BEHIND THE HEADLINES
1811: the madness of George III
The day had long been coming when George III must be forced to relinquish the throne.
His mental health had been intermittent ever since he had suffered a severe attack of mania in the 1880s. This was treated with forcible restraint and caustic poultices. A Regency Bill to relieve him of his powers was prepared in 1889, but the king recovered and it was not required.
George’s condition has been diagnosed retrospectively as porphyria, which is a group of diseases in which toxins build up in the blood and attack the nervous system producing symptoms including mania. It is a genetic condition, named for the purple colour of an affected person’s urine.
By 1811 George had ruled for 51 years. Under his reign Britain had suffered the disaster of the loss of the American colonies, but on the positive side, the nation had resisted the threat of French invasion. Britain was now in the middle of the long war with the Napoleonic empire, and another war with the USA loomed (it was to start in 1812). This was the wrong time for Britain to have a sick head of state.
The final crisis that precipitated the king’s madness was not political but personal: the death of his beloved Princess Amelia, the youngest of his 15 children, in November 1810. George was said to have been in “distress and crying every day… melancholy beyond description”. He suffered from a pathetic delusion that Amelia was not dead but was staying in Hanover with a large family of her own, where she would “never grow older and always be well”. His mental state developed into acute mania with obscene language and violence – “recourse was had to the strait-
waistcoat”, according to one account. The obvious solution to George’s insanity – appointing his eldest son George Augustus Frederick, the Prince of Wales, as Regent – had been resisted, because members of the Tory Government feared for their jobs. The prince, popularly nicknamed ‘Prinny’, had sided with the Whigs, so when he was in a position to appoint the cabinet, the Tories foresaw him sacking them and appointing his Whig cronies.
The Regency Act was finally passed on 5 February 1811, being rushed through in order to give time for the Prince Regent to approve finance bills that were necessary for military expenditure. To keep him under a tight rein, the Act was initially limited to a year and he was forbidden to sell any of the king’s property or grant peerages except for military service.
The following day the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, and the Privy Council attended the Prince of Wales at his home in Carlton House for them to kiss hands. The band of the Grenadier Guards played God Save
the King in default of any more appropriate tune for the investiture of a Regent.
No matter what the Prince Regent might have done if he had assumed the throne in earlier times, by 1811 he was too conservative and too addicted to his own pleasures to take the trouble to make any changes. He stayed with his father’s conservative choices, and kept the Government.
The Prince Regent celebrated with a party for 2,000 guests. Few members of his family came; one comment about the guest list was, “half the whores in town were invited”.
When in good health, George III had been pious and reserved, a marked contrast to the frivolous and ostentatious atmosphere that was promoted by the Prince Regent. In his favour, his reign was a time of a flowering of the arts, particularly in building and interior design in a style that came to be known as Regency.
George III never recovered and spent the rest of his life in seclusion in Windsor Castle, developing dementia and going blind and deaf before his death in 1820. The Prince Regent became George IV.
The state of the nation
If Prinny had been prepared to turn his mind to it, he would have been able to learn about the realm from the results of the second census of Great Britain, which was taken on 27 May 1811. Attempts were made to reach every dwelling, and it was claimed that “the Enumeration of the whole Population may be considered as complete, no place being known finally to have omitted making Return”. However, despite this boast, evasion was believed to have been widespread, because householders feared – with good reason – that their information would be used to establish a liability to pay income tax to fund the war with France. The returns were filled in by people who were designated as competent by county clerks of the peace or the sheriff ’s officer; in Scotland teachers played a leading role. An increasingly differentiated society was revealed, at least as far as employment was concerned. In the 1801 census some householders had included their servants as members of the family; now they had to be noted separately in an employment category, along with coal miners and fishermen. In each case the “chief source” of the family’s income was now stated, although this gave rise to errors because so many families depended on multiple sources of income. For example, a Cornish fisherman’s wife might make and sell handicrafts while their daughter did daily work as a servant and their son toiled in a tin mine. Nevertheless, scanty and inaccurate though it might have been, this was the best “Enumeration of the whole Population” that had ever been undertaken.
Unfortunately, you will not be able to access the dwelling-by-dwelling data from this census. The individual returns were destroyed in 1904 in a fit of housekeeping by the Government, but the abstracts of returns and reports by the superintendent remain.
England’s population was revealed to be 9.5 million; Scotland had almost two million; and Wales had 600,000. Ireland’s population was estimated at five million, although the country was excluded from the census.
A huge military force of 640,000 was serving in the Army and Navy. About 900,000 families were dependent on agriculture, although work on the land was not evenly spaced; counties such as Wiltshire, Suffolk and Essex were overwhelmingly agricultural. Middlesex (which included London) was highly commercial, and increasing in population.
The big changes for your ancestors were happening in the Midlands; in northern counties such as Staffordshire, Lancashire, Northumberland, Durham and the West Riding of Yorkshire; and in central Scotland. The Industrial Revolution was now well underway. Villages were swelling into towns, and attracting labourers from the surrounding countryside to come and work in factories.
Despite the inevitable loss of a large section of the workforce to the armed forces, the population was increasing and the nation becoming more prosperous as a result of the boost in productivity caused by the Revolution. The average size of a family was just under six people, but this figure would grow dramatically later in the century.
Austen’s arrival
The difficulties of middle-class families in reduced circumstances were reflected in Jane Austen’s first novel Sense and Sensibility, which was published this year although it was credited to “A Lady”. This book saw two young women, Elinor Dashwood (embodying sense) and her sister Marianne (representing sensibility), aspiring for and achieving love – but it also showed one of them settling for the best that they could get in the marriage market, which was probably a true reflection of mating behaviour in the restricted world of the Regency drawing-room. Early reviewers were uncertain what to make of it, but stressed the value of the work as a conduct model for young ladies.
A more vulgar entertainment was had by patrons of Sadler’s Wells, just outside London. The Wells, named after Richard Sadler who first set up a theatre next to medicinal wells, had started to provide aquatic spectacles. A huge tank was set up on stage in which naval melodramas were performed, with presentations about heroes such as Admiral Lord Nelson.
It would take 12 men 12 hours to fill the tank with water, which became dirty not just from the shows, but also from actors who would bathe in it, and audience members who would jump in.
It was truly a time of spectacle in the theatre. Sixteen white horses were introduced at the Covent Garden Theatre for a performance of Bluebeard, or Female
Curiosity, about the multiple wife-murderer of legend. Unfortunately audiences found the stench of the horses unbearable, and reported that it was like sitting in a stable. Animals on stage were in vogue: this year also saw the comedian Joseph Grimaldi, playing his Harlequin character at Surrey Theatre, being upstaged by an Indian elephant named Chuny, the largest elephant that had ever been seen in London. Jad Adams is a writer and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society