“I am reserved for fortune to frown upon”

In 1736 Bennet Bard (1711–1757) of Burlington, New Jersey, was the sheriff of Hunterdon County.

Bard’s father Peter had been a Huguenot refugee arriving in America in 1706. He held important positions in the colony’s government, including colonel commandant, judge of the supreme court, and member of the governor’s council.

Two years after Peter Bard died in 1734, the council was presented with “sundry Affidavits containing Complaints of the Misbehaviour of Bennet Bard Esq Sherriff of Hunterdon as Also a Letter from some Merchants in Philadelphia to the same Purpose.”

On 23 Sept 1736 the council met to consider those complaints and the sheriff’s response. The official record says:

after hearing Several Petitions and Affidavits Read against the said Sherriff: and several Affidavits on his behalf and Examining diverse Witnesses upon Oath: They are unanimously of Opinion that the said Bennet Bard has been Guilty of divers notorious Barratrys Extortions and other malversations in his Office, and of Cruelly and unjustly Useing and Abusing the Prisoners in his Custody, And that he is not fit to be Continued any longer in that office

Bard remained wealthy, having inherited a mill and lots of real estate. He bought more land. He owned slaves and the labor of indentured servants. His 1743 house appears above, showing off its Flemish checker bond brickwork.

A few years after Bennet Bard stopped being sheriff, his son William was born. According to John McVickar’s A Domestic Narrative of the Life of Samuel Bard, M.D. (1822) and Abraham Ernest Helffenstein’s Pierre Fauconnier and His Descendants (1911), as a young man William fell in love with his cousin Mary Bard, born in 1746. But she didn’t return his affection.

William Bard reportedly moped off into the British army, enlisting in 1761. He was an ensign in the 80th Regiment when he co-signed this affidavit involving someone else’s dispute about rank.

Bard transferred into the 35th Regiment in 1765. He was still an ensign eight years later, which suggests he didn’t have the money and/or ambition to buy a higher rank.

The year after that, Ens. Bard wrote back from his station at Samford Hall in England to another cousin, Dr. Samuel Bard:

My Dear Sam,

You lay me under great obligations for the concern you express at my unhappiness; though, at the same time, it is a little ungenerous to torment me by that ironical speech, with regard to our dear cousin, telling me to live still in hopes of being happy with her.

Believe me, my dear Sam, I have long given that over. Some other person, (perhaps yourself,) is designed for that blessing, whilst I am reserved for fortune to frown upon. For my future ease, I must endeavour to forget her; how far I shall succeed in that, God only knows.

After mustering all my philosophy, I am still as discontented as ever. I am, indeed, very unhappy, and what is worse, believe I shall ever remain so.

Yours affectionately,
W. Bard.

Four years later, Dr. Samuel Bard married their mutual cousin Mary. That can’t have made Ens. William Bard any happier.

TOMORROW: This is supposed to be Bunker Hill week, right?

“It means exactly what it says, it’s a declaration”

Back in early March, following reports that Donald Trump was demanding a Declaration of Independence to hang in the Oval Office, I wrote:

Donald Trump doesn’t want the Declaration in his office to honor that text or its values. He wants a rare, beloved national asset brought to him to glorify himself.

Eventually Trump did get a printed Declaration behind a curtain in his heavily guarded workspace, an odd way for it to be “shared and put on display,” as a White House publicist had claimed.

This past week the television journalist Terry Moran visited the Oval Office and asked Trump what the Declaration meant to him. Trump confirmed my reading of his character by offering this ignorant blather:

Well, it means exactly what it says, it’s a declaration, it’s a declaration of unity and love and respect and it means a lot and it’s something very special to our country.

Trump couldn’t explain the meaning of the Declaration, its historical significance, or its relevance to today. His comments reveal his desperation to believe that a rare copy’s presence in his office shows the country feels “unity and love and respect” for him.

Last month the White House issued a proclamation on the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, as a Boston 1775 commenter alerted me. This document was obviously not written by Trump since it was focused on the historical event, coherent, and grammatical.

Much of that proclamation landed within the realm of common accuracy. In other words, it made the usual mistakes: that Paul Revere rode to Concord, that the “shot heard ’round the world” happened at Lexington, and so on. But a lot of other cursorily researched descriptions of the 19th of April make those same mistakes.

This White House document, however, made some mistakes all its own. It described the opening skirmish as “The British ambush at Lexington.” It said that at the North Bridge “the startled British opened fire, killing 49 Americans.” The correct number is 2. (The number 49 refers to the total number of provincial dead over the whole day.) Obviously the team drawing public salaries to prepare that proclamation for signature didn’t value fact-checking.

Incidents like these show how hollow the Trump administration’s claim to value American history really is. Behind the rhetorical trumpery, the White House is trying to defund our national parks, museums, libraries, universities, humanities research, public schools, and public television. The only forms of history its occupant shows any sign of valuing are statuary and birthday parades.

John Linzee and “the appearance of mental derangement”

On 4 Oct 1792, about two months after giving birth to her tenth child in Boston, Susannah Linzee died. She was thirty-eight years old.

That baby, named George Inman Linzee, died the following 21 March.

His next oldest sister, Mary Inman Linzee, died on 18 May.

Within a year, retired Royal Navy captain John Linzee had lost his wife and their two youngest children. He was still responsible for six older children.

(The oldest, Samuel Hood Linzee, was by then a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He had gotten a head start in the seniority system by being listed as his father’s servant and senior clerk aboard H.M.S. Falcon in 1775, when he was less than two years old.)

The death of Linzee’s wife also led to him losing his house on Essex Street in Boston. The merchant John Rowe had left it to his niece Susannah in his will, but only after the death of his widow, Hannah Rowe.

Rowe had her own house nearby, but she decided to reclaim this one now that Susannah hadn’t survived to inherit it. In July 1794 the widow told the court she owned the

House & Land…demised to the said John Linzee for a Term that is past, after which it ought to return to her again, but the said John Linzee still withholds the said House & Land & their appurtenances

She sued the retired captain for £1,000. Sheriff Jeremiah Allen certified that he had “attached a chair as the property of the within named John Linzee and left a summons at his last and usual place of Abode.”

John William Linzee’s 1917 history of the family reprints a couple of documents from that court case but doesn’t show how it was resolved. He declared, “this disagreement was of short duration,” pointing to how Hannah Rowe left bequests to the Linzee children. However, that will was written in 1803, after John Linzee had died. It would be just as consistent with Hannah Rowe strong-arming him out of the scene and raising her great-nephews and great-nieces herself.

In fact, there’s evidence that the death of his wife cast Linzee into a depression that alienated him from people. The merchant Samuel Breck, who praised the captain as “a good officer” in earlier years, recalled:

At her death the eccentricities of the captain assumed the appearance of mental derangement. He retired to a small box in the neighborhood of Milton, where he lived entirely by himself, rode out armed, and tapped his cider-cask by firing a ball into the head.

