by Alan Bennett
As always I find I’m pretty surplus to requirements, my only contribution a muttered suggestion to Nick Hytner that Rupert Graves’s ad lib ‘I’m fine, I’m fine’ would be more in period if he said, ‘It is no matter, no matter.’ I watch Nigel H. rehearse the pisspot scene, then walk round the garden with Mark Thompson before buying some plants on sale in the potting-shed and coming away. Except then I call in at the church, which is full of the sound of hoovering – a friendly grey-haired man, Welsh, who may be the vicar, though I don’t like to ask, seemingly vacuuming the altar. It’s the bats, he explains, the church being disputed territory between English Heritage, who want them expelled, and English Nature, who don’t. In the meantime he hoovers.
Unnoted in my diary were locations even more spectacular. The opening concert was shot in the Double Cube room at Wilton, where the handbell ringers give their somnolent rendering of Greensleeves‘(’Fascinating stuff!’ says the King) in front of the sumptuous backcloth of Van Dyck’s portrait of the Earl of Pembroke and his family. The Prince of Wales’s lodging were at Wilton and the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, where Wren’s Painted Hall was the setting for the second concert, when the King runs amok. The long gallery in which George III sees Pitt at the start of the film and its close, and down which Pitt bows himself endlessly out, is at Syon House, as was the Prince of Wales’s breakfast room. Arundel Castle doubled for Windsor. Medievalized around the same time, Arundel shares many of the features of its more familiar counterpart, though catch either of them on a wet day and they look like long-stay institutions for the criminally insane.
The title of the stage play is The Madness of George III and of the film The Madness of King George. This was a marketing decision: the American backers somewhat shamefacedly explained that the audience might think, seeing The Madness of George III, that they had missed out on The Madness of George and The Madness of George II, a survey having apparently shown that there were many moviegoers who came away from Kenneth Branagh’s film of Henry V wishing they had seen its four predecessors. Where this leaves The Third Man (or The Second Mrs Tanqueray) I’m not sure.
Many of the actors and actresses in the stage play took part in the film, though not always in the same roles. Nigel Hawthorne remained George III, and Julian Wadham Pitt, and two of the King’s doctors and two of his pages were the same on stage and on film. Even when this continuity wasn’t possible there was often a niche in the film for actors who had been displaced: Iain Mitchell, who played Sheridan on the stage, is the pig farmer (with terrible teeth) at the start of the film. Helen Mirren played Queen Charlotte, but Selina Cadell, who had played the Queen in the second National Theatre production, became Mrs Cordwell, a patient in Dr Willis’s Lincolnshire asylum who lost her wits when her sea-captain husband was drowned off the Goodwin Sands. The scene in the asylum was originally much longer, with the patients due to be played by some of our leading stage directors, including Richard Eyre, Sam Mendes and Declan Donnellan. The directors proved, of course, much more temperamental and hard to please than actors and one by one got cold feet, leaving only Stephen Daldry gamely plying a lonely sickle. Alas for his loyalty, his scene was one of the earliest cuts.
The marriage of the Prince of Wales to Mrs Maria Fitzherbert comes into the film as it didn’t into the play. The Prince had married her secretly (in her own drawing-room) in 1785, really in order to satisfy Mrs Fitzherbert’s Catholic conscience, as she refused to sleep with him otherwise. Valid in the eyes of her Church, the marriage was always invalid in legal and constitutional terms, as the Prince could not marry without his father’s permission and if he married a Catholic he forfeited his right to the throne. Not that this mattered to Mrs Fitzherbert, who – sensible woman that she was – had no interest in the throne anyway. No one has a wrong word for her: sweet-natured, amiable and no great beauty, she was received at court and was on good terms with the King and Queen, both of them seemingly in no doubt about her relation to the Prince. However, when, early in 1787, the existence of the marriage was raised in Parliament, the Prince of Wales denied it even to his friend Fox, who, believing him, stood up in the Commons and denied it too. Not surprisingly, Mrs Fitzherbert was very cross and, though she forgave the Prince, she never forgave Fox, who in turn found it hard to forgive the Prince.
