Blind History S5E2: King George III

the signs of the king's madness were there early on he once asked his surgeon to get the spanish to swap gibraltar for menorca he would run up to farmers and give them advice on breeding better pigs he also thought he could control the weather with his mind at the end of his life king george iii was completely mad but during his reign he was arguably a good deal smarter than any british royal before or since his book collection formed the basis of the british library and he was the patron of handel's hallelujah chorus he may have lost america but king george iii won over all of britain blind history season five and a character that i've been looking forward to getting to for a long time anthony and i always talk about who we should have on the show in terms of these great historical figures this guy kind of slides under the radar a little bit but he was the longest lived and longest serving king of england before the queen came along and before victoria came along he was the longest running reigning monarch in british history and his name is george the third most people know only a few things about him they know that he lost america which is unfair we'll get to that they know that he went mad which is also unfair we'll get to that and that he had 15 children which was true and we'll get to that as well but what an interesting guy incredible i didn't really know that he was such an interesting person so george iii was actually the grandson of george ii and they paid him no attention until his father george iii's father died and he became the next in line to the throne and then suddenly george ii took an interest in him said to him at an early age of about 14 or 15 right we're going to set you up in your own lavish apartments in james's palace and his first decision as heir apparent was to say no i don't want to do that i'll continue to live with my mother and i'll continue to have my family around me as a young boy he didn't want any of the the money and the luxury of having his own household and his mother was quite strict as i understand it he was quite strict on himself and he had a number of tutors through his childhood who obviously infused a very strong sense of morality and of principle and of discipline in george iii because this guy grew up believing that certain things were right certain things were wrong and you couldn't persuade him otherwise he wasn't going to be you know bought over by the promise of pleasure or luxury for the whole of his life that one decision kind of set the tone for the way that he would live and although his his reign has been marked by you know the colonies america in particular rebelling against him there was so much that went on that was so good scientific development the agricultural revolution setting the scene for the industrial revolution all of that took place under george iii he was the first english monarch of his dynasty the hanoverians to speak english and to only live in england he never left england and he loved that you know he was he was english through and through and he said that in his coronation i believe you know that's right i was born in england i am english where his grandfather and his father they only spoke german they were proper german they could hardly speak english and funny enough his father just on the side note was his father loved cricket and he was quite good at cricket yes and apparently that some maybe have something to do with his early death and that's why he never came to to the throne although he's his father being george the third's grandfather really didn't want him on the throne well the hanoverians always hated their heirs they used to say terrible things all the way down to victoria they hated their ears so um the father always hated their son and the the feeling was mutual going down every generation from george the first all the way to edward vii and somehow luckily it broke at some point but george the third we don't know that do we well elizabeth maybe maybe she still hates charles who knows yeah and they are still hanoverians whether they like it or not so george was really interesting because he was very intelligent he read prolifically he wrote all the time there is a collection of george iii letters in the royal archives in windsor which they actually did a documentary on about five or six years ago which has just been released to the public and it's incredible personal letters to his own family and his children and his friends letters to politicians he was very involved in the politics of the day he knew everything that was going on if there was an expedition to the galapagos he knew about it if there was a new telescope being unveiled somewhere he knew about it he had astronomical clocks that had been given to him by you know his admirers and because he was patron of various science foundations he supported the arts you know handel he started the biggest collection of books in britain and the museum of the arts was that's that was started by many many different uh foundations and and museums that supported all kinds of endeavors were started under george iii and he would arrange his day around eclipses and planetary alignments and he had the most sophisticated scientific equipment that any monikers had he's probably the cleverest person to have sat on the throne of england and i mean no disrespect to any of this and a very very hard work ethic is amazing what he got through incredible and but and a lot was thrown at him i mean when he started it was in the middle of the seven year war which is basically what we would call the first world war of sorts because there was where there were multiple countries involved and he came into the middle of that right and in all intense purposes i think he handled it very well but then when they had to do the peace treaty they felt that france should have been harder hit but his whole point was that you know if you do they're going to come back harder well it's interesting you bring up france because throughout his reign there were a lot of comparisons with france and france didn't make the better decisions you know if you look back at that time the french revolution happened during george iii reign and if england hadn't been managed better and it wasn't a constitutional democracy it might have gone the same way as france had and france was a bloodbath for a long time after that napoleon came along and most of napoleon's real victories and his conquests were achieved under george the third's reign even though by then he'd gone crazy and it was england who had to defeat napoleon it was england who everyone looked to because the rest of europe was in disarray yeah so wellington was part of under george the