As he was seldom to be seen at home, he fixed a parcel of hooks in his kitchen for the butchers to hang their meat on, giving a standing order to put daily a joint upon one of the hooks. It so happened on one occasion, when he was detained in Boston about a fortnight by sickness, that he found on his return home fifteen or sixteen pieces of meat hanging around the walls of his kitchen.

Linzee died in 1798. He left his estate, worth almost $18,000, to his children and grandchildren and asked to be buried next to his wife.

The Linzees’ oldest daughter, Hannah, married Thomas C. Amory. Their son John Inman Linzee served as treasurer of Massachusetts. A granddaughter married a grandson of Dr. John Warren, a great-granddaughter married a grandson of Paul Revere, and, as I wrote here, another granddaughter married a grandson of William Prescott.

“Say, didst thou never practise such deceit?”

As I described yesterday, in March 1769 the British writer Horace Walpole asked Thomas Chatterton for more information about the fifteenth-century manuscript he said he was transcribing.

Chatterton’s 30 March reply included more verses and some remarks about his life as a poor young law clerk in Bristol, but no solid evidence. Walpole, born into wealth, became suspicious of a scam. He asked literary friends about the Rowley writings. They told him the language and form weren’t authentic.

On 4 April, Walpole sent Chatterton what he viewed as an avuncular letter, advising him to stick to his studies instead of literary forgeries. That document doesn’t survive.

Four days later, Chatterton replied, insisting that the Rowley writings were genuine. He also admitted he was “but 16 Years of Age.” And in a snit he wrote about “destroying all my useless Lumber of Literature, and never using my Pen again but in the Law.”

Then Chatterton sent another letter on 14 April, asking Walpole to return his manuscripts. This paper has a scrawled postscript: “Apprentice to an Attorney Mr Lambert, who is a Good Master; I find engrossing Mortgages &c a very irksome employ.”

Walpole went to France before returning the documents. That prompted even angrier demands from the teenager in July and August. On his return, Walpole wrote a response accusing Chatterton of “entertaining yourself at my expense” but decided not to send it. Instead, he just bundled up the Rowley papers and mailed them to Bristol.

At some point, and it’s unclear when, Chatterton summed up his feelings in a poem about Horace Walpole being mean, snobby, and hypocritical:

WALPOLE, I thought not I should ever see
So mean a heart as thine has proved to be.
Thou who, in luxury nurst, behold’st with scorn
The boy, who friendless, fatherless, forlorn,
Asks thy high favour—thou mayst call me cheat.
Say, didst thou never practise such deceit?
Who wrote Otranto? . . .

As I noted yesterday, back in 1764 Walpole had concealed his authorship of The Castle of Otranto for a year, letting people think it was an authentic medieval story. Chatterton was apparently playing the same game, but he didn’t have the standing to pull it off.

That fall, the young man turned to political writing using the name Decimus. In 1770 he left the attorney’s office and moved to London to establish a literary career. John Wilkes and other opposition politicians admired his essays, but no one paid him for them. He penned some more Rowley poems but couldn’t publish them, either.

On 24 Aug 1770 Chatterton killed himself by drinking arsenic. He was three months shy of turning eighteen. He was evidently a person of strong moods.

Seven years later, a scholar named Thomas Tyrwhitt collected some of Chatterton’s manuscripts and published Poems Supposed to have been Written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and Others, in the Fifteenth Century. He was among the shrinking number of people who thought the Rowley documents were genuine.

That book prompted articles about Chatterton, the supposed young discoverer. One detail in those reports was that Walpole had discouraged him. Indeed, a writer from Bristol said that Walpole’s dismissal had led to Chatterton’s suicide “soon after,” though a year had passed between the events.

But remember how Walpole owned a printing press? He could put out his side of the story. He printed a small private edition, enough to circulate among his many literary friends.

Meanwhile, Chatterton’s work, life, and death became yet another inspiration for the Romantics.

As a result, the exchange between Chatterton and Walpole is well known to scholars of literature and literary gossip. Some documents in their brief 1769 correspondence are already in libraries. Walpole’s early biographer, Mary Berry, had access to all the letters that survived in his papers and summarized them.

Now a few more of those documents—Chatterton’s letters, Walpole’s unsent reply, and his note on when he returned the Rowley writings—have come on the auction market. Bonhams is offering the collection for sale on 14 November. The estimated price is £100,000–150,000.

The Last of the Jacob Osgood House?

Back in 2012, I picked up a local news report that the Andover board of health had issued orders for the owners of the house where Jacob Osgood lived during the Revolution to remove garbage bags piled up on the front lawn.

According to Andover Historic Preservation’s 2016 page about this house, the earliest part might have been built in 1699, and it was expanded with new decoration in the mid-1700s.

On 23 May 1783, James Otis, Jr., the former leader of the Massachusetts Whigs, was staying at this house, while hoping to recover from mental illness.

William Tudor’s 1823 biography of Otis included a picture of the Osgood house and said:

…the greater part of the family were collected in one of the rooms to wait till the shower should have past. Otis, with his cane in one hand, stood against the post of the door which opened from this apartment into the front entry. He was in the act of telling the assembled group a story, when an explosion took place which seemed to shake the solid earth, and he fell without a struggle, or a word, instantaneously dead, into the arms of Mr. Osgood, who seeing him falling, sprang forward to receive him. . . .

His own room was on the left hand side of the front door, when looking at the plate; and at his death, he was standing in the door way of the room to the right. The lightning struck the chimney, followed a rafter of the roof which rested upon one of the upright timbers, to which the door post was contiguous. The casing of this door was split, and several of the nails torn out all which marks still remain as they were at the time.

This week Donovan Loucks sent me this new photograph of the Osgood house, showing much more damage than that.

He wrote:

The place is in terrible condition and has a red square with a white cross prominently displayed on the front so emergency personnel know it’s unsafe for entry. The front door is gone, the entry is piled high with refuse, and I suspect it’ll end up being demolished at some point.

The house had clearly deteriorated since 2012. It may be too late to preserve anything more than a few architectural elements.

Hearing about the Seven Years’ War, Top to Bottom

Yesterday by chance I listened to two podcast episodes about the French & Indian War that were so diametrically different in approach that they ended up being good complements of each other.

One recording was from the History Extra podcast, issued by B.B.C. History Magazine. It was in that podcast’s “Everything You Wanted to Know” series, interviewing an expert about a historical topic using basic, far-reaching questions drawn from listeners and internet searches.

(Though this “Seven Years’ War” episode is restricted on the magazine website, it appears to be freely available through advertising-supported podcast services.)

In this case the interviewee is Jeremy Black, professor emeritus at the University of Exeter. Prof. Black came through Lexington fifteen years ago, as I reported back here. He tends to speak with a great deal of authority, based on a great deal of knowledge. Among his remarks about the French & Indian War were:

• It was really two wars laid on top of each other, one involving lots of countries on the European continent and one between Britain and France in their imperial territories (with Spain making a poor choice to join in late).
• Though often called a “world war,” should we really apply that label when China’s huge population wasn’t involved? Hadn’t European powers fought in many parts of the globe simultaneously before?

Those remarks give the sense of how this conversation took a big-picture approach.

