three, but there may have been as many as ten. Nor have I included Willis’s son, who was also a doctor and in charge of the King during his next attack in 1802.

  The pages who in the play bear so much of the burden of the King’s illness were probably older than I have made them, the youngest and kindest, Papandiek, being the King’s barber, with his wife another of those who kept a diary of this much journalized episode. Some pages were sacked when the King recovered, because ‘from the manner in which they had been obliged to attend on Him during the illness, they had obtained a sort of familiarity which now would not be pleasing to Him.’ However, these were not Papandiek and Braun. In the play depicted as a heartless creature, Braun was in fact one of the King’s favourites, and still in his service ten years later. The other page, Fortnum, left to found the grocer’s, and in the seventies, I remember, one used to be accosted in the store in far-from-eighteenth-century language by two bewigged figures, Mr Fortnum and Mr Mason – actually two unemployed actors.

  I found the Opposition (an anachronistic phrase for which there is no convenient substitute) much harder to write than the government. ‘What can they do?’ Nicholas Hytner would ask, which is the same question of course that Opposition politicians are always having to ask themselves, even today. Pitt, Dundas and Thurlow carry on the government; Fox, Sheridan and Burke can only talk about the day when they might have the government to carry on. And drink, of course. But, as the King says, ‘they all drink.’ Pitt was frequently drunk before a big speech, and on one occasion was sick behind the Speaker’s chair.

  With Pitt I had first to rid myself of the picture I retained of him from childhood, when I saw Korda’s wartime propaganda film The Young Mr Pitt. Robert Donat was Pitt, kitted out with a kindly housekeeper, adoring chums and maybe even a girlfriend. At one point in the play he talks of when he was a boy, though boy he never really was, brought up by his father to be Prime Minister, destined always for ‘the first employments’. The son, the nephew and the first cousin of Prime Ministers, the only commoner in a Cabinet of peers, perhaps he was arrogant – but no wonder. Long, lank and awkward, he made a wonderful caricature, and if he was the first Prime Minister in the sense we understand it today it was because, as Pares says, the cartoonists made him so.

  Pitt’s career ran in tandem with that of Fox, though Fox was the older man. Meeting the boy Pitt, he seems to have had a premonition that here was his destiny. They are such inveterate and complementary opposites – Pitt cold, distant and calculating; Fox warm, convivial and impulsive – that they are almost archetypes: save or squander, hoard or spend, Gladstone and Disraeli, Robespierre and Danton, Eliot and Pound. Pitt had his disciples, but Fox, for all his inconsistencies and political folly, was genuinely loved, even by his opponents (though never by the King). His oratory was spellbinding, as Pitt ruefully acknowledged (‘Ah,’ he said to one of Fox’s critics, ‘but you have never been under the wand of the magician’). Burke, whom posterity remembers as a great orator, was in his day considered a bore, his speeches often ludicrously over the top, and known as ‘the dinner bell’ because when he rose to speak he regularly emptied the House.

  Fox had charm, even at his lowest ebb. ‘I have led a sad life,’ he wrote to his mistress:

  sitting up late, always either at the House of Commons or gaming, and losing my money every night that I have played. Getting up late, of course, and finding people in my room so that I have never had the morning time to myself, and have gone out as soon as I could, though generally very late, to get rid of them, so that I have scarce ever had a moment to write. You have heard how poor a figure we made in numbers on the slave trade, but I spoke I believe very well … and it is a cause in which one cannot help being pleased with oneself for having done right.

  Baffled as to how to convey Fox’s charm, I included much of this letter
in the first draft of the play, the speech originally part of the much altered final scene. ‘A danger this is becoming Fox’s story,’ noted Nicholas Hytner, so I took it out again.

