Reigns of madness
QUESTION Is it true that George III was one of several mad monarchs of the late 18th century? The end of the 18th century was unusual in that there were three regents in control of the thrones of europe.
The mental illness of George III (17381820) began in the early 1780s, and in 1811 his son became Prince Regent.
Christian VII of Denmark (1749-1808) suffered a lifetime of mental health issues. he became king shortly before his 17th birthday and within a year married his 15-year- old cousin, Caroline Matilda of Great Britain and hanover (1751-1775).
he fell under the influence of the young Dr Johann Freidrich Struensee who, by a combination of charm and heavy sedation, managed to have himself appointed secretary of the royal cabinet.
he not only usurped Christian’s rule, but also took advantage of his marriage bed, embarking on an affair with Caroline Matilda, much to the disgust of her brother, George III.
When the queen produced a daughter, Louise Augusta, her likeness to Struensee was so marked that it caused a riot.
Not that Christian deserved much better: he spent his nights whoring on the streets of Copenhagen and sometimes attacked passers-by with a spiked club.
Struensee was ousted in 1772, his position of power taken by the dowager queen, Juliane Marie, the king’s stepmother.
She secured her son, Prince Frederick, a seat in the state council and appointed his former teacher, Ove hoegh-Guldberg, as secretary of the royal cabinet.
As Christian VII’s behaviour became even more obsessive, he spent much time with Anna Catharine Beuthaken, a red-haired prostitute who liked to dress in naval uniform.
he was often found in the morning, sitting in the corner of his room in a trance. From time to time, he would beat his head against the wall, sometimes until blood flowed.
he later became obsessed with pain. he liked to watch people being tortured and would also have himself whipped or subjected to the rack. When his son, Crown Prince Frederick, reached 16, he joined a circle of discontented politicians and took the throne in 1784.
he ruled Denmark-Norway on behalf of his increasingly mentally ill father until the latter’s death of a brain aneurysm in 1808.
Maria I of Portugal (1734-1816) had the distinction of being that country’s first queen regent in 1777. She married her uncle Pedro (when crowned, he was renamed Peter III) in 1778.
In May 1786, Peter III died and Maria started suffering bouts of depression and religious mania. Two years later, her eldest son, Joseph, died of smallpox and within two months her only surviving daughter, Mariana, died days after giving birth.
After that, Maria sank into a state of permanent melancholia.
She fancied she saw her father’s image ‘in colour black and horrible, erected on a pedestal of molten iron, which a crowd of ghastly phantoms were dragging down’.
In 1792, Portuguese ministers concluded that their queen was mad and turned to her only surviving son, Joao, with the request to ‘assume the direction of public affairs’. Maria lived a life of perpetual torment until her death in 1816. Joao continued to rule the country until his death in 1826.
Alice Hammond, Edinburgh. QUESTION Did Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell really play Dick Whittington’s cat in a panto? JOhN McDonnell starred as Dick Whittington’s cat in the 1984 Greater London Council’s Christmas panto when he was GLC finance chairman.
his boss and friend, Ken Livingstone, played Dick Whittington.
It’s fair to say that McDonnell looked marginally better in a cat suit than George Galloway later did when he pretended to be Rula Lenska’s cat on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006.
Derek Chambers, Birmingham.
QUESTION Do plants get cancer? ALL multicellular organisms are susceptible to defects in the regulation of cell proliferation that cause individual cells or groups of cells to escape normal developmental constraints and proliferate inappropriately (known as neoplasia).
In animals, such defects lead to tumour formation and cancer, and negatively impact an individual’s health.
Cancer can spread from its original site by local spread, lymphatic spread to regional l ymph nodes or by blood (haematogenous spread) to distant sites, known as metastasis.
Plants also develop tumours, which are composed of disorganised tissues and might i nhibit plant development or function. however, as plant cells are fixed in a cell wall matrix, they are not motile and therefore metastases cannot occur.
Most plant tumours are caused by pathogens (such as crown gall, fungal infections and geminiviruses), but tumours c an al s o develop s pontaneously, particularly in interspecific hybrid plants.
In the absence of pathogens, however, most plants are non- susceptible to neoplasia and this resistance is of interest to oncologists.
Ken Wolfe, Exeter. QUESTION The Alfred Hitchcock film Young And Innocent (1937) features the 18-year-old actress Nova Pilbeam. What became of her? FuRTheR to the earlier answer, an unusual episode in Nova Pilbeam’s life took place in the eighties, when the former actress had been out of the business for 30-odd years.
Manhattan- based American artist Duncan hannah, a protege of Andy Warhol, became seemingly obsessed with Pilbeam, painting her many times.
he would post his pictures to her, but she steadfastly ignored him.
This only reinforced hannah’s admiration for Pilbeam; in an interview he said: ‘She’s the plucky english schoolgirl . . . she’s got such spunk. That iconic face.’
Whether hannah was truly obsessed or playing a clever game with the buying public is uncertain. Of his pictures, he said: ‘The strange thing is that those are the paintings that always sell first.
‘People seem to respond to her. I think they like the fact that I’m obsessed. They’re buying part of the obsession.’
Will Seintz, Liverpool.