In contrast, the 2 Complicated 4 History podcast from Dr. Lynn Price Robbins and Isaac S. Loftus get into small details on “George Washington, The Seven Years’ War, & Post-traumatic Stress.” Their guest was Daniel Cross, who portrays Col. Washington for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (as shown above).

Using Washington, his fellow Virginians, and British army officers as case studies, Robbins, Loftus, and Cross looked at the painful effects of warfare, particularly Braddock’s defeat. They suggest that George Washington’s marriage to Martha Custis gave him not only wealth and status but also the stability he needed to recover from the turmoil of the preceding years. Other men weren’t so fortunate.

Exploring the Story of Samuel Dyer

This week I have two articles up on the Journal of the American Revolution:

• “The Return of Samuel Dyer: An Attempted Assassination in Revolutionary Boston”
• “The Secrets of Samuel Dyer”

These are two parts of the same research project. To borrow the summary from the second article:

in October 1774 a sailor named Samuel Dyer returned to Boston, accusing high officers of the British army of holding him captive, interrogating him about the Boston Tea Party, and shipping him off to London in irons. Unable to file a lawsuit for damages, Dyer attacked two army officers on the town’s main street, cutting one and nearly shooting another—the first gunshot aimed at royal authorities in Boston in the whole Revolution. Those actions alarmed both sides of the political divide, and Dyer was soon locked up in the Boston jail. Everyone seemed to agree the man was insane.

But there was a lot more going on than Bostonians could see. And Dyer resurfaced in an unexpected way.

Originally I wrote up this story for The Road to Concord, but it has only a passing connection to that book’s focus, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s cannon. Still, the events involved many of the same players and further raised tensions in October 1774. Dyer’s attack could even have started the war in a way quite different from how we remember it.

To spread the word about this project, I’ll do a couple of audio interviews in the next few days.

On the morning of Friday, 7 April, starting at 10:00 A.M., I’ll be Jimmy Mack’s guest on the Dave Nemo show on Sirius XM, discussing the months leading up to April 1775. This will be part of the show’s “Revolution Road” segment featuring writers from the Journal of the American Revolution.

On Sunday, I’ll discuss these articles with Brady Crytzer for the Dispatches podcast. That episode will drop later this month.

Two Deaths in Pondichéry

At Nursing Clio, Jakob Burnham examines two deaths in the French colony at Pondichéry, India, in 1726.

One was a French soldier named Le Bel who had thrown himself into a well and drowned. The other was a 75-year-old local man named Canagesabay, found hanging from a tree.

Both men had been ill, Le Bel with a “lung abcess” and Canagesabay with debilitating stomach pains. The soldier had made arrangements for his death days earlier while the local man’s sons reported that he had spoken of throwing himself into the street. So it appears both men became physically ill, despaired of recovering, and killed themselves.

Burnham writes that French law required “French subjects who were determined to have committed suicide to hang by their feet in the gallows; have their bodies dragged through the street; be denied Christian burial; as well as have their personal goods and assets confiscated.” Not that this was always applied to the letter.

However, there was a changing attitude:

By the seventeenth century, public officials in France and elsewhere increasingly concerned themselves with suicide as a matter of public order and as part of a larger effort to investigate the circumstances around suspicious deaths. This greater attention to the circumstances of death contributed to what has been called a “medicalization” of suicide, especially at the turn of the eighteenth century. Testimonies from investigations into reported suicides revealed that witnesses and family members began amplifying connections between chronic illness and suicide during this period. Official reports, witness statements, and even interviews with survivors made references to “melancholy, mental and physical maladies over which they reputedly had no control.”

This led to the thinking that someone’s illness may have “transport au cerveau” (gone to his head) and led to suicide.

In Pondichéry, the surgeon-general used just that phrase to explain the soldier Le Bel’s death. However, the same doctor said nothing about the medical conditions preceding Canagesabay’s suicide. And this different approach continued with how the authorities treated the two men’s corpses.

“George III’s unusual accessibility”

You may have noticed reports that Britain is celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s “Platinum Jubilee”—a new term since few peoples have imagined their monarch ruling for seventy years.

Last week at the Social Bodies blog at the University of Birmingham, Sarah Fox looked back on the first British ruler to have a Jubilee: George III. The empire celebrated the fiftieth year of his reign in 1809 and 1810.

As Fox writes, the king and his household advisors had managed to build his popularity through what Linda Colley has called “a cunning and influential blend of ritual splendour and winning domesticity.”

George III and Queen Charlotte became a model for Britain’s growing middle class, or upper class of commoners, despite their royal trappings and responsibilities. That’s not dissimilar to the current queen.

Fox’s essay focuses on how the British public literally saw the king:

George’s Hanoverian predecessors had shunned the Stuart monarchy’s tendency to ‘progress’ round the country. George III reinstated regular royal processions, particularly in London, creating a sense of familiarity between him, his family, and large numbers of the general public. Such processions were often connected to the militia: aligning the monarchy with an important engine of growing British power, patriotism, and global expansion as well as developing notions of nationhood and identity. . . .

George III’s unusual accessibility was, in part, due to restrictions on space and money in the royal household. When he, or a member of his family, wished to see an opera, or visit the theatre, he went to London like many of his subjects. There he could be seen behaving in ways that onlookers both recognised and understood.

This strikes me as a London-centered view, despite the blog’s roots in Birmingham. Traditional royal progresses covered large parts of the kingdom. In contrast, George III never went 100 miles from London until he had to recuperate at Cheltenham Spa in 1789, and he stuck close to the capital after that. And of course the only people who would see the royal family at the theater were London theatergoers.

There are other aspects of George III’s relations with his subjects beyond the scope of this essay. Most prominent, of course, are his periods of insanity. Those became a matter of public debate in 1788, and the king had serious relapses in 1801 and 1804. He was stable as the Jubilee year began, but suffered deep troubles before it ended. The regency officially began in 1811. Those psychological difficulties apparently made the king and his family more relatable.

This analysis also makes me wonder about the number of times people attacked George III, or were grabbed for doing so. (I started discussing those back here.) Those assaults were possible precisely because he was visible in London. There was even one plot to assassinate him in a theater. How do we reconcile the king’s popularity with so many reported attempts on his life?

A couple of those assassinations were politically motivated, but in most cases the lone assailants appear to have become fixated on the king precisely because they felt a personal connection or believed he could help them. In other words, his humanity and approachability produced false hopes, then frustration and desperation.

George III survived all those attacks, of course, and stayed on the throne for over fifty years. That let British society be as forgiving of most of the obsessed attackers as they were of the king’s own mental illness. While attacking the king was still capital treason, most of the accused would-be assassins were put into asylums.

TOMORROW: Who had the idea for a Jubilee?

“A great part of my disease immediately gave way to your Chemical Essences”

When the historian Catharine Macaulay contacted Dr. James Graham, he was changing his field of medical practice.

In his advertisements in American newspapers, similar notices in Bristol, and his 1775 London pamphlet, Graham presented himself as a specialist in problems of the eyes and ears.

