George III is famous chiefly for two things: Losing the American Colonies and for going mad. George III's mental illness is now thought to have been caused by porphyria, a blood disorder known to cause psychiatric as well as physical symptoms, such as the urine turning an appropriately royal purple.
However, George III's encounter with madness was not limited to his own symptoms, on two separate occasions, he was the victim of assassination attempts by two people equally or even more unhinged than he was.
Mrs Margaret Nicholson (c. 1750 - 1828)
The first of these is the aforementioned Mrs Margaret Nicholson, who was in fact a spinster (The 'Mrs' was a courtesy title often extended to unmarried women who had already past the age at which society deemed it wise to have been married by).
Margaret Nicholson was a former maid and needleworker who was originally from Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham. She had moved down south to find work as a maid at the age of 12, and had in her time worked at several notable households, including those of Tory Peer Lord Coventry, and the Anglo-Irish soldier Sir John Sebright.
However, things seem to have gone downhill for her in 1783, when she was dismissed from her employment as a maid for having been discovered engaging in an illicit affair with another servant. Her lover subsequently abandoned her, and poor Mrs Nicholson was left to fend for herself in London, where she got by scratching a living as a needleworker.
Nobody seems to have seriously taken notice of her deteriorating mental state until one day in August 1786, when, on the pretext of presenting the king with a petition (which was common in those days), Mrs Margaret Nicholson lunged forward with a desert knife in a feeble attempt to stab him as he alighted from his carriage at St James' Palace.
As assassination attempts go, it was a pitiful. The knife was blunt and was attempted at such a distance that George III easily dodged the the effort. Mrs Nicholson was quickly seized by the King's bodyguards, supported by furious onlookers. Fearing that she might be lynched or otherwise mistreated, the King called out “leave her alone, the poor creature is mad! Do not hurt her! She has not hurt me”. A wondrously enlightened attitude for an 18th Century monarch, who probably already had reason to empathise with her plight, having suffered a number of mild episodes of the illness which would eventually consume him.
Mrs Margaret Nicholson's actions technically constituted High Treason, a crime for which, even in those late times, could have earned her a gruesome death by burning at the stake*. However, when her lodgings were raided following her arrest, it was discovered that she had written many rambling entries and letters in which she claimed, amongst other things, to be the true heir to the throne of Great Britain, as well as the mother of several prominent figures of the day, some of whom were older than she was, despite the fact that she also claimed to be a virgin.
It was plainly obvious to all that the would-be-assassin was a few pence short of a shilling, and she was never put on trial (perhaps in part due to George III's humanitarian attitude towards mental illness), instead, she was confined to a lunatic Asylum (the Royal Bethlehem Hospital AKA 'Beldam'). Her confinement in an asylum was controversial to both Whigs and Tories however. Many Whigs sniffed that detaining Nicholson without any semblance of a trial was yet another example of George III's tyrannical impulses, whereas those on the Tory end of the spectrum where rather more disappointed that they were to be deprived of the gratifying spectacle of seeing a traitor and would-be regicide being brutally executed, only three years after the loss of the American colonies and only a few months after suffering the sight of the author of the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson strutting around in the streets of London earlier in the Spring, not only as a free man but also as the citizen of a new nation forged in the furnace of treason and rebellion against the Crown.
Nevertheless, Maragaret Nicholson spent the remaining years of her life confined in Bedlam, dying in 1828, 42 years after her assassination attempt.
James Hatfield (c. 1771 - 1841)
James Hatfield, the other of George III's would-be assassins, was a former soldier with the 15th light dragoons, who had fought at the Battle of Tourcoing in 1794, and survived to become a prisoner of war despite the best efforts of a French cavalryman to hack his head open like a coconut. With 8 separate sabre wounds to the head, James Hatfield lived, but the injuries to his brain challenged his grip on reality. Upon returning to Britain, he joined a bizarre millennial cult and came to believe that the second coming of Christ would be brought forward if he could get himself executed by the British Government, and what better way to do this, than by trying to assassinate the King himself?
And so, on the 15th of May 1800, during the performance of a play at the Drury Lane Theatre at which George III was present, James Hatfield waited until the National Anthem was being played before standing up, pointing a pistol at the Royal Box and opening fire. The bullet missed the King, and Hatfield called out “God bless you your Royal Highness (sic)** I like you very well! You are a good fellow!” Remarks which call into question whether he really intended to kill the King, or merely intended to make sufficient show of it to get himself arrested, tried and hanged for treason.
Whatever the case, the King himself appeared unfazed by the attempt, and even fell asleep during the course of the play, which continued after the incident.
The King earned much praise and popularity for his cool demeanour, but considering his own often tenuous grip on reality by this time, it can only be speculated how much of this was down to stone-cold courage on his part, rather than an inability to comprehend the seriousness of what had just happened.
On this occasion, a trial was held and Hatfield was defended by no less a man than Thomas Erskine, future Lord Chancellor and one of the greatest barristers of his day. During the course of the trial, it was established that since returning from France, Hatfield had demonstrated to many of those around him that he had lost his sense of reason. Although previously, the insanity defence worked along the premise that a defendant was so far gone as to be completely incapable of reasoned planning for his actions, Erskine and the testimony of two eminent surgeons asserted that madness did not necessarily mean that a patient was entirely incapable of planning, despite his or her delusions and further asserted that insanity “unaccompanied by frenzy or raving madness [was] the true character of insanity”.
The Judge, Lloyd Kenyon halted the trial and ordered the jury to acquit the defendant, but stipulated that for his own sake, as well as that of wider society, he should not be discharged, and instead confined to an asylum, and so Hatfield found himself confined to the very same hospital in which Margaret Nicholson had been confined to some 14 years earlier.
Parliament subsequently passed two acts, the Criminal Lunatic Act 1800, which made it easier for the state to confine those who were certified to be dangerously insane, and also the Treason Act of 1800, to make it easier to prosecute people who attempted to harm the monarch.
As for George III himself, his own mental condition steadily declined to such an extent that by 1811 his insanity was considered to be permanent, with only brief and occasional glimpses of lucidity. His Royal Powers were taken up by his eldest son, who became Prince Regent (and later George IV). From then on, George III was largely confined to Windsor Castle, out of public sight, until he died in 1820.
His would-be-assassins, Mrs Margaret Nicholson and Mr James Hatfield died 8 and 21 years later respectively, albeit in far less luxurious conditions. In fact, such were the appalling conditions of the Bedlam, and of lunatic asylums in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries generally that many have speculated whether having them executed might not have been the more humane thing to do in the long run, but the legal precedents established by finding them not-guilty of serious crimes by reason of their insanity helped to establish the concept of diminished responsibility much more firmly.
*Catherine Murphy was the last British woman to suffer this horrific fate. She was burned at the stake in Newgate Prison in 1789, for the ostensibly far less serious crime of coining (forging counterfeit coins), which was at that time considered to be a form of high treason.
**As the King, the correct term of address should have been 'Your Majesty' rather than 'Your Royal Highness', a common mistake made even today, even by people who aren't mad...
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