Assassination: The Royal Family's 1000-Year Curse (43 page)

Nicholson increased George’s popularity. However, trouble of a different kind was coming. In June 1788, George suffered a painful gastric attack. His doctor blamed it on too much sauerkraut, and sent George to take the waters in Cheltenham. George recovered, but in October he suffered another attack, which caused him great pain and left him speechless. He developed a rash, his eyes became yellow and his urine turned very dark. When George regained the power of speech, he talked drivel for hours without stopping, constantly repeating bizarre remarks. It was even claimed that he had approached an oak tree, shaking one of its branches as if it were a hand, and talking to the tree in the belief that it was the King of Prussia.

After a brief period of calm, on 5th November George once more began to speak nonsense at great speed, foam coming from his mouth. He attacked the Prince of Wales, attempting to smash his head against a wall, and the constant rambling speech continued day after day.

George was in effect imprisoned in his palace at Kew. He was forced to swallow drugs, and was tied up sitting on a chair during the day and lying down on a bed during the night. Starved as a punishment for any misbehaviour, when he objected he was gagged. Then the doctors blistered George’s body to draw out the evil, causing him excruciating pain.

It is now believed that George was suffering from porphyria
– an excess of the pigment that gives the blood its red colour. That excess turns the urine dark, and in extreme cases it poisons the nervous system and the brain. Unfortunately, throughout his life George was given medicine containing antimony for his various maladies. Antimony contains arsenic, and arsenic triggers porphyria attacks.

Despite all the Hanoverian inbreeding, porphyria was probably a Stuart defect that was inherited by George from his 3 x great-grandmother Elizabeth Stuart, through whom the Hanoverians gained the crown. Evidence of the disorder can be found in James I (who suffered periods of delirium) and his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, who had attacks of hysteria. Despite the ‘treatments’, George began to recover, and by March 1789 he could return to Windsor. But porphyria was, and still is, incurable.

Some generations can escape porphyria attacks. After George, the first descendants we know for certain suffered from the disease were Princess Charlotte of Prussia (daughter
of Queen Victoria’s daughter, also called Victoria), who often tore her clothes and who suffered constant ill health, and then her daughter Princess Feodora of Saxe-Meiningen who committed suicide in a sanatorium in 1945 – recent tests on their remains evidenced the porphyria. In England, it was the present Queen’s cousin Prince William of Gloucester; he was diagnosed with the disease shortly before he died in 1972, when the plane he was piloting in an air race crashed after takeoff. A bachelor, he was ninth in line to the throne.

There may have been others who were not diagnosed, such as Prince Henry, oldest son of James I, who suffered from delirium; Princess Henrietta (Minette), sister of Charles II, who married the Duke of Orleans and died aged 26, suffering incontinence and vomiting; Queen Anne, who suffered hysterical fits; and Queen Caroline of Denmark, George III’s sister, said to have died of scarlet fever.

Despite a Prime Minister in favour of reform, a reaction set in following the French Revolution in 1789. Although there was shock at the execution of Louis XVI and his wife Marie-Antoinette (daughter of Maria Theresa), there was some satisfaction that the French ruling classes were receiving their deserved retribution for supporting revolutionaries in the American War of Independence.

For a time, the French were occupied in war against Austria and Prussia, who had tried to come to the aid of Louis XVI. Then France declared war on Britain. At sea, Britain was victorious. The army, sent to the Netherlands under the command of George’s second son, the Duke of York, suffered a series of defeats, and he would forever be mocked as:

The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men.
He marched them up to the top of the hill And he marched them down again.

Back in England, the Prince of Wales continued to be a problem, and he was still unmarried. Parliament offered to pay off his debts of £630,000 over a period of years if he took an acceptable wife. George selected for his son the fat and ugly Caroline of Brunswick. Even though Caroline was the Prince’s first cousin (her mother was George III’s sister), he had never met her. Having met her, he asked for brandy. He had to get drunk in order to go through with the wedding ceremony. It was not just her looks and vulgar behaviour, Caroline rarely washed or changed her underclothes. Apparently, the smell was nauseating. George and Caroline had a daughter, Charlotte, and then they separated. It was probably worth it for £630,000; a vast sum at the time.

Elsewhere it was all bad news. The first coalition against France broke up when the French Army led by Napoleon forced Prussia and Spain to submit to his terms. In England, the failing war and poor harvests damaged the economy. Living standards plummeted and discontent grew. Perhaps the French Revolution suggested that killing the monarch was the solution. On 29th October 1795, George travelled to Westminster by coach to open a new session of Parliament. He must have become aware of the hostility in the streets. As he neared the Houses of Parliament, George heard the chants of the people demanding bread, demanding peace and demanding “No King!”. George’s coach turned into Old Palace Yard where protestors attacked the coach; then one of them drew a gun and fired. The ball flew through the window of the coach. Usually, George’s head would have been at the window, as he waved to his cheering subjects. This time, in view of the crowd’s demeanour, George was sitting back in his seat – it saved his life. The assassin escaped.

In 1800, the second coalition against France collapsed following further victories for Napoleon. Britain was left to fight alone. France now controlled most of Europe; but the British Navy, inspired by Nelson, ruled the seas. Nevertheless, Britain prepared for the expected French invasion. On 15th May 1800, George went to Hyde Park to watch a field exercise of the Grenadier Guards. During the exercise, blanks were to be fired. Suddenly ‘by accident’ a live shot was fired in George’s direction, missing him by a few feet. William Ongley, a clerk in the navy pay office, was hit in the thigh. Following an investigation, it emerged that amongst the blanks distributed to the soldiers there were nine live cartridges disguised as blanks. Maybe it was not a coincidence that the Guards had recently had their beer allowance withdrawn. Possibly it was another attempt to kill the King.