  I made Sheridan a man of business, a manager of the House, and he was certainly more canny than Fox, whom he regularly scolded and who, he always said, treated him as if he were a swindler. I began by peppering his speeches with self-quotation, which is never a wise move. I had done the same with Orton in an early draft of the screenplay of Prick Up Your Ears, and that hadn’t worked either; one thinks, too, of all the movies about Wilde in which he talks in epigrams throughout. There was originally a parody of the screen scene in School for Scandal, in which the Prince of Wales and his doctor are discovered hiding from the King. It had some basis in fact, but it was an early casualty. I give him two shots at explaining it, but what I find hard to understand is why, having made a name for himself in the theatre, Sheridan should have wanted to go into politics at all. On the rare occasions I have talked to politicians I have found myself condescended to because I’m not ‘in the know’. (Political journalists and civil servants do it too.) So perhaps that was part of it. Poor Sheridan never quite managed to be one of the boys, even in death. In Westminster Abbey, Pitt, Fox and Burke are buried clubbily together, whereas Sheridan has landed up next to Garrick. His distaste for this location wa another casualty of the final scene of the play. Of course what really wanted to include, but didn’t dare, was the playwright’ bane: a conversation (with Thurlow, it would be), beginning ‘Anything in the pipeline, Sheridan?’

  26 Camden Town, 1982

  27 An Englishman Abroad, Dundee, 1983, Coral Browne and Alan Bates

  28 An Englishman Abroad (left to right: Alan Bates, Bates, Innes Lloyd, Ken Pearce, A. B. and John Schlesinger)

  29 Kafka’s Dick, Royal Court Theatre, September 1986 (left to right: Andrew Sachs, Jim Broadbent, Roger Lloyd Pack, Geoffrey Palmer)

  30 Kafka’s Dick, Jim Broadbent and Roger Lloyd Pack

  31 A Private Function, Barnoldswick, May 1984 (left to right: A. B., Denholm Elliott, Bernard Wrigley, John Normington, Richard Griffiths, Michael Palin)

  32 A Private Function, Bradford Art School (left to right: A. B., Maggie Smith, Michael Palin)

  33 A Private function, Ilkley, With Betty

  34 Keith McNally and Russell Harty, New York, 1979

  35 With Craig Raine, Sue Townsend and the Orel writers, USSR, May 1988

  36 and 37 Miss Shepherd, 1988

  38 With Simon Callow rehearsing A Question of Attribution, Royal National Theatre, November 1988

  Dundas was much older than I have made him, but, dramatically, Pitt needs a friend or else he would never unburden himself at all. Thurlow, foul-tongued and ‘lazy as a toad at the bottom of a well’, was well known to be a twister. When he made the speech on the King’s recovery, quoted in the play – ‘And when I forget my sovereign, may God forget me’ – Wilkes, who was seated on the steps of the throne, remarked, ‘God forget you? He’ll see you damned first!’

  Queen Charlotte was every bit as homely and parsimonious as she’s presented, stamping the leftover pats of butter with her signet so that they would not be eaten by the servants. Her name is preserved in Apple Charlotte, a recipe that uses up stale bread. I thought I had caught her rather well until Janet Dale, who was playing her, said that the game little wife was a part to which she was no stranger: not long ago it was the first Mrs Orwell, and more recently Mrs Walesa. ‘“Have another cup of tea, Lech, and let Solidarity take care of itself …” Solidarity, Animal Farm or porphyria, I’m always the plucky little woman married to a hubby with problems.’

  There are some fortuitous parallels with contemporary politics; and had the play been written before the downfall of Mrs Thatcher there would have been more. Pitt’s ‘kitchen principles’ were not dissimilar to hers, and one can see that Dundas having Willis redraft the bulletin while Pitt keeps his hands clean is reminiscent of Mrs Thatcher’s conduct in the Westland affair. Thinking that the Regency Bill must pass and that he faces imminent dismissal, Pitt says that he needs five more years.* The audience laughs. But what politician doesn’t? Pitt of course got them, but what he actually meant was five more years of peace, and these he didn’t get. Mrs Thatcher’s fortunes were made by a war that came just in time, Pitt’s ruined by a war which (as Fox thought) should not have come at all. The audience applauds again when Pitt, reviewing his seemingly bleak future, says that having been Prime Minister he does not now intend to sit on the back benches and carp. This isn’t an easy gibe at Mr Heath, for whom I’ve got some sympathy. Pitt had always aspired to be Prime Minister, but on his own terms; in 1783 he had even refused the King’s invitation to form a ministry because he was not yet ready; defeated, he would never have played second fiddle to anybody.

