The Final Years of King George III Were a Living Nightmare (The Full, Untold Story)

They tied his legs first. At five in the morning on 20 December 1788, in a cold house at Kew, King George III was forced into a strait waistcoat, strapped down across his chest and held there until nearly two in the afternoon. One of his own physicians had been placed in the household by his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, and was accused of writing the gloomiest reports he could. This documentary follows the madness and death of King George III through the people who were in the room. The night at Windsor when he walked into Queen Charlotte's bedroom with a candle. The trick that got him to Kew. Dr Francis Willis, the clergyman who ran a Lincolnshire madhouse, and the restraint chair the king bitterly called his throne. The Regency Crisis of 1788 and 1789, Fanny Burney's flight through Kew Gardens, the relapses of 1801 and 1804, the death of Princess Amelia, the Regency of 1811, and his final decade at Windsor Castle, blind, almost deaf, bearded and talking to children who had died long before. Then we put the theories on trial. The porphyria diagnosis and the famous blue urine. The arsenic found in a lock of his hair, probably from antimony medicines such as emetic tartar and James's Powder. And the evidence in his own letters that points to recurring mania, the explanation most historians and psychiatrists now favour. George III died at Windsor at 8.38 in the evening on 29 January 1820 and was buried by torchlight in the royal vault he had built under St George's Chapel, beside his daughter Amelia and his little son Octavius, without whom, he once said, there would be no Heaven for him. Who did George III the most harm, the illness, his doctors or his own son? Tell us in the comments, and subscribe to The Royal Deathbed for more true stories of how rulers really died. This is a history documentary and does not provide medical advice.