The day was not yet over. In the evening George went to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, where (in the former theatre building) an assassin had tried to kill his grandfather in 1716. He went to see the comedy,
She Would and She Would Not
. George made his way to the royal box. Entering the box, he walked to the front to receive the applause of the audience. George stood there smiling as everyone got to their feet and cheered the King, celebrating his escape in Hyde Park.

All eyes were on the King. In the second row, a man stepped up on to his seat and aimed a pistol at George. But David Moses Dyte leaned over from the third row and struck the assassin on the arm as he fired, so the shot narrowly missed the King’s head. The would-be assassin was seized and taken away. George was advised to leave, but he would have none of it. He insisted that the performance should continue, and sat quietly enjoying the play. Two assassination attempts in one day; and he still fell asleep during the interval. Dyte’s reward was the patent for selling opera tickets.

The failed assassin was James Hadfield, a former soldier in the 15th Light Dragoons. He had been wounded at the Battle of Tourcoing, struck eight times on the head with a sabre, and had been discharged from the army because of the state of his mind. Hadfield generally appeared to be normal, but at times he was convinced that he had conversations with the Almighty who had told him that the world would come to an end unless he sacrificed himself for its salvation, thereby procuring the second coming of Christ. Hadfield had also been warned that he must not destroy himself. He worked out that killing or attempting to kill the King would ensure his lawful execution.

At his trial for high treason, Hadfield surprisingly pleaded ‘not guilty’; it was contrary to his supposed plan to be executed. Doctors, former army colleagues and family members gave evidence that he was mad. The Court declared Hadfield insane and acquitted him. Persons found to be insane by the criminal courts were treated in the same way as other lunatics, and were released to their families; only the family could commit them to a madhouse. To release a man who had tried to murder the King would have caused outrage. So Hadfield was sent to prison for four days while Parliament rushed through the Criminal Lunatics Act. That Act gave the courts power to order the indefinite detention in a madhouse of persons accused of crimes who had been declared insane. Hadfield was then sent to Bethlehem Hospital (‘Bedlam’ for short), where he died of tuberculosis 41 years later.

That was not George’s only eventful visit to the theatre. The following year, he went to see a play when visiting Weymouth on the south coast. At the end of the performance, a man suddenly ran towards the royal box and tried to climb in. He was quickly seized and taken away. It was only the next morning that a knife was found embedded in the door next to the royal box. Urban Metcalf was a 25-year-old lace and garter hawker from London, who had already spent five years in asylums. He believed that he was the true king, and that was why he had repeatedly tried to enter royal palaces. Metcalf had travelled down from London to throw his knife at George. As no one had noticed the knife being thrown, the authorities decided to do nothing. Then Metcalf created a disturbance outside the King’s Lodge, demanding to be allowed inside. He was locked up in a madhouse. Although released after several years, he ended up in an asylum in York.

Next the French started to foment trouble in Ireland. So Pitt decided to abolish the Irish Parliament (where membership was restricted to Protestants), and instead have Irish members of parliament at Westminster. In 1801, by a further Act of Union, the Kingdom of Ireland was joined to the Kingdom of Great Britain to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Pitt promised legislation to enable Catholic Irish members to sit in Parliament. That would involve a change in the oath of membership, which included denials of the principal tenets of Catholicism.

A Bill only became an Act and therefore the law after approval by both Houses of Parliament and receipt of the monarch’s assent. George was outraged; he believed that assenting to such an Act would be a denial of his coronation oath to protect the Protestant faith, and would make him undeserving of the throne in God’s eyes. Also, George was well aware that the crown had been given to the House of Hanover because James II and his descendants were Catholics, whereas the Hanoverians had sworn to protect England from Catholicism. If George failed to do so, on his death the Stuarts would have a better right to the crown than the Hanoverians. Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender, had died a drunken old man without children. His brother was a cardinal. So the throne could be claimed by the Cardinal or the man who became the Jacobite heir on the Cardinal’s death in 1807, the senior descendant of Charles I’s daughter Henrietta (Minette) and her husband the Duke of Orleans, and that was King Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia
³⁴
– 3 x great-grandson of Charles I.

George lined up the Church, the judiciary and much of Parliament against the proposed legislation. Pitt admitted defeat, he resigned and was replaced by his friend Henry Addington (the son of Pitt’s doctor).

Within a short time, the King’s illness returned. Addington and George’s doctors had him taken to Kew House and kept there as a prisoner, drugged and in solitary confinement. He was rescued by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon. Freed from his doctors, George’s condition improved.

A greater threat to George was said to have come from Colonel Edward Despard. He had been appointed superintendent of what is now Belize in Central America, and, contrary to instructions, granted land to colonists regardless of colour. Following complaints by white settlers, Despard was ordered back to England. After an investigation, he was exonerated and told that he would have been reinstated, but unfortunately his position had been abolished. Pursued by his enemies, Despard was bankrupted and spent two years in debtors’ prison. He then took up the cause of political reform, and with 30 others was seized and imprisoned for three years without trial on suspicion of being revolutionaries. Six months after his release, Despard and 32 colleagues were arrested and charged with treason for conspiring to kill the King and start a revolution. The only evidence against them was the testimony of government spies. They said that Despard’s plan was to fire a canon at George’s coach as he made his way to Parliament. The army had conveniently put a captured French canon on display in St James’s Park. It was alleged that Despard planned to use that canon to blow George’s coach sky-high.