  Any account of politics, whatever the period, must throw up contemporary parallels. I think if I had deliberately made more of these it would have satisfied or pandered to some critics who felt that that was what the play should have been more about. But it is about the madness of George III – the rest amusing, intriguing, but incidental. Mention of the critics, though, reminds me that one of the jokes when we were rehearsing the play was that it would take audiences ten minutes to reconcile themselves to the fact that it wasn’t set in Halifax. Such jokes tempt fate, and I’m told that the critic of the Independent spent most of his notice regretting that it wasn’t more Trouble at t’Mill.

  Though I have known sufferers from severe depression, I have had little experience of mental illness or of the discourse of the mentally ill, since depression, though it can lead to delusions, doesn’t disorder speech. Of course, as Greville cautions Willis in the play, the King’s discourse is slightly disordered to begin with, not normal anyway, and his idiosyn-cratic utterance has to be established in the audience’s mind before it gets more hurried and compulsive and he starts to go off the rails. Even then Willis has to tread warily, because behaviour which in an ordinary person would be considered unbalanced (talking of oneself in the third person, for instance) is perfectly proper in the monarch. Some of the contents of the King’s mad speech I cribbed from contemporary sources, such as John Haslam’s Illustrations of Madness, an account of James Tilly Matthews, a patient in Bethlem Hospital in 1810. Other features of the King’s mad talk – his elaborate circumlocutions (a chair ‘an article for sitting in’), for instance – are characteristic of schizophrenic speech.

  What was plain quite early on was that where mad talk was concerned a little went a long way; that while it is interesting to see the King going mad, and a great relief to see him recover, when he is completely mad and not making any sense at all he is of no dramatic consequence. Since what he is saying is irrational it cannot affect the outcome of things, and so is likely to be ignored: thus an audience will attend to what is being done to the King but not to what he is saying. There was also a difficulty with the sheer quantity of the King’s discourse (on one occasion he was reported as talking continuously for nine hours at a stretch). Two minutes’ drivel, however felicitously phrased, is enough to make an audience restive, and, though what the King is saying is never quite drivel, the volume of it has to be taken down to allow other characters to speak across him – subject sense taking precedence over regal nonsense. Of course speech is not the half of it, and without Nigel Hawthorne’s transcendent performance the King could have been just a gabbling bore and his fate a matter of indifference. As it is, the performance made him such a human and sympathetic figure the audience saw the whole play through his eyes.

  The final scene of the play proved the most difficult to get right. I knew from the start that the play must end at St Paul’s, when the nation gave thanks for the King’s return to health. As originally written, the doctors emerged still quarrelling as to who deserved the credit for their patient’s recovery. Then Dr Richard Hunter, joint author of George III and the Mad Business, materialized in modern dress to tell the eighteenth-century doc
tors that they were all wrong anyway and that the King was not mad but suffering from porphyria. The discussion that followed was long and detailed – too much so for this stage of the play – and was made longer when the politicians emerged and started quarrelling too. Finally the King himself came out, found the doctors disagreeing over the body of the patient and the politicians disagreeing over the body of the state, said to hell with it all, and, taking his cue from Hunter, described how he would eventually end up mad anyway.

  Nigel Hawthorne felt, I think rightly, that he couldn’t step out of his character so easily and that if he did the audience would feel cheated. It was Roy Porter who suggested that Richard Hunter’s mother, Ida Macalpine, was as much responsible for George III and the Mad Business as her son and that in the interest of literary justice (and political correctness) she should be the voice of modern medicine. Accordingly I wrote the brief scene just before the finale where she explains to the sacked pages (who had been the only ones to take notice of the King’s blue piss) what this symptom meant. Whereas in a film one could deal with this explanation in the final credits, I felt at the time the play opened that the facts had to be set out and the matter settled within the play. Now I’m less sure, though the scene has a structural function as it enables the King and Queen to nip out of bed and into their togs ready for the finale.

  One ending I was fond of, though it was determinedly untheatrical, and perhaps just an elaborate way of saying that too many cooks spoil the broth; still, it’s the nearest I can get to extracting a message from the play. The King and Queen are left alone on the stage after the Thanksgiving Service and they sit down on the steps of St Paul’s and try to decide what lessons can be drawn from this unfortunate episode.