King George’s Illness Explained: Were the Brutal Treatments of ‘Bridgerton: Queen Charlotte’ Real?

The “Bridgerton” prequel “Queen Charlotte” about the very romantic union of Queen Charlotte (India Amarteifio) and King George (Corey Mylchreest) is currently running with great success on Netflix. Of course, many things in the series are fictional, but the basic facts correspond to reality: Charlotte was actually German and gave birth to the British king, with whom she is said to have had a love marriage after a forced marriage, 15 children . And also that George III. had problems with his mental health is true.

From today’s perspective, of course, it is difficult to say exactly what disease he suffered from. There is much speculation in historians and medical circles as to whether he was primarily mentally ill or whether his delusions were symptoms of an underlying physical and/or neurological illness. There is also talk of an (unintentional) poisoning with arsenic, which was then regularly used for treatment.

porphyria? Or is it bipolar disorder?

A theory that has gained widespread acceptance in recent decades is that that King George suffered from a hereditary disease called porphyria. This metabolic disease also affects the nerves. In addition to complaints of the gastrointestinal tract, there are also epileptic attacks and psychiatric symptoms such as psychoses.

Another possibility recently considered is that George suffered from bipolar disorder and suffered manic episodes as a result. George actor Corey Mylchreest, on the other hand, doesn’t want to commit to a medical diagnosis, but according to him the interpretation that the king’s mental health was severely compromised by stress, fear and panic. In “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton StoryGeorge’s medic Doctor Monro (Guy Henry) sees a “crushing nerve” and a lack of willingness to submit as a problem – among other things – and subjects the king to brutal treatment methods bordering on torture.

The brutal “treatment” was standard at the time

These scenes are almost unbearable in “Queen Charlotte”. Again and again King George has been submerged in ice water, inflicted pain while tied to a chair, and will be subdued by Munro, even broken. As an audience we don’t even see everything, often we only hear the king’s screams through closed doors. George voluntarily undergoes the treatment in the Netflix series because he wants to get rid of his “madness” before his new wife Charlotte notices.

And as exaggerated and dramatized as these treatments appear in the Netflix series, chances are the real king was subjected to them and perhaps even worse, since such radical treatments were the standard treatment for mental illness at the time. ‘Queen Charlotte’ producer and director Tom Verica explained : “In the Georgian period and the Regency era, some very extreme methods were tried to deal with issues like King George.”

The real Dr Monro – and a doctor named Francis Willis

By the way, there was actually a Dr. John Monro (1715 – 1791) of London’s Bethlem Hospital, who is said to have acted as the king’s healer in later years. Initially, however, it was a doctor named Francis Willis who treated George. There are suspicions that he actually subjected the king to cruel (and then common) procedures such as skin burning, scarring and restraining, which are picked up in the 1994 feature film King George: A Mind Mind, among others, and perhaps not entirely voluntarily done by the king.