British King "Bullet Book," George III, 1760 - 1820
BillJones
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1776 Guinea,
This piece belonged to an old friend, the late Leonad Finn, who was a fellow member of the Boston Numismatric Society. Lenny was one of the middle class collectors who did remarkable things. The crown jewel of his collection was a piece of 1690 Massachusetts currency. Massachusetts was the first government entity in the western world to issue paper money. I believe that this exceedingly rare piece is now in the Smithsonian Institute collection.
1798 "Spade Guinea"
• Americans best remember George III as the British king who wore crown during the Revolutionary War. George was one of the prime movers who kept the prosecution of the war going when many British politicians thought that it was time to end it. George was particularly angered by the Boston Tea Party when rebellious colonists dumped British tea into Boston Harbor. This colonial act insolence cut him to the core, and it prompted him to keep pushing the war.
• George III was the grandson of George II and the son of George’s son, Frederick. Frederick was the heir to the throne but died before his father, there by passing the crown to his son.
• George was known as “farmer George” because he had an especially strong interest in botany and agriculture. He wrote pamphlets on farming methods under the pseudonym “Ralph Robinson.”
• Next to the way that he handled taxation and the other policies toward the American colonies, George’s second major mistake was his draconian attitude toward his sons. Both of them rebelled and sowed “wild oats” through out their lives leaving George with a severe shortage of legitimate grandchildren who were heirs to the crown.
• Despite the conduct of his sons, George was deeply devoted to his wife, Charlotte, they had 15 children. Unlike many British kings, George never had a mistress.
• During George’s rein, the French posed the greatest threat to England. Under Napoleon the French threatened to stage a land invasion upon England, but the British fleet under Lord Horatio Nelson thwarted those plans in 1805 when his ships defeated a combined French and Spanish force at Trafalgar. A French sharpshooter killed Nelson during that battle. He was honored by a state funeral, and his accomplishments have been forever enshrined by Nelson's Column which is the center piece of Trafalgar Square in London.
1817 George III Half Sovereign
This piece was issued when George III was insane.
• Napoleon had his “Waterloo” at Waterloo in 1815, but by then George III was beyond caring anything about world affairs because he was insane.
• George suffered from a genetic disease, porphyria, which caused him to lose his mind. George had his first attack in 1788. That attack was followed by others in 1801, 1804 and 1810. Stress was one of the contributing factors to the disease. Before his last attack the king was devastated by the death of his favorite child, Princess Amelia. George sank into a mental state from which he never recovered. In 1811 Parliament declared that George was unfit to rule and made his son, the future King George IV, Prince Regent.
Comments
The cause of George III's mental problems is NOT at all precisely known today. Not at all.
George had more than two sons, and none of them were strict paragons of virtue. Only the first two had the benefits of near-unlimited access to cash.
George III was the first British sovereign to sit on the throne for over fifty years.
Great thread.
The movie about George III, (The Madness of King George) is pretty good if you haven't seen it.
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I agree that the movie is good for a historic costume drama, especially in how it highlights that quiet discretion is a very good way for a scheming man or for a courtesan to get ahead in a Royal Court. It also shows how Doctors can be complete boobies. But the diagnosis of porphyria is mentioned over and over, all on the basis of minimal firm evidence.
I just this morning read an article on how the 1st Earl of Munster (eldest illegitimate child of William IV and grandson of George III) may have had porphyria. We know even less about him than we do his grandfather!
George III's porphyria condtion has been mentioned in several of my resource materials. He obviously lost his mind a few times before the final relapse when everything when dark for him the last 10 years of his life. There is no disputing that fact.
One can't dispute that a regency was being considered in 1788 and that a regency came into being in 1811. But the true reason for the King's bad mental condition was unknown then and is possibly still not knowable today. You might as well say that the success of the American Revolution caused George's insanity.
George's bones rest in the main crypt underneath St. George's Chapel at Windsor. Nobody is in any hurry to test a piece, if that would help us to know.
Other thoughts, fairly recent:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22122407
James VI(I) 1567-1625 57 years
Henry III 1216-1272 56 years
Edward III 1327-1377 - 50 Years
Of course all of the above were monarch when they did not have majority - ie regents while they were underage.
But George assumed the throne when he had attained majority, but his actual rule ended in 1811 when the regency was declared. So instead of reigning for 59 years he really only ruled for 51 years.
When George died he was blind and deaf. I think that his medical problems went beyond mental illness brought on by the loss of the American colonies which dated from 1783. There was a serious chemical imbalance in his body. I have read that is urine was blue, which was a symptom of porphyria.
@BillJones if you look at that linked BBC article, it says that the "blue urine" was caused by a specific drug (made from gentian, a blue flower) that his doctors were known to be administering to George. The person writing the article leans towards evidence that George had severely bi-polar disorder.
You can still buy gentian at many pharmacies, but they seem to mostly use it topically today.
George was alone, relatively neglected and well into his eighty-first year when he died - and you usually aren't very healthy when you die anyway.
FWIW, Queen Victoria lived almost the same amount of time as her Grandfather, and she lived in a much better era of medicine.
This is also an era when mercury was often used as a medicine. Is there any indication that George III received any mercury treatments that could have contributed to or caused his condition?
Don't know, but have never heard mercury suggested. The many modern researchers of this case surely looked for things like that.
Poryphyria became a fashionable solution partly because you could clear the royal family of strict 'insanity'. But maybe the King was. It was also suggested that the next two kings following him had a touch of the same thing in their old ages. Lots of inbreeding in those royal Germans.
Supposedly at Christmas 1819 King George III talked ranted and raved for 58 hours straight. This was less than a month before his death.
By the Victorian ea, Mercury was better known as a toxin. See Lewis Carrol.
Most moderns appear to attribute George's blindness to cataracts. Cured by a simple operation today.
Sorry for all the edits, but spellchecker is getting very aggressive. I hope that our defense department computers don't get taken over by spellchecker like mine has.
This is an interesting list:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_monarchs_by_longevity
Of the eighteen persons on this list, four died from the effects of cigarette smoking!
Victoria lived just five days longer than her Grandfather!
I’ll show my only current George III coin: (Irish)
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