All this had blown over by the time George III became ill late in 1788, and the marriage played no part in what came to be called the Regency Crisis. In my script it does, partly because the plot needed thickening and also because I wanted Mrs Fitzherbert to have her own story and not just be sitting around as the companion of the Prince. At the end of the film the Prince is seen to have rejected Mrs Fitzherbert, but in fact they lived together openly for another fourteen years, even after the Prince’s marriage (legal but disastrous) to Princess Caroline of Brunswick. Rejection, when it did come in 1803, was as crude and brutal as royal behaviour often is, recalling the unfeeling-ness with which a later Prince of Wales, having met Mrs Simpson, briskly put aside his long-time mistress, Mrs Dudley-Ward. Sometimes it’s as if royalty know about good behaviour by hearsay and can give only a faulty imitation of it, or, as Willis remarks before meeting the King, ‘Deferred to, agreed with, acquiesced in. Who can flourish on such a daily diet of compliance? To be curbed, stood up to, in a word thwarted, exercises the character, elasticates the spirit, makes it more pliant. It is the want of such exercise that makes rulers rigid.’ Or spoiled, as Nanny would say.
In general the Prince of Wales is more forceful and more of a villain in the film than he was on the stage or in life. There’s no doubt that he was anxious to be made Regent, but he was more careful of appearances than I have made him and was more governed too by that fellow-feeling all royals have for each other. The Prince of Wales, for instance, was understandably sensitive to any suggestions, particularly in the press, that his father was mad. For a subject to remark on the King’s state of mind seemed to the Prince insolent and intolerable. Or sometimes seemed to him insolent and intolerable. For the Prince himself to make such a suggestion (and to make jokes on the subject) was permissible, and permissible for his cronies too, a lot of the time. But suddenly they would find they had gone too far, the Prince would get on his high royal horse again, and his friends would have to mind their p’s and q’s for a bit. It’s a characteristic of royalty that one minute they are happy to masquerade as ordinary persons and the next they demand to be treated as a race apart. Like the rest of us, I suppose, they just want things both ways, but this ‘Now you “Sir” me, now you don’t’ must make intimacy with royalty a little wearing, and friendship with them must always involve an element of Grandmother’s Footsteps. Like Fitzroy, courtiers must learn to be pretty surefooted, with little hope of ever being ‘natural’, the ideal being somewhere between those who can’t forget the royals’ highness (and so are stilted) and those who forget it altogether (and so are cheeky).
These reservations apart, I found I was less sceptical about the monarchy as an institution than my colleagues on the production team, partly because (and slightly to my surprise) I was older than most of them and more set in my ways. Certainly I’m no republican and find nothing particularly extraordinary in the difficulties and embarrassments of the present Prince of Wales. It’s a role, after all, which has seldom been satisfactorily filled; I suppose George V was good enough at it, but he was a dull man who was heir-apparent for a relatively short time, acceding to the position on the unexpected death of his much less suitable elder brother for whom no one had a good word, some even identifying him with Jack the Ripper. (Even the Sun hasn’t managed to insinuate that Prince Charles is a serial killer.) But when the Prince of Wales in the film says that to be heir to the throne is not a position, it is a predicament, it’s meant to be both a cry from the heart and a statement of an obvious truth.
Given my royalist inclinations, I haven’t followed the goings-on over the break-up of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, or read any of the literature it has oc
casioned. I don’t say this prissily. In my own circle of friends divorce dismays me for entirely selfish reasons: it alters the social landscape in unpredictable ways, curtailing friendships, shutting down havens, and generally making life less comfortable. The Prince of Wales’s marriage, I need hardly add, does not impinge in quite this way, but like everything to do with the monarchy I’d just like to be able to take it for granted as one used to do. I don’t want to have to think about it. I just want it to be there.
