Behind the Palace Doors

by Michael Farquhar

  Despite her untimely demise, Caroline Mathilde did leave a pronounced legacy in Denmark. Her son became regent for his mad father in 1784 and immediately removed the government that had dethroned his mother, the memory of whom he always revered. He became King Frederick VI in 1808. Caroline Mathilde’s daughter, Louise, went on to have her own daughter, Caroline Amelia, who was the wife of King Christian VIII.‖ Thus, in one of history’s great ironies, Struensee’s granddaughter wore Caroline Mathilde’s crown as queen of Denmark.

  * Caroline’s father, Prince Frederick (see Chapter 18), was the older brother of Christian’s mother, Princess Louise. (See Hanover family tree, this page.)

  † There would be a more formal ceremony, with Christian actually present, when Caroline Matilda arrived in Denmark.

  ‡ Kronborg Castle is known by many also as Elsinore, the setting of Shakespeare’s great tragedy Hamlet. Elsinore is actually the town in which Kronborg is situated.

  § Struensee’s friend Enevold Brandt was sentenced to the same fate, and suffered on the same scaffold just moments before Struensee did.

  ‖ Christian VIII succeeded his cousin Frederick VI as king of Denmark in 1839. (He was the grandson of dowager queen Juliane Marie, the royal figurehead of the coup against Struensee and Caroline Mathilde.)

  21

  George III (1760–1820):

  The Reign Insane

  I wish to God I may die, for I am going to be mad.

  —KING GEORGE III

  Five years after losing the American colonies in 1783, George III began to lose his mind. It was a frightening decline for the once restrained and dutiful monarch, marked by strange hallucinations, inappropriate behavior, and incessant babbling. Most historians now attribute the king’s unsettled state of mind to a particularly virulent form of the metabolic disorder known as porphyria.

  Early one August morning in 1788, the pages at Windsor Castle were shocked to see the king’s wife, Queen Charlotte, run out of the royal apartments “in great alarm, in her shift, or with very little clothes.” The men turned their backs to save the queen the embarrassment of being seen in such a state, but she came right up to them and told one to go immediately and fetch a doctor in Richmond. King George III was in a terrible state, suffering through the early stages of what would soon become a nightmare of madness.

  The fifty-year-old monarch was seized by violent stomach pains that left him hunched over in agony. These were accompanied by painful cramps in his legs and a rash on his arms that his daughter Elizabeth described as vivid red “and in great weal, as if it had been scourged with cords.”

  The doctors were bewildered by the symptoms. Some said it was gout; Sir George Baker concluded that the king’s illness was caused by his having “walked on the grass several hours; and, without having changed his stockings (which were very wet) went to St. James’s; and that at night he ate four large pears for supper,” having had no dinner. Soon enough, though, worrisome signs of mental distress began manifesting as well.

  Fanny Burney, a member of Queen Charlotte’s household, reported in late October that the normally composed king spoke in “a manner so uncommon, that a high fever alone could not account for it; a rapidity, a hoarseness of voice, a volubility, an earnestness—a vehemence, rather—it startled me inexpressibly.… The Queen,” she added, “grows more and more uneasy.”

  Poor Charlotte was actually growing frightened of her husband, with whom she had shared a loving relationship. “Their behaviour to each other speaks the most cordial confidence and happiness,” one of the queen’s attendants had observed several years earlier. “The King seems to admire as much as he enjoys her conversation.… The Queen appears to feel the most grateful regard for him.” Now Charlotte couldn’t keep far enough away, even as George became ever more dependent on her in his disordered state. “How nervous I am!” the queen exclaimed to Fanny Burney. “I’m quite a fool. Don’t you think so?”

  The queen was worried about what she called King George’s “great hurry of spirits and incessant loquacity.” One day at chapel, he suddenly jumped up during the sermon, threw his arms around Charlotte and his daughters, and exclaimed, “You know what it is to be nervous. But, was you ever as bad as this?” On another occasion, Sir George Baker found him at a concert recital at Windsor, repeatedly rising and sitting throughout, “not seeming to attend to the music,” and talking continuously, “making frequent and sudden transitions from one subject to another.”

