Frank's Reviews > A Royal Experiment: The Private Life of King George III

My wife and I watched the TV series, Bridgerton, on Netflix. This was a very fictionalized account taking place in 18th century Georgian England. One of the continuing characters in the series was Queen Charlotte who was married to the Mad King, George III. We also watched the spinoff series called Queen Charlotte which told of Charlotte's travel from a kingdom in Germany to become Queen of England by marrying King George. This series was actually more interesting and enjoyable to me than the original Bridgerton series. It told of Charlotte's marriage to George and his struggle with mental illness. Again, both of these series were highly fictionalized and used a premise of Charlotte being at least partially black with other black personages being granted peerages in England. But how much in the series was close to what really happened in history? Anyway, I wanted to find out more about George III and Charlotte so checked this mammoth biography out from the library.

This is a very detailed biography of not only George III and his family but of the Georgian dynasty as a whole, including George I and George II who came before George III and ending with Victoria, George III's granddaughter. The German House of Hanover became the British royal family by default of the Act of Settlement of 1701, which assured only a Protestant monarch would rule England. George I and II were not fond of England and were miserable parents who despised their own offspring. George III came into power in 1760 at age 22, and was determined to be a better king whose power would be rooted in the affection and approval of his people. He wanted to escape the dysfunction of his predecessors by maintaining a faithful marriage with domestic harmony. His marriage to Charlotte was an arranged affair with Charlotte coming from the German kingdom of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Charlotte agreed with George's sense of moral purpose and together they do everything possible to raise their thirteen sons and daughters with love and attention. However, as the children grow older, the men mostly stray and have affairs outside marriage while the women have difficulty in securing a husband who meets the requirements of a royal marriage. And then George III struggles through a time of change and tumult including both the American and French revolutions. Then at age 50, George is stricken with a mental illness that plagues him off and on through the rest of his life. This kept him confined and in strait jackets for many years. His symptoms included manic bouts of talking until he passed out, becoming obsessed with a certain Lady Pembroke of court and telling his wife he hated her and preferred Lady Pembroke (in front their children), trying to seduce his daughter-in-law, and using increasingly bawdy language in front of his daughters. George's illness has sometimes been identified as porphyria, a metabolic disorder caused by a genetic malfunction that alters the body's chemistry, resulting in the overproduction of toxins affecting the nervous system. However, more recent research questions this diagnosis and attributes his madness to the mental condition, late-onset bipolar disorder with recurrent manic episodes.

This biography was very well researched and contained a ton of information about life during that time period including things such as childbirth and midwifery, education of children including differences between how boys and girls are taught, religion and politics, and domestic and public life. So how does this compare to the Netflix series. Well there is some truth to the series including Charlotte's motherhood of 15 children, but the series is much more romantic than the actual life. George's mental illness is portrayed as something he was plagued with since childhood but in actuality, it didn't affect him until age 50. I would recommend this biography for anyone with an interest in Georgian England but it is a slog to get through — I admit that I did skim some of the later chapters.