third era yeah look he went through a series of prime ministers i mean among them are famously william pitt george fox there were a lot of very interesting politicians right and and lord lord lord buttes but he was alleged to be having an affair with george's mother so because they were very close to fair very close yeah yeah so there's a lot that went on in this guy's rain because it was also such a long reign and the interesting thing about him and his wife charlotte of mecklenburg's trellis who also never really learned to speak english properly i mean she would ask for things in german she didn't know how to speak english very well and when she did speak english it was a very bad accent and the children some of them also end up speaking like this yeah because they were around their mother all the time like the daughters the younger daughters were always around the mother and they were very coddled the sons were maniacs they they were like real playboy princes they had women and fast chariots and they spent money and they had seaside homes and you know they were really like the first european aristo trash and george was horrified because he was a tremendously moral man he never cheated on charlotte once which was extraordinary considering i mean all of his ancestors were correct jumping from one woman's bed to another all of his children were jumping his sons anyway were jumping from one bed to another and there was george holding the fort yeah and he never you didn't even know his wife so they were the first time he saw was at the time they were going to get married he didn't know at all i mean and he he made a go of it and 50 years i think or something unfortunately towards the end he was so deranged that he didn't even know she died but he loved her to the end and he i think was devoted to her in a way that we don't see often in you know the marriages of a very important very rich very powerful and very royal people yeah but often you don't think of in war wars massively costly and it's the seven year war is basically who was going to fall first he was going to run out of money first and france actually ran out of money and but england were struggling as well i mean they didn't have much money and i think that's really started to a certain extent the rot in their colonies is that they wanted to up the taxes to to you know to get some money and to recoup money there's this there's this conspiracy theory which was bandied about that the the english were living un unfair taxes on the americans and it suited the americans who wanted independence to say so but george really had removed almost all their taxes by a certain point and he kept the tea tax because he said otherwise they're going to think that we can't ever levy attacks again so even though we've removed all of these we'll keep that one but they were looking for an excuse boston was the scene of it with the bust yeah and george really didn't have anything to do with the ultimate loss of america his own choice for prime minister i think it was lord north at the time had lost pretty much all public support for a war they'd been the defeats at yorktown and and various others that it just wasn't any more something that he could keep holding on to and george was quite removed from the decision-making with respect to america he was a proper constitutional monarch but once they'd lost the colonies he said and i'm prepared to work with you well yeah he met john adams famously and john adams ended up being the second president of the united states later on but he was emissary to to britain straight after independence you can imagine that first meeting with the king was very awkward and george iii is reputed to have said i was the last to consent to the separation but the separation having been made and having become inevitable i have always said as i say now that i would be the first to meet the friendship of the united states as an independent power so he was sensible yeah and interestingly enough france went into the war louie the 16th before he had chopped off um he went in to assist the colony against england but funnily enough not too long after that because of the way george was they became allies again the american colony in england so that turned against the french now slavery was a big issue during his lifetime and he was pro-slavery um there are not a lot of people who will um who'll be counted among the pro-slavers now because it's not a very popular position to take but at the time he thought it was a good idea but he didn't make abolition a cabinet measure as a result he he kind of let his ministers decide in their individual capacity what they wanted to do so he played this game of chess with parliament the whole time which is what a constitutional monarch should do if they're any good he interfered some of the time and he was often reprimanded for it by the public or by the politicians and sometimes he forced his way because he could constitutionally do that but the parliament wasn't quite divided yeah there was a lot of so this is really the era where the whigs and the tories came to prominence the what eventually would become the left and the right of modern politics and it's a fascinating story i i don't want to go too much into all the different prime ministers because they could be episodes on their own but what happened is that george iv who was at that stage prince of wales would ally with the whigs just to upset his father and his father would take it as a personal insult if the whigs won an election and they supported the prince of wales it was almost like you had two battling households going on here the whole time and really george iv was a bit of a disappointment to his father you know george iii was working hard here to try and ensure that britain was moving ahead scientifically agriculturally in terms of exploration in terms of government in terms of education everything else they were trying to make the country a real first world power for that time and george iv was interested in drinking and partying and dressing up and decorating his houses and then unfortunately he had an episode you know where this melody which affected him a lot in his life it happened and parliament needed to make a decision on on what to do in case that george iii would never come back yeah and that's where they had to do something in terms of the law for the prince and uh they instituted the the regency the regency correct but this whole story of george going mad and there's lots of new evidence they found a lock of his hair a while ago and they tested it and they found some arsenic in it which means that he may have not that he was poisoned but he may have been exposed to poisonous wallpapers or whatever else i