But in 1776 he published another pamphlet whose title suggested new treatments for many more ailments:

A Short Inquiry into the Present State of Medical Practice, in Consumption, Asthmas, Gout in the Head or Stomach, Hysterical, Spasmodic, or Paralytic Affections of the Nerves in Every Species of Nervous Weakness and in Cancerous and Other Obstinate Ulcers and a More Elegant Speedy and Certain Method of Cure by Means of Certain Chemical Essences, and Aërial, Ætherial, Magnetic, and Electric Vapours, Medicines, and Applications—Recommended.

To which is added an Appendix on the Management and Diseases of the Teeth and Gums

In this pamphlet Graham declared that the electrical lectures he had attended in Philadelphia had inspired him to develop new methods of curing people. (He also mentioned trips to Germany and Russia, which must have been very short because I have no idea when he fit them in.)

This essay may well have been what prompted Macaulay to consult with Graham. And she was pleased with the results. On 18 Jan 1777 she wrote to the doctor from the home she shared with the Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson in Bath:

…I was unfortunately born with a very delicate constitution, and a weak system of nerves; that from my earliest infancy to the age of maturity, my health was continually disturbed with almost every species of fever, with violent colds, sore throats, and pains in the ears, attended with all the variety of symptoms which accompany a relaxed habit, and an irritable state of nerves.

In this very weak state of health, I undertook the writing the History of the Stewarts; and I do not know whether it is not impertinent to add, that seven years severe application reduced an originally tender frame to a state of insupportable weakness and debility: continual pains in the stomach, indigestion, tremblings of the nerves, shivering fits, repeated pains in the ears and throat, kept my mind and body in continual agitation; and marked, those which would otherwise have been the brightest of my days, with sorrow and despair.

In one of these fits of despair, your pamphlet came to my hands. Its contents awakened my curiosity; I sent for you; you undertook my cure with alacrity, and gave me the pleasing hope of a restoration of health, or rather a new state of constitution; and I have the happiness to declare, that a great part of my disease immediately gave way to your Chemical Essences, your Ætherial, Magnetic, and Electric Applications; the pains in my ears and throat subsided, the fevers and irritations of my nerves left me, and my spirits were sufficiently invigorated to break from a confinement of six weeks, and to exercise in the open air.

Macaulay told Graham that she gave him “full liberty to publish this declaration,” and he seized the opportunity. He included the letter in a second edition of his Short Inquiry pamphlet and put her name on its title page, twice.

For that 1777 edition Dr. Graham also added an effusive 31 March letter back to Macaulay that filled seven printed pages, addressed her as “Madam” nine times, and used fifteen exclamation points (as well as slipping in “most hearty acknowledgements” to “the Revd. Dr. Wilson”).

In April 1777, as I wrote before, Wilson organized a grand celebration of Macaulay’s birthday. As a gift he gave her a gold medal that Queen Anne had presented to one of her negotiators at the Treaty of Utrecht—a historical artifact for a historian. The published description of that event then went on:

Next advanced the ingenious Dr. GRAHAM, to whom the world is so much indebted for restoring health to the Guardian of our Liberties, and thereby enabling her to proceed in her inimitable History;—he with great modesty and diffidence presented her with a copy of his works, containing his surprising discoveries and cures…

Furthermore, one of the odes presented to the lady that day and then printed was titled “On reading Mrs. Macaulay’s Letter to Dr. Graham.” It described Clio, “Th’ HISTORIC MUSE,” worrying about the lady’s health, even seeing the statue of her Wilson sent to his church in Walbrook as a “marble tomb.” But finally the god of healing Apollo promises:

“To stop the ravage of the foe,
My GRAHAM instantly shall go,
And set thy Fav’rite free;
No more let sorrow still thine eye—
On GRAHAM’s skill secure rely,
For he was taught by me.”

Those two 1777 publications—the doctor’s pamphlet and the birthday odes—publicly linked Graham and Macaulay. As he always acknowledged, her celebrity helped his pioneering ideas about “Chemical Essences, and Aërial, Aetherial, Magnetic, and Electric Vapours, Medicines, and Applications” reach a wider audience.

Later in the year, however, Catharine Macaulay took ill again.

COMING UP: Search for a cure.

“A thoroughgoing refutation of the Whig historians’ estimation of George III”

The H-Early-America email list just ran Matthew Reardon’s review (P.D.F. download) of The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III by Andrew Roberts.

Like other reviewers, Reardon notes Roberts’s main thesis (especially for U.S. readers): that George III wasn’t a tyrant as American Patriots and many of their descendants portrayed him. He was committed to the eighteenth-century British form of constitutional monarchy. Indeed, his respect for some political traditions limited what measures he endorsed to put down the colonial rebellion.

In addition, this George was personally nicer to his family and circle than his predecessor and successor. 

Roberts argues the king’s periods of insanity resulted from bipolar disorder. As to other times, “Far from the dullard regularly portrayed in print and film, George III in fact possessed an inquisitive mind, with interests spanning from astronomy to agriculture.”

Reardon takes issue with how the book treats the American Revolution:

Although it is a thoroughgoing refutation of the Whig historians’ estimation of George III, it thoroughly embraces their interpretation of the American Revolution as an inevitable coming-of-age event. Ignored is the recent historiography positing either institutional, ideological, or economic causes for independence, in favor of older arguments associated with salutary neglect.

Many historians of early America will certainly take note of bold but unsourced statements such as “by the time of the Peace of Paris of 1763 … some [Americans] were ready for full statehood” or that “many Patriots had indeed long wanted the thirteen colonies to become an independent nation” (pp. 107, 286). Who were these shadowy American revolutionaries quietly waiting (for decades it seems) for an opportunity to break from Britain? None are ever identified.

When evaluating the colonists’ motives for independence, the interpretative slant becomes downright American Tory in its cynicism. Objections to “taxation without representation” were merely disingenuous “proxy protests against British political control by a people who sensed they could now thrive as an independent country,” we are told, while the Declaration’s content is summarily dismissed as “simultaneously grotesquely hypocritical, illogical, mendacious and sublime” (pp. 113, 306).

That might be an effect of getting deeply into George III’s head: not seeing how Americans felt just as committed to the British constitution as they understood it, and broke with Britain only after deciding there was no way to heal the rifts between them and their national government and sovereign.

“I believe absolutely that he is totally deranged”

One goal of the attorneys defending John Frith against the charge of treason, as yesterday’s recap showed, was to let him express his own delusional ideas in the courtroom. To give him enough rope to not hang himself, as it were.

The other was to expose members of the jury to respectable people saying they believed Frith was insane. To that end they called:

• Rev. John Villette, ordinary of Newgate Prison: “The first time I saw him I really thought from the appearance he had, that he was deranged in his mind.”
• Sheriff William Newman: “I believe absolutely that he is totally deranged, and not in the use of his senses for ten minutes together; every day I saw him he was so, and of that there is not a doubt.”
• Mr. Fuller, who spent Christmas Eve two years before listening to Frith: “I thought that the speech of a madman.”