  The king was aware of his incessant babbling and endeavored unsuccessfully to control it. He had his attendants read aloud to him in the hope that that would keep him quiet, but he just spoke right over them. He even suggested that he be taken to General Sir George Howard’s home in Buckinghamshire, where, he said, the general would give an account of the campaigns he made in Germany, “and that will keep me from talking.”

  Sadly, King George still had enough presence of mind to realizing he was losing his. “They would make me believe I have the gout,” he said, kicking one foot against the other; “but if it was gout how could I kick the part without any pain?” In despair, the king sobbed on the shoulder of his favorite son, the Duke of York. “I wish to God I may die,” he cried, “for I am going to be mad.”

  That seemed certain on the evening of November 5, when the king’s heir, George, Prince of Wales, dropped by Windsor for dinner. Father and son had always had an uneasy relationship (see Chapter 23), but something snapped that evening that sent King George into a blind frenzy. He suddenly rose from the table, grabbed his son by the collar, pulled him out of his chair, and slammed him against the wall. It was a devastating scene that left Queen Charlotte in hysterics and the weeping Prince of Wales on the verge of fainting. Sir George Baker concluded afterward that the king was now “under an entire alienation of mind and much more agitated than he had ever been.”

  King George was a frightening sight the next day. Charlotte told Lady Harcourt that his eyes were like “black currant jelly, the veins in his face were swelled, the sound of his voice was dreadful. He often spoke till he was exhausted, and, the moment he could recover his breath, began again, while the foam ran out of his mouth.”

  “I am nervous,” King George insisted. “I am not ill, but I am nervous. If you would know what is the matter with me, I am nervous.”

  With the king in such a state, it was decided that he should be moved out of the queen’s bedroom under the pretext that she was ill. Unsettled by her absence, George got up in the middle of the night and stole into Charlotte’s room. For a half hour he hovered over her, candle in hand. The next night the queen moved to apartments farther away. Finding her door locked, the king burst into tears. “We’ve been married twenty-eight years,” he said to the queen, “and never separated a day until now; and now you abandon me in my misfortunes.”

  As George’s condition worsened, he became increasingly violent and uncontrollable. His incessant chatter, which one day went on “for nineteen hours without scarce intermission,” was now sprinkled with obscenities that would have once mortified the normally pious monarch. Then there were the delusions. The king gave orders to dead people, or to individuals who never even existed. On one occasion be became convinced that London was flooded and ordered his yacht there. Looking through a telescope, he insisted that he could see his ancestral homeland of Hanover. He composed letters to foreign courts filled with fanciful tales, and lavished honors on all who approached him—even the lowliest servant.

  A succession of doctors was brought in to treat the king, but each was baffled by his condition. They prescribed wildly divergent courses of treatment, most of them barbaric, none successful. Dr. Richard Warren, for example, ordered that the king’s shaved head be blistered to draw out the bad humors from his brain. Leeches were attached to his forehead. He was administered strong purges and emetics, followed by sedatives, and his room was kept freezing cold. Little wonder there was no improvement.

  Then, on December 5, Francis Willis took o
n the task of curing the king, assisted by his son John. It was not a good match. “I hate all the physicians,” railed the ailing monarch, “but most the Willises; they beat me like a madman.” The king’s distaste for Francis Willis was evident from the beginning, when Willis acknowledged that he had been a clergyman before becoming a doctor.

  “I am sorry for it,” George said with mounting agitation. “You have quitted a profession I have always loved, and you have embraced one I most heartily detest.”

  “Sir,” Willis protested, “Our Savior Himself went about healing the sick.”

  “Yes, yes,” the king answered irritably, “but He had not 700 pounds a year for it, hey!”

  The treatment that followed this testy introduction was nothing short of torture. Willis was determined to tame his wild patient. If the king spoke out of turn, became too restless, or refused to eat, he would be confined in a straightjacket. Willis also had a chair specially made to confine the king until he complied with the doctor’s demands. With bitter irony, George called the horrible contraption his “coronation chair.” Once Willis kept him strapped in the chair, gagged, while he lectured the king on the impropriety of his lewd ranting about a certain lady of the court.