mean they say that's what killed napoleon but um they've initially blamed the disease porphyria which is a rare blood disease which we get purple urine goes purple and porphyria whatever it was that drove him mad he he certainly was you know slightly wacky he used to say what what what at the end of every sentence he would uh talk to animals all the time he would talk to trees and address them as if they were other kings but that's not abnormal isn't it he'd play games with his equities where he'd ride on their backs like they were horses this is when he was totally yeah yeah i mean he was a he was a he was a good guy i mean he just loved going up to ordinary people in a straw hat and saying how do you do what what what i am the king who are you and then they took him i mean maybe that's where you know with the current royals get it from hello what do you do and you know that kind of thing but this is what his this is his social idea of being king is that he would go around and talk to everybody i mean in in private he was probably a lot more serious but he did go crazy and i mean he he had a tough time physically you know in those days they didn't know how to deal with mental illness so they would bleed you um they would uh put leeches on you and they did use arsenic in some form oh actually if you could help and they'd beat him and they'd put him in a straight jacket i mean can you imagine beating the king putting him in a straight jacket he'd be screaming because he didn't know what was going on he was deranged and he would do inappropriate things like he'd pull down his pants and pee in the middle of a you know concert recital or whatever so it became a bit of a problem and and he did dip in and out of this i mean in law they call it a look at him intervallium where you come out and you're clear for a while but then you go straight back into the madness so it was a very sad thing to see but he had been king for a very long time and he'd been mostly a stable influence on things and eventually you know they decided after his i think it was his third major episode that it wasn't likely that he was going to come back yeah but all the while he had set up the english monarchy as an example of what he wanted a king and a queen and a royal family to be and that that example was inherited by all of his heirs and probably continues more or less to this day which is why things like the abdication was such a scandal why charles and diana's marriage breakdown was such a scandal because the idea that george the third put in play in the late 1700s remained a fruitful idea of what monarchy should be in the modern world all the way up to the modern moment and even the ratification of the prime minister yes i mean that started with him yeah well i the uh the whole relationship between the government and the monarchy was sort of put in place by maybe his his predecessor george ii but mostly him and it remains that way sadly um for the last seven or eight years of his life he was blind he was deaf he had long hair a long beard but when he lost his sight he would get people to read to him all the time and so he was still trying very hard i think that what pushed him over the edge was when his daughter died and his youngest daughter was princess amelia and they were close they were he loved his children i mean he was he was fond of all of them he grew to dislike the prince of wales but the rest of them he absolutely loved and of course queen victoria's father who was his fourth son edward duke of kent um he died before george the third but he didn't even know what was going on by then and when amelia died a few years before that it just it really hurt him he wrote he wrote letters to charlotte he was already kind of locked away and and didn't see much of the family i mean he must have been quite a a sad character he was wandering around on the ground floor apartments which they'd set aside for him probably probably padded the walls nobody went to visit him anymore he was just a deranged old man and there's a very sad picture of him that was the last portrait painted of him it's a miniature actually and it's just this very old man who's kind of staring into the distance because he can't see anymore he can't hear anymore so it's all kind of a sad story at the end because he had been the most educated most interesting man in britain who had his hands on all the gears for a long time and then suddenly he was this invalid who was insane yeah that is actually very sad but an incredible life yes i mean if you look at what what he had to deal with i mean the french revolution must have been scary to any monarch across the world so and the fact that the point that you raised earlier was that that england didn't go down that road it was testimony to first of all the respect that they had for him and even that even the americans they were you know that was it was fifty percent of them wanted to stay under the money he had a big statue up in new york to him yeah which then he pulled down in like the about the 1800s or so yeah so i mean the fact is there was you slept he had good support and like i said he had very strong work ethic yeah good guy yeah i think he was he was a for his time he was a very advanced monarch and the thought thought forward rather than backward yeah and i think that his progeny that went forward i mean queen victoria was special beside her under pressure well she totally took over his mantle and i think she implemented a lot of the things that he would have probably done if he'd lived at her time 100 so overall a good guy i mean he was proper crazy a lot of the time which is also i think quite charming because there's an english eccentricity that borders on madness which we still associate with the royal family and it's all because of him in the middle of a of a of a handle concert when they're playing the hallelujah chorus one time he got up and started dancing with queen charlotte he just decided this was too good to sit down i mean you didn't do that if you were a king you sat there and everybody clapped when you clapped he loved it anyway george the third god save the king what what [Music] blind history is brought to you by taylor blinds and shutters all the episodes are available on the cliffcentral.com website and app as well as apple podcasts google podcasts spotify or wherever you get your 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Channel: Taylor Blinds & Shutters

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Keywords: Taylor, Taylor Blinds, Taylor Shutters, Podcast, history podcast, Cliff Central, Gareth Cliff, King George III, South African podcast

Id: fzOUL7F-Nfs

Length: 20min 7sec (1207 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021