The defense counsel also asked Frith about his thoughts on the auctioneer David Burnsall, apparently a family friend who had helped the defendant obtain his army commissions. Frith replied:

he took an extraordinary liberty in putting into the Public Advertiser, the third of February, a letter, dated the first, declaring me insane, a most extraordinary liberty; I thought it prudent to keep a copy: I have made memorandums, but they have been taken from me by Colonel [Jeffery] Amherst, the same as Mr. [John] Wilkes’s papers were seized, a kind of alteration of the laws of the land, a kind of scheme to make a man appear insane, to totally disguise, to undo the liberty of the British subject; in fact it is such a concealed evil that I do not know where it will end.

[Counsel:] Had Mr. Burnsell any ill will to you?

None at all; he was only employed to hide the mutiny that those applauses of the clergymen had occasioned; he went to a person that lives with Mrs. Dowdswell, in Upper Brook-street; he had a letter, and was perhaps see’d; the clergyman declared me as a God, the body of the people as a man insane; myself applying to the King merely to get my birth [berth] again; when I went to my friend Mr. Burnsell, I spoke of no powers of God or Christ.

That exchange had the effect of putting Burnsall’s opinion on the record along with those of the witnesses in court.

With all that evidence, the jury’s decision is no surprise, though Frith continued to try to waylay the process:

Court. Gentlemen of the Jury,…the question the Court proposes to you now, is, Whether he is at this time in a sane or an insane state of mind?

Prisoner. Permit me to speak, the physician is the most principal person, who has visited me as a friend, he can tell more than from any other private person’s declarations what ever; I appeal as a British subject.

Jury. My Lord, we are all of opinion that the prisoner is quite insane.

Court. He must be remanded for the present.

Prisoner. Then I must call on that physician, who said, on the 19th, I was perfectly in my senses.

The prisoner was then removed from the bar.

John Frith’s trial at Newgate had involved Britain’s lord chief justice, two other judges, the attorney general, the solicitor general, and half a dozen more London lawyers. In contrast, after Rebecca O’Hara and Margaret Nicholson lunged at King George III in 1778 and 1786, respectively, the authorities quickly deemed them insane without trials and clapped them inside Bethlem Hospital (shown above).

I think the major difference is that John Frith, for all of his obviously delusional talk, was a gentleman—raised in wealth, well connected, a former army officer. O’Hara and Nicholson were not only women but working-class. The legal system put a lot of resources into respecting Frith’s rights as an Englishman.

According to Joanne Major and Sarah Murden’s All Things Georgian, Frith continued to benefit from his genteel status. The judges sent him from Newgate to Bethlem, but on 17 December “he was released to his friends and disappeared from view except for his inclusion in the army lists as a half-pay officer up and including the 1806 list after which, presumably, his death occurred.”

COMING UP: The political side.

“A most extraordinary sermon upon me, as if I was a God”

As I described yesterday, John Frith refused to let his lawyers delay his trial for treason in April 1790, so the judges decided to start by making the session a trial of Frith’s sanity.

Even before the jury was sworn in, Frith started talking about how various authorities had met him: “the king’s physician,” “Lord Camden” of the privy council, an “apothecary,” and “my own physician, Dr. [William] Heberden.” Those men said he was “fit to meet my trial.” He’d made memorandums of all those visits.

Justice John Heath replied simply, “The jury will take notice of that.” Whether he meant the reported opinions of those experts or Frith’s behavior in the courtroom is not clear.

Frith’s attorneys Samuel Shepherd and William Garrow then asked him some questions and let him express himself at more length. For instance:

Mr. Garrow. Will you have the goodness, Mr. Frith, to state to the jury the circumstance that took place on your arrival at Liverpool, about the clergyman.

Prisoner. When I first arrived at Liverpool I perceived I had some powers like those which St. Paul had; and the sun that St. Paul gives a description of in the Testament; an extraordinary power that came down upon me, the power of Christ; in consequence of my persecution and being ill used, the public wanted to receive me as a must extraordinary kind of a man; they would have received me in any manner that I pleased; when I went to St. Thomas’s church I was there surprised to hear the clergyman preach a most extraordinary sermon upon me, as if I was a God: I found my friends wanted me to support that kind of fanaticism in this country; this sermon was printed afterwards by [William] Eyre, the printer at Warrington; when I came to London to the king concerning some military business, I told him nothing about any supernatural abilities, or the power of God; when I went to the Infirmary over Westminster-bridge, to the Asylum, I was surprised to hear General [George] Washington’s late Chaplain, Mr. [Jacob] Duche, he said, I remember the words he said, “see him clothed in grace,” pointing to me; there were some supernatural appearances at that time, therefore I could wish the privy council, when I came to England, or the Parliament, might be witnesses that I did not want to set up any kind of powers to the public; but there are such extraordinary appearances that attend me at this moment, that it is singular; and all I do daily is to make memorandums, daily to prove myself in my senses: some friends in Cheshire wanted me to set up some kind of fanaticism, some new branch of religion.

The Rev. Jacob Duché (shown here) preached to the First Continental Congress, which included Washington. In July 1776, the Second Continental Congress elected him its chaplain. However, when Gen. William Howe seized Philadelphia, Duché switched allegiances and wrote to Washington at Valley Forge, urging him to surrender. The minister soon moved to Britain and stayed there until 1792. Though he had never been Washington’s personal or military chaplain, Duché was evidently known in Britain for that link. 

Frith’s counsel was particularly eager to have him speak about a pain in his ear:

Mr. Garrow. Would you be so good, Mr. Frith, to inform the Court, as you have an opportunity now, of the complaint you made to me of the effect your confinement has upon you, and the pain in your ear?

Prisoner. In respect to the body of people, St. Paul when he was at Jerusalem, the same kind of power then came down on the public; there is both a kind of good and evil power which we are all liable to in this world; in consequence of that I feel myself in a particularly disagreeable situation in confinement; I am under a state of suffocation almost, the divine ordinances weighing so very low down that I am entirely reduced to a shadow almost, that is all to me as if it was a death seemingly, I am so in a state of confinement.

Garrow asked twice more about the ear pain before Frith finally explained:

I supposed it merely as a triffling thing, but that complaint arises from a power of witchcraft, which existed about a hundred years ago, in this country; there is a power which women are now afflicted with; there is a power that rules now, that women can torment men, if they are in a room; over your head, they may annoy you by speaking in your ear; I have had a noise in my ear like speech; it is in the power of women, to annoy men publickly, even throughout the whole continent.

Mr. Garrow. Could you satisfy one of the Jury, that such a noise exists in your ear at this time?

Prisoner. That there is a noise in my ear at this time?

Mr. Garrow. Yes.

Prisoner. No, I am free from it now.

Mr. Garrow. Oh! you are free from it now?

Prisoner. Yes, but it is the power and effects, of what they call witchcraft, or some kind of communication between women and men; but I have remained such a chaste man for these four years, that it has fallen upon me particularly…

The defense attorneys thus established what modern psychiatrists would call multiple delusions.

TOMORROW: Hearing from other witnesses.