  Brutal as Willis’s methods were, they did seem to cow the king and keep him grudgingly compliant. “Dr. Willis remained firm and reproved him in determined language,” Colonel Robert Fulke Greville reported. “He conducted himself with wonderful management and force. As the King’s voice rose, attempting mastery, Willis raised his and its tone was stronger and decided. As the King softened his, that of Dr. Willis dropped to softening unison.… The King found stronger powers in Dr. Willis, gave way and returned to somewhat of composure.”

  Gradually King George began to improve, and by April 1789 he was considered cured. A service of Thanksgiving was held at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and all of London seemed to celebrate. The only one who regretted the king’s recovery was his eldest son, George. The Prince of Wales hoped his father would remain mad, a state that would propel the heir to the regency and all the attendant powers of the sovereign. Alas, he would have to wait two more decades for that, drowning in debt all the while.

  George III suffered through two more brief episodes of his strange disorder—first in 1801 and again in 1804. Then in 1810, when he was a little over seventy years old, permanent insanity came upon him. For the next decade Britain’s sovereign, beyond all reason and nearly blind, was confined to a set of apartments at Windsor Castle, shambling around with a long white beard. The only indication of the king’s former greatness was the badge of the Star of the Order of the Garter pinned to his chest. George finally found peace in 1820, when he died at age eighty-one.

  22

  George III (1760–1820):

  A Royal Murder Mystery

  Sellis was not his own executioner.

  —THE INDEPENDENT WHIG

  George III and Queen Charlotte had thirteen children who lived to be adults, among them seven sons, including Ernest, Duke of Cumberland. As the fifth son, Ernest was too far down in the line of succession to rule Britain. Nevertheless, he did inherit the throne of Hanover—his family’s German kingdom—in 1837 (after the deaths of his four older brothers), and ruled there until his own death in 1851. Before assuming the Hanoverian crown, though, the duke was deeply involved in a murder mystery that remains unsolved.

  While most historians believe that it was a hereditary disorder known as porphyria that plunged George III into babbling fits of insanity, the behavior of his large brood of debauched sons no doubt contributed mightily to the king’s unsettled state of mind. The royal dukes were a troublesome lot indeed—“the damnedest millstones about the neck of any government that can be imagined,” the Duke of Wellington said of them. Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, was a particularly loathsome fellow—a tyrannical military officer known to torture his men, and a lecher who reportedly seduced his own sister. He was “at the bottom of all evil,” wrote his niece Princess Charlotte. But was he a murderer? Many of his contemporaries believed so.

  Sometime after midnight on May 31, 1810, the duke claimed to have been awakened in his bedchamber at St. James’s Palace by a blow to the head. At first he thought a bat had flown into the room and hit him, but, he later testified, he was then struck several more times with his own sword by an assailant he couldn’t see. Dazed and bloody, he tried to make his way to his valet, Cornelius Neale, who was sleeping in the next room. “Neale!” he shouted. “I am murdered!” After a final thrust, according to the duke, the unknown attacker slipped out of the room and escaped.

  It was during a subsequent search of the royal apartments that another of the duke’s valets, a Sardinian named Joseph Sellis, was discovered lying on his bed, his throat slit from ear to ear, with a bloody razor resting nearby. An inquest determined that it was Sellis who had entered the duke’s chamber and attacked him. Then, ruing what he had done, or fearing arrest, he went back to his own room and nearly beheaded himself.

  Sellis’s corpse was unceremoniously buried beneath Charing Cross, with a stake reportedly driven through the heart as a symbol of the suicide’s eternal damnation. Meanwhile, tickets were issued to the curious who wished to view the death scene. Sarah Spencer (an ancestor of Princess Diana’s) was appalled: “Can you imagine … that the finest, most delicate ladies in town went in parties to look at those nasty rooms as a morning lounge, and to examine the slops of blood which covered the bed, the floor, and even the walls and pictures, of the scene of this horrible murder and suicide? It was a spectacle which I should think the stoutest heart would hardly bear to look at, and yet these soft beings were able to stand it, out of mere curiosity.”