However, I would like to tiptoe into a royal bedroom if only to see how far, when one party is royal and the other not, the game of Grandmother’s Footsteps still goes on between the sheets. At what point is rank suspended and royalty discontinued, and is the subject, even when forgetting him/herself utterly, still obliged to remember his/her place? Toiling over that regal eminence, I can imagine Edward VII’s mistresses still feeling constrained to call him ‘Sir’, and without their ‘Sir’ or ‘Ma’am’ royals may feel too naked altogether. Though maybe the discarding of this last rag of distinction gives them a thrill denied to the rest of us who, when we have no clothes on, have nothing left to take off. More reports please.
The parallels with today’s monarchy were largely unsought, but they became more obvious as the film proceeds, the final shot of St Paul’s consciously recalling the television coverage of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales. (On the other hand, if one is going to film the entry into St Paul’s, there is only one place from which to do it; television chose it and so did we.)
Still, the conversation as the royal family pauses at the top of the steps to acknowledge the crowds has acquired a resonance it did not quite have when the play was written in 1991.
‘We must try to be more of a family,’ says the King. ‘There are model farms now, model villages, even model factories. Well, we must be a model family for the nation to look to.’
‘But, Pa,’ complains the Prince of Wales, ‘I want something to do.’
‘Follow in my footsteps,’ says his unfeeling father. ‘That is what you should do. Smile at the people. Wave to them. Let them see we are happy! That is why we are here.’
George III has a bad reputation in the United States, because he is thought of as the king who caused the War of Independence. Were this true (which it isn’t), then he could be said to have earned America’s gratitude: if without him there would have been no war, there would also have been no United States (or they would at least have been postponed). By the same token I always feel Judas deserves some sort of slap on the back, because without him Christianity would never have got off the ground.
By 1788, as Pitt says in one version of the stage play, ‘America is over’, meaning not merely the war but the relevance of America as a factor in English politics. In the shake-up of parliamentary allegiances brought about by the war Pitt had sided with Fox against the King and Lord North. This so rankled with George III that he would not leave the subject alone, to the extent that when at the King’s request Pitt formed a ministry in 1782 he made it a condition the King would not mention America. So when at the outset of his illness the King starts to ‘harp on about America’ it is a sign that the royal self-control is beginning to break down.
Fox was temperamentally drawn to the colonists, Pitt less so, but neither was in sympathy with the King’s view that the colonies were an inalienable estate and part of his royal patrimony. The King’s attitude has echoes today, with the monarch much more wedded to the idea of the Commonwealth than is the Prime Minister: it was one of the points of difference between the Queen and Mrs Thatcher, who probably found Her Majesty every bit as intractable on the subject as Pitt did George III. In the language of the higher Civil Service, George III was ‘a bit of a loose cannon’; one never knew what he would be up to (and into) next. At the end of the eighteenth century the monarch was, of course, less circumscribed than today, and constitutional practice still permitted the crown a good deal of freedom, and it wasn’t a freedom George III was prepared to share.
KING: When people in Parliament oppose, go against my wishes, I still find it very vexing. Try as I can, it seems to me disloyalty.
PITT: Your Majesty should not take it so personally.
KING: Not take it personally? But I’m King. This is my Government. How else should I take it but personally?
PITT: The Whigs believe it is their duty to oppose you, sir.
KING: Duty? Duty? What sort of duty is that?
It was a duty to the future, in fact, as the idea of an Opposition that was legitimate and not simply bloody–minded was only just beginning to emerge. I have made Pitt say, ‘The King will do as he’s told.’ That’s a bit in the future too, as it was quite hard, until his health began to fail, to tell George III anything – he was far too conscientious and well-informed for that. Certainly had he been less dutiful, less busy, he would have been less trouble to the politicians and perhaps to himself, as some at least of his mental torment can be put down to the frustration of a conscientious nature. ‘Cork too tight in the bottle,’ says Dundas. ‘The man has to break out somehow.’