“Justice could not be attained without reasonable delay”

Last month I left John Frith in Newgate prison, about to be put on trial for treason after people had seen him throw a rock at King George III’s coach on 21 Jan 1790.

As you recall, Frith had been a lieutenant in the royal army during the American War and after, but was cashiered after he had a divine revelation that Jamaica wasn’t real. Or, if we adopt his commanders’ narrow perspective, after he went mad.

Frith’s trial began on 17 April. Three judges presided: Baron Kenyon, the Lord Chief Justice of England (shown here); John Heath, known for handling criminal trials; and Sir Beaumont Hotham, who was a baron of the exchequer but would eventually become a baron in the House of Lords, just to confuse matters.

The defense attorneys were Samuel Shepherd and William Garrow. They both turned thirty that month, but they were well regarded; each would eventually serve as attorney general of the U.K. They started by asking for a postponement, saying, “we think there is some very important evidence which might be procured before the next sessions.”

However, when the lawyers broached that idea with Frith himself, he responded, “I object to it, on account of my health, being in a bad state through long confinement. I should rather meet it now: it is depriving a subject of his liberty, and endangering his health.”

The attorney general, Sir Archibald McDonald, said he was fine with a postponement: “I shall have no objection to give the gentlemen such time as will enable them to collect such evidence as they may chuse.” He was being assisted by the solicitor general, Sir John Scott; the appropriately named attorney Edward Law; and John Silvester, soon to be made a judge in London. Both Scott and Law eventually became Britain’s lord chief justice.

Frith still insisted on going through with the trial. He added, “whoever dares to oppose me in that respect, I will represent him to the legislature, or some member of parliament; either to General North, or some gentleman whom I have the honour of knowing.” (I can’t identify “General North.”)

The judges themselves then stepped in and ruled, “because justice could not be attained without reasonable delay interposing, therefore it must stand over till next sessions.”

And Frith declared:

I do not admit of it. And I shall make an application to parliament, that I have been here three months in disagreeable confinement; and the king has broke the mutual obligation between him and the subject: and the assault is of such a simple kind of manner; and what I have met with is of such a nature, that I desire to speak by way of extenuation, and to plead guilty or not guilty to the facts. I then shall make an application as being illegally detained in prison, that you will not admit a British subject to plead to the indictment: I therefore shall make an application to the legislature, that you are violating the laws of this kingdom. I will not put it in the power of the gentlemen that are employed for me to put it off.

A significant portion of the kingdom’s top legal minds were in that courtroom agreeing that the trial should be delayed for the defendant’s sake, and Frith absolutely refused. So the judges took another approach. Lord Chief Justice Kenyon stated:

I think there ought now to be an enquiry made, touching the sanity of this man at this time; whether he is in a situation of mind to say what his grounds of defence here are. I know it is untrodden ground, though it is constitutional: then get a jury together to enquire into the present state of his mind: the twelve men that are there, will do.

The criminal trial thus turned into an inquiry on whether Frith was sane.

TOMORROW: Testimony.

(Incidentally, Wikipedia tells us that Sir Archibald Macdonald was the first baronet of his line, as well as the son of a seventh baronet and brother of an eighth. How was that possible? Because Macdonald’s brother, father, and ancestors were baronets of Nova Scotia, but for his services Sir Archibald was given the same title within the English peerage.)

“A man of genteel but frantic appearance”

John Frith, formerly a lieutenant in the 37th and then the 10th Regiment of Foot, returned to Britain in the late 1780s, convinced he had been unfairly pushed out of the army.

And all because he, while serving in the West Indies, had a divine vision that convinced him Jamaica wasn’t real, and the British government was covering that up. 

In December 1787, according to Steve Poole in The Politics of Regicide in England, 1760–1850, Frith petitioned the House of Commons to “desire His Majesty to enforce his executive power of martial prerogative” and put him back on the rolls.

Frith then appears to have traveled around. I see references to him arriving in Liverpool and visiting Holland, and he commissioned a memorial at his mother’s burying-place in Hempstead.

At the end of December 1789, Frith was back in London promulgating a “manifesto” and a Protest Against the Democracy of the People of the Kingdom of Great Britain. He pinned the latter paper “on the whalebone in the courtyard of St. James’s” and at the Royal Exchange, press reports said. What’s more:

he publicly read it, and, in the most wild and extravagant manner, exhorted the persons who heard him, to espouse his cause, and not to see the constitution of their country subverted.

In Frith’s mind, his dismissal from the army had become a constitutional offense because the king, privy council, and Parliament were shirking their duty to address his petition. He warned:

After waiting upwards of four months and no attention paid, I don’t hesitate to pronounce our Ancient Constitution has given a mortal blow to her libertys and we have only the outward form of government.

Frith compared the situation to “Sweden in 1772,” when King Gustaf III led a coup to introduce absolute monarchy. No matter that Frith was asking the king to act absolutely on his behalf.

On 21 Jan 1790, Frith visited the Treasury Solicitors’ Office for help, only to be turned away. In St. James’s Park he saw George III ride by in his gilded carriage to open a session of Parliament. Frith waved a roll of paper at the king, who by tradition accepted petitions from his subjects. But then the former officer shouted, “You tyrant! You villain! You are going to be hanged like a rogue, as you are guarded by a parcel of rogues of constables!”

The newspapers reported, “a person of genteel appearance threw a large stone with great violence at the carriage, but fortunately missed the royal person.” People immediately seized “a man of genteel but frantic appearance” with “a bunch of orange-coloured ribband” sewn in the middle of his cockade. The press reported on one eyewitness:

Samuel Spurway…saw the prisoner, when his majesty’s carriage was passing him, throw a stone with all his force against it, the stone hit the coach about two inches below the glass, but his majesty was so engaged in conversation as not to observe it. The stone, Mr. Spurway picked up, and found it large and heavy.

On questioning the prisoner as to his motives for so horrid an attempt, he replied, ‘He was very sorry the stone had not hit the king!’ Mr. Spurway ordered Jordan, a constable, to seize him, who also saw him throw the stone.

That prisoner was, of course, John Frith. On searching him, the constables found twopence and a bag containing a copy of his manifesto. Frith identified himself as a former army officer and said he was seeking “a public examination” to restore his good name.

The authorities took Frith to the Whitehall office of the Duke of Leeds, secretary of state for foreign affairs. In crowded many more royal officials: “the lord president, lord privy seal, chancellor of the exchequer, duke of Richmond, two secretaries of state, earl of Chatham, lords Hawkesbury and Kenyon, master of the rolls, attorney and solicitor generals, and sir Sampson Wright,” chief magistrate at Bow Street.

The constables described seeing Frith throw the stone. An unidentified female relative “spoke strongly to the appearance of the prisoner’s derangement of mind, previous to his committing this rash act.” Other people who knew Frith also answered questions about him.

As for Frith himself, he was recorded as telling the magistrate:

Until His Majesty is better advised and gives a Martial Redress…the Liberty of the British Soldier and Subject are Infringed by Despotism which may end in Anarchy and Confusion. . . . our chartered rights in the Tower will Supply the Deficiency to Carry on the Law of the Land. Now the Compact is Disolved as in the case of James II, June 1688.