  In the same letter, Sarah also noted the duke’s quick recovery from his wounds and remarked blithely, “Thank Heaven, we shall have no court mourning to keep us in black gowns all the summer.”

  Ernest’s convalescence was indeed brief, which may be explained by the superficial nature of his wounds. The royal physician Sir Henry Halford treated them the night Sellis died and immediately reported to King George: “One upon the side of the head above the right ear, which bled profusely but is not dangerous—another on the back of the right hand—a third upon the left—and two or three others of less importance upon various parts of the body.… There is no danger to the Duke of Cumberland’s life.” It was “a most providential escape,” the doctor concluded; a bit too providential, others said.

  The conclusions of the inquiry into Sellis’s death—that he had killed himself after attacking the duke—did little to end the speculation surrounding the case. Too many questions were left unanswered, one of the most significant being motive. The News said it could not discover anything “to induce a man to imbue his hands in the blood of his benefactor and also ruin his own family.” It was strange that a man who had loyally served the duke for over a decade, and even named his son after him (Ernest served as godfather at the child’s christening four months earlier), would suddenly attack him so ferociously.

  Sellis’s wife said that her husband had “frequently complained of a giddiness in the head,” and it was the opinion of Colonel Henry Norton Willis, the well-informed comptroller for Princess Charlotte’s household, that Sellis, disturbed in the mind, had been goaded into a fury by Ernest, who, “in his violent, coarse manner,” taunted him.

  Cornelius Neale, the duke’s other valet, offered another possible motive at the inquiry. He testified that Sellis was of “a very malicious disposition” and hated Neale. “My opinion is … Sellis meant to murder the duke, thinking that the blame should be put on me.… I have no more doubt he did it to cause me to be suspected than I have of my own existence.”

  There was evidence produced at the inquiry that Sellis did indeed have issues with Neale. A letter he wrote to one of the duke’s bedchamber grooms, Captain Benjamin Stephenson, was read aloud at the hearing. In it, Sellis asked Stephenson to tell the duke “of the roguery of this man.” He then continued, “I have
been told, sir, that Mr. Neale cheats His Royal Highness in everything he buys.… This man is as great a villain as ever existed.” This bit of evidence was far from compelling, however, as it forced the conclusion that after documenting his accusations against Neale, Sellis then tried to kill Ernest to prove what a monster Neale was, only to cut his own throat when he was about to be caught.

  “Sellis was not his own executioner,” The Independent Whig declared, echoing a belief widely shared by many. Rumors about what really happened that fateful night were rampant and dogged the duke for years. Some concluded that Sellis had caught Ernest in a compromising position with Neale and had to be silenced; others said that the valet had rejected the duke’s advances and was killed as a result. And, they posited, Ernest’s wounds were self-inflicted to cover the crime.

  Given the duke’s nasty reputation, people were prepared to believe the worst. Nearly twenty years after Sellis’s death, Charles Greville wrote in his journal of “the universal and deep execration” in which Ernest was held, noting, “Sellis’s affair was never cleared up.… Everybody believes there is some mystery of an atrocious character in which he is deeply and criminally implicated.”

  Ernest successfully prosecuted several publishers for criminal libel after they alluded to his guilt, but that did little to enhance his standing. Rather, it only “induced multitudes of people to believe the calumnies,” as the foreman of the original inquiry noted in a letter to the duke’s attorney.

  A libel trial in 1833 was notable for Ernest’s testimony. He told the jury that he had seventeen wounds, not the five or six the royal physician had reported to King George. He also stated that the wounds were so severe that “I was in a state of agony, I suppose, from six weeks to two months.… It was not, I believe, till the beginning of August that I was able to leave the house.” Actually, historian John Wardroper has noted, he was out of bed in three days and made his first public appearance less than two weeks later.