The Trials of the King of Hampshire by Elizabeth Foyster

Author:Elizabeth Foyster [Elizabeth Foyster]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2016-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

A lack of ‘proper feeling’

SOMETIME ON THE evening of 13 November 1813, Portsmouth entered his wife’s bedroom in Lincoln’s Inn Fields to go to bed. Grace was kneeling by the bed, as if in prayer. But as he approached her and saw her face he realized that she was dead. She was sixty-one years old, and her death was attributed to an apoplectic fit, or what we might today call a stroke. She died alone.

Grace had been complaining for some time of ‘a giddiness in the head’. Portsmouth said that he had advised her to see Dr Matthew Baillie, one of the leading physicians of the day. But in 1813 Baillie was occupied with his most famous patient, George III, as he suffered from another of his episodes of insanity. Over the course of the regency, which had begun two years earlier, Baillie visited the King at Windsor several hundred times. Never able to resist the opportunity to take on a new fee-paying patient (it was said Baillie was so much in demand that he regularly worked sixteen-hour days), Baillie sent a note to Portsmouth appointing a time when he would see Grace. Grace resigned to wait and ‘see whether she in a few days might not get better’.

In the end, the doctor never arrived because Grace died before her appointment. Portsmouth had demonstrated his concern for his wife’s health; Baillie did not come cheap. The irony that Portsmouth had recommended Baillie to examine his wife’s head could not have been lost to the Commission of Lunacy years later. At the Commission, Baillie was one of a number of physicians to declare Portsmouth insane. But when his wife had been sick, who better than a man with head problems of his own to know that Baillie was the doctor his wife should see?

In the days immediately following his wife’s death, Portsmouth withdrew from society, and returned to Hurstbourne. Edward Phillips, an Andover physician who had become friendly with Portsmouth while playing cards with him, came to give his condolences. Initially, Phillips was told that Portsmouth was not seeing anyone, but, after Phillips presented his card, Portsmouth warmly invited him in.

Portsmouth was eager to talk to Phillips and to get his medical opinion about his wife’s death. He told Phillips how Grace had died, and that he had tried to get Baillie to see her. As he spoke, Phillips considered that Portsmouth’s ‘manner was collected’. Like any person who had lost someone who was close to them, Portsmouth wanted to know if he could have done anything to prevent his wife’s death. In particular, Portsmouth asked if that cure for all ills, and his own peculiar obsession, bleeding, would have made any difference, and prevented the fit. Phillips answered all his friend’s questions, and then ‘endeavoured to divert his Lordship’s mind, as he seemed much affected’. Phillips was confident from his experience treating patients with disordered minds that Portsmouth had a weak but sound mind, and this conversation confirmed his opinion that Portsmouth was not insane.

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