The august council decided to commit John Frith to Newgate Prison and put him on trial for treason.

COMING UP: Frith at the bar.

“He wished to reveal what the government wished to conceal”

John Frith was born in Westminster in 1752, according to Joanne Major and Sarah Murden’s All Things Georgian: Tales from the Long Eighteenth Century.

Frith was the younger son of a brandy merchant and veteran of the Life Guards, but by the end of 1771 his parents and older brother had died, so he inherited the family money.

Some reports say Frith dissipated that fortune, but he retained his genteel education and enough money that, with a push from Chelsea businessman David Burnsall, he bought the rank of ensign in the 37th Regiment of Foot in March 1774.

Frith was promoted to lieutenant the next year, and in 1776 the 37th was part of the Howe brothers’ invasion of New York. An item published in The British Mercury, or Annals of History in March 1790 stated:

The Major and Captain of this regiment, when in America, had, by retreating from the enemy, affixed some stains on their military character; and Mr. Frith, in a moment of irritation, or imprudence, was unguarded enough to reproach them for their dastardly behaviour. This gave rise to an implacable dislike, and brought on a series of ill treatment, which, as his feelings were exquisite, obliged him to quit the service on half-pay.

Lt. Frith retired from the army in March 1778, as noted in Gen. Sir William Howe’s orders. But four years later he rejoined as an officer of the 10th Regiment, which was posted to the West Indies. That stretch didn’t prove to be any more successful.

A man named Fuller later testified about hearing Frist complain about “his ill treatment by Major Amherst, and Ensign Steward, in the West Indies.” I believe these men appear in the 1791 Army List as Lt. Col. Jeffery Amherst (c. 1752–1815, illegitimate son of the field marshal who had led the British army at the end of the French and Indian War) and Lt. Thomas Stewart of the 10th.

As Fuller recalled:

[Frist] declared then the reason he was ill treated, was, that he wished to reveal what the government wished to conceal; for that he saw a cloud come down from Heaven, that it cemented into a rock, and out of that sprung a false island of Jamaica, and because he wished to reveal it, he had, he said, been confined one hundred and sixty-three days

According to Major and Murden, Frith’s commanders asked him to leave in 1786 because they thought he was going insane. He was officially listed on the half-pay roles as a lieutenant from the “1st Foot, 2d Bat.” among the “Additional Companies, reduced in 1783.”

In 1788 Frith went back to Hempstead, where his mother was buried. He commissioned a memorial for his family in that church, including his own name among them. Under the emblem of a sun in a double triangle beneath a rainbow were the words:

And there shall be a standard of Truth erected in the west, which shall overpower the enemy.—May 12, 1786, This glorious phaenomena in Sol of the Almighty came down for my protection in latitude 15, on the Bahama sandbanks, and where the spiritual cities of Sodom and Gomorrha came up in the West Indies. Vide Revelations.

Your dying embers shall again revive,
The phoenix souls of Friths are still alive.

One wonders what the stone carver and churchmen thought of those words, but Frith was paying the bill.

TOMORROW: Lt. Frith and the king.

(The photo above shows a recreated 37th Regiment active in the late twentieth century, courtesy of Flintlock and Tomahawk.)

“The poor creature is mad”

What did Rebecca O’Hara, Margaret Nicholson, John Frith, James Hadfield, Catherine Kirby, and Urban Metcalf have in common?

They all attacked King George III, and all were deemed mentally ill.

Rebecca O’Hara came at the king as he was stepping out of his sedan chair on 2 Jan 1778. Newspapers reported that she was “going to lay hold on him, but he with difficulty avoided her.”

After guards seized O’Hara, she declared that she was “Queen Beck,” rightful ruler of Britain, or perhaps royal consort. Then she identified herself as Rebecca O’Hara, born in Ireland, living at a particular address—but the authorities couldn’t confirm any of that. O’Hara was committed to the Bethlem Royal Hospital, or Bedlam.

Eight years later, on 2 Aug 1786, another woman attacked George III as he was exiting his carriage. Holding up a petition (actually a blank piece of paper), Margaret Nicholson suddenly lunged at the king with an ivory-handled dessert knife. Guards arrested her and later searched her lodgings. There they found letters in which Nicholson claimed to be the rightful monarch, a virgin, mother of Lord Mansfield, and more.

As his men grabbed Nicholson, George III called out, “The poor creature is mad; do not hurt her, she has not hurt me.” This was widely reported as a sign of royal mercy. There was much more public discussion about Nicholson than about O’Hara, perhaps because the first incident happened in wartime, perhaps because the second involved a knife. The picture shown above, by Carington Bowles, is one of several prints depicting Nicholson with the king.

The press blamed an unhappy love affair for driving Nicholson insane. Radicals objected to her being confined in a mental hospital without trial, conservatives to her not being punished as an assassin. As late as 1810 Percy Shelley co-wrote a book of satirical verse in Nicholson’s name. She died, still confined in Bedlam, in 1828.

Ironically, in 1788 George III himself started to show signs of serious mental illness. By that fall he was speaking at extraordinary length in manic fits. Though the young king appears to have suffered a debilitating depression in early 1765, he had recovered quickly, so people assumed that was a one-time problem. By early 1789, with the king still not well, the younger William Pitt’s ministry prepared a law to establish a regency.

But then King George recovered. Just in time for another assault.

TOMORROW: An army veteran with a complaint.

Bipolar Disorder as a Factor in the American Revolution?

Instead of porphyria as the explanation for George III’s madness, in the paper I quoted yesterday Timothy Peters pointed to bipolar disorder: a cycle of mania and depression that debilitated the monarch for long, unpredictable stretches in his later life.

Andrew Roberts adopts this conclusion in his new biography of the king. Other scholars might have proposed the same answer as well.

Some might respond that that’s not so much of a diagnosis as a description of the king’s symptoms. Why did his mood shift so drastically? Indeed, part of the appeal of the preceding porphyria diagnosis is that it seems to offer an “explanation” to point to.

Many psychiatrists would counter that even if we don’t know the causal mechanisms of bipolar disorder, it’s a widely recognized condition. About the same fraction of people have it in many different cultures, strongly suggesting that a similar fraction of people had it in the eighteenth century.

Indeed, a number of other prominent figures in the American Revolution showed signs of the disorder. I’m not talking about people whose politics or opinions other people sometimes called “mad,” such as John Adams, but men who went through periods of not being able to function because of depression and other periods of exuberance that got them into trouble.

In Massachusetts, the most prominent example was the early radical leader James Otis, Jr. He suffered several periods of insanity in the 1770s and early 1780s, bad enough that his family bundled him off to houses in the country.

William Tudor, Jr.’s 1823 biography blamed Otis’s coffee-house brawl with John Robinson for those troubles. But John Adams’s diary and other contemporaneous sources from 1769 suggest that Otis’s troubles were already evident by then, and that he actually went into that confrontation during a manic period.

