Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

In this episode, historian Elaine Chalice explores the mental health of George

the third and how it affected his reign.

In June of 1788, George had a bout of biliousness. Now, whether or not that meant that he was having, you know,

it's simply bad indigestion or it was a flu or he was having gallstones fire up or it was

the onset of whatever is going to be turning into this attack of madness, as it was deigned later on. We're not sure, but we know

that he had an early attack in June of biliousness, which left him deciding that he needed to go

and take the waters. And so he went to Cheltenham, and the family spent five weeks at Cheltenham

with the King taking the waters, and he felt

thoroughly renovated, rejuvenated by this, and he came back into London for the autumn.

Now, unfortunately, by middle of October already, his health is clearly, there's something

wrong, and he's had another attack of biliousness and they're concerned about fever

and increasingly over these days from the end of or towards the end of October there's more and

more concerns about delirium. Now whether or not he is actually delirious or feverish, we're not

sure because there isn't actually a measuring of temperature but certainly something's going wrong and he's not able to sleep.

He's getting all kinds of pains up and down his body.

He's feeling lame.

And he's increasingly manifesting what we would almost think of as manic type of behavior,

whether it's the delirium caused by Porphyria or whether it's a bout of manic depression,

...