Whether America played any part in causing his ‘breaking out’, it would be hard to say. He never wanted to be opposed, and to be contradicted as ordinary mortals were was, as Willis says, one of the lessons he had to learn. Certainly after his illness he was able to swallow America as he could not before, and he learned to be more sly – neatly reversing Pitt’s embargo on mentioning America by making Pitt promise that he in his turn would not mention, still less propose, Catholic emancipation.
KING: As for the future, Mr Pitt, you are not to disagree with me on anything, what? My mind is not strong enough to stand it.
PITT: (Drily) I will do my duty, sir.
Whether or not George III was suffering from the metabolic disease porphyria remains an open question. In their book George III and the Mad Business (1969), Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter argue convincingly for this retrospective diagnosis on the strength of the purple tinge the King’s urine took on while he was ill. Less convincingly, they trace the supposed incidence of the disease in other royals, nipping up and down George III’s family tree, attributing no end of assorted ailments to the same cause. So Mary Queen of Scots was said to have had the condition, and her son James I, Queen Anne, George IV and even Frederick the Great. Although Hunter and Macalpine suggest that George IV’s brother, the Duke of Kent, was similarly affected, the condition does not seem to have been passed on to his daughter, Queen Victoria, so the (rather heartless) joke of the final caption probably has no substance.
The condition presents problems that are as much metaphy-sical as medical. If porphyria is a metabolic disease, the symptoms of which are similar to, and which even today can be mistaken for, those of mental illness, in what sense is a sufferer from porphyria different from someone who is more routinely deranged? In what sense is all mental illness physical in origin? These are large questions, and I didn’t want to venture into what is both a swamp and a battlefield but felt that I needed at least to show that I was aware of the problem. Hence this exchange between Greville and Dr Willis:
GREVILLE: Do you think His Majesty is mad? Sometimes he seems … just … ill.
[The dots indicate my opacities as much as Greville’s.]
WILLIS: Perhaps. But he has all the symptoms of madness.
GREVILLE: So what is the difference?
WILLIS: I am a doctor, Mr Greville, not a philosopher.
‘And this is a film,’ he might have added. ‘And I’ve not been got up in a bob wig and black silk stockings just to safeguard the intellectual credentials of the author.’ So the exchange was, of course, cut.
There had to be some sort of explanation, though, if only because of the scenes involving the urine. But since it was only identified in the 1930s porphyria could not be acknowledged in the film or the play without anachronism. When the play was first put on at the Royal National Theatre, there was a penultimate scene which catapulted the pages and
equerries into the twentieth century where Mrs Macalpine explained about the blue piss. This didn’t entirely work, and when the play was revived the following season the scene was omitted. Trying to work out how to get across this information in the film, I sometimes wished I’d been writing for Hollywood thirty years ago, because then there would have been no problem.
EXT. RIVER BANK DAY
As BRAUN and PAPANDIEK pour the contents of their chamber-pots into the river a sudden shaft of sunlight catches
PAPANDIEK’s face and he looks up, dreamily.
PAPANDIEK: There will one day come a time when our master’s disease will be recognized for what it is … not madness (cue Heavenly Choir) but porphyria! (He raises the crystal chamber-pot to heaven and we see looking down on him the faces of Mary Queen of Scots, James I, Queen Anne, George IV and Frederick the Great. And they are all smiling!)
Except, of course, that they wouldn’t be smiling, because, even though the condition is more often (though not always) diagnosed today, there is still no cure, just improved alleviation.
Monarchy is a performance, and part of the King’s illness consists in his growing inability to sustain that performance. When the King is on the road to recovery, Chancellor Thurlow discovers him reading King Lear and congratulates him on seeming more himself.
‘Yes’, says the King, ‘I have always been myself … Only now I seem myself … I have remembered how to seem.’
The King is then rushed off to Westminster to be shown to the MPs, who, still under the impression that he is mad, are busy passing the Regency Bill. They rush out to greet him, and he addresses them – haltingly at first, but with increasing confidence, muttering to the pages at the finish, ‘How’s that, lads? Not bad, eh?’ i.e. the performance has gone well; he has remembered how to seem.