In addition, the Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings for May 1858 refers to a letter from Otis’s younger brother, Samuel Allyne Otis, to their father with “evidence of the existence of a tendency to insanity in the younger [James] Otis, which manifested itself at an early period of his life.” Of course, being beaten on the skull didn’t help the man’s mental stability.

Contemporaries also recognized that the Northampton lawyer Joseph Hawley (1723-1788) fell into a debilitating depression around the start of the Revolutionary War. Until then, he had been a strong Whig voice from the western part of the province, sometimes voicing radical arguments in the courts and legislature. Indeed, in the late 1760s his criticism of the Superior Court was so strong it got him disbarred for a time.

In May 1775 Hawley wrote to his colleague Theodore Sedgwick that he felt “very low and melancholy,” complaining of “want of health or memory, weakness of body and Shocking impair of mind.” He declined requests to serve in the Continental Congress and retired entirely in late 1776. In the following years friends would find Hawley confined to his house, biographer E. Francis Brown wrote, sitting in front of his fire and smoking for hours with a “wild and piercing look” in his eyes.

I think another Massachusetts lawyer in the opposite political camp, attorney general Jonathan Sewall, also shows a pattern of manic-depressive behavior. He certainly suffered a severe depression after going into exile during the war. But Sewall’s refusal to participate in the Boston Massacre trials and his uneven output of newspaper essays might be best explained as signs of severely changing moods.

The cases of both Hawley and Sewall offer evidence of how there’s a hereditary aspect to bipolar disorder. Hawley’s father committed suicide, and Sewall’s son was also known to have depressive episodes.

In Renegade Revolutionary: The Life of Charles Lee (2014), Phillip Pappas posits that bipolar disorder is the best explanation of that general’s wild and often self-defeating behavior—the risk-taking that led to his capture in 1776, his choice as a prisoner to offer strategic advice to Gen. William Howe, what looks like an attempt to draw Gen. George Washington into a duel after the battle of Monmouth, and so on.

Assuming these men did have bipolar disorder, did that affect the course of the Revolution? I think it’s conceivable that Otis was a bit manic when he broke with the Crown in the early 1760s and formulated his foundational arguments about the illegitimacy of Parliament’s revenue laws. I’m not saying that political position was crazy, but it was radical enough that Otis might never have had the audacity to stake out that ground otherwise.

Streaming King George

This evening, Andrew Roberts is scheduled to speak at Mount Vernon on his new book The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. The public can view that talk starting at 7:00 P.M. through the estate’s website.

I recently listened to the History Extra podcast’s conversation with Roberts, which focused mainly on the charge that George III was tyrannical. American Patriots used that claim to justify their total break with the British system in July 1776, piling onto the king all the policies of the government he represented and describing them in the worst possible way.

Later British Whig writers also criticized George III for trying to exercise political power simply on the basis of inheritance. Roberts argues that really they disliked his preference for “Tories” even when Whigs held the majority in the House of Commons. In reality, he says, George III was barely involved in governing even before his illness.

That position makes a provocative contrast with the conversations about the prime ministers who served under George III on Iain Dale’s “The Prime Ministers” podcast. A recurring theme of those interviews is that getting along with the king was close to a prerequisite for prime ministers in the late eighteenth century. Men like William Pitt in the late 1750s and Charles James Fox in the early 1780s held power in the House of Commons but needed a more congenial, noble First Lord of the Treasury as a buffer between themselves and the king. George III may not have gotten deep into the details of policy, but he did get into personalities.

Another of Roberts’s contentions involves the illness that debilitated George III. Back in the early 1960s Drs. Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter argued that disease was porphyria in two British Medical Journal papers; a book, George III and the Mad Business; and a pamphlet, Porphyria: A Royal Malady. Not everyone was convinced, but their hypothesis got a lot of traction.

Indeed, I remember learning the word “porphyria” as a boy back in the Bicentennial era, solely because of King George. All I knew about the disease is that it could render people insane and turn their urine purple.

In 2011 Timothy Peters published a paper in the journal Clinical Medicine titled “King George III, bipolar disorder, porphyria and lessons for historians.” He lambasted Macalpine and Hunter’s diagnosis, writing, “it is clear that their interpretation of [the king’s symptoms] as diagnostic of acute porphyria was misleading and some interpretations were bordering on the fraudulent.”

As for the urine:

The discoloured urine claimed by Hunter to be ‘the final proof of the diagnosis’ is worthy of some mention. Macalpine was able to identify four occasions during the 30 years of the King’s recurrent illness when the physicians reported discolouration. They subsequently claimed a further two unidentified occasions when coloured urine was noted. The bluish particulate material in a single urine sample during his final attack in January 1811…is particularly noteworthy.

However, Macalpine and Hunter and other researchers have failed to point to the six occasions in the six weeks leading up to this event when the physicians referred to pale, clear, yellow and normal urine samples. A single visit to the British Library to confirm the blue urine referred to in the Willis papers would surely have signalled even to non-medics the possibility of selectivity. The observation that three days before the blue urine episode the King commenced a new medication, extract of gentian, was a ‘red flag’ to the present author.

Roberts clearly trusts Peters’s analysis of the case.

TOMORROW: So what was the madness of George III?

Mysteries of Marie Antoinette and Her Family

Yesterday I listened to this episode of the History Extra podcast, an interview with Nancy Goldstone about her new book, In the Shadow of the Empress: The Defiant Lives of Maria Theresa, Mother of Marie Antoinette, and Her Daughters.

Although the episode title focuses on Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa, a large part of the conversation was about the empress’s youngest daughter, Marie Antoinette of France. In that section, Goldstone posited that:

• Louis XVI was on the autism spectrum.
• Marie Antoinette might have been dyslexic.

The latter theory didn’t appear in her book, she said. The former is a major argument, and her publisher is marketing that as part of what’s new.

Another element of Goldstone’s portrait of Marie Antoinette, not so new, is that she had a long emotional and sexual relationship with the Swedish count Axel von Fersen. I discussed the recent reading of their letters earlier this month.

Goldstone has written or co-written quite a range of books, including previous biographies of royal women, memoirs of the book trade, and murder mysteries. She hasn’t written about the eighteenth century before, however. I’ve seen some reviews complain that she’s overlooked sources that have come to light in the last few decades, which specialists would certainly use.

That said, Goldstone’s status as a non-academic historian writing for a popular readership has probably freed her to acknowledge the usual caveats about the impossibility of making any sort of sophisticated diagnosis when a subject has been dead for centuries and share her ideas anyway.

Autism and dyslexia may be like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, homosexuality, and other human conditions with genetic components that appear in individuals in all sorts of societies in all eras. Those societies understand and respond to the conditions differently—accepting, denying, punishing—leaving different evidence in the historical record. Our present understandings of those conditions may be more advanced than in previous centuries but are undoubtedly still limited. Nonetheless, I think these possible diagnoses are worth at least considering.

In the podcast Goldstone also raised the possibility of genetic testing to see if, as she suspects, Marie Antoinette’s two younger children were fathered by Count von Fersen rather than King Louis. I don’t know if there’s enough genetic material available to make that possible; both children died young, though one became the doomed Dauphin, whose heart is reportedly preserved.