“George IV should have been a hairdresser”: Lucy Worsley on rethinking Britain's royal past

“George IV should have been a hairdresser”: Lucy Worsley on rethinking Britain's royal past If Lucy Worsley has learned one thing in her 30 years as a historian, it’s that what we think we know about Britain’s kings and queens is often wrong. She looks again at five royals whose reputations have been transformed – or are long overdue a makeover 1. How Henry VIII became “the most dangerous man in the world” When I started work at Hampton Court, more than 20 years ago, Henry VIII was treated as the hero of the story of Tudor England’s greatest surviving royal palace. But during my time as chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the charity that also looks after sites such as the Tower of London and Kensington Palace, I saw his reputation transformed. He went from the king we love to the king we love to hate. In the glittering early years of Henry VIII’s reign, there was something genuinely heroic about Henry. Athletic, cultured, adored, he was the golden prince who jousted, loved music and dazzled every ambassador who met him. But then came his desperate hunt for a male heir. He began to break the things that seemed to stand in the way of his drive to secure the succession: marriage vows, the monasteries, the Catholic church’s power in England. He became a breaker of people, too. By the late 1530s, contemporaries were calling him “the most dangerous and cruel man in the world”. Two wives, 10 relatives and 20 former friends died on his orders. Yet the real change in our perception of Henry is where he fits into a wider cast of characters. When, in 2016, I made a BBC series called Six Wives, we had to argue hard for its name because of fears that no one would watch it if Henry VIII wasn’t in the title. Now, when I ask young people what they know about him, they don’t mention that he founded the English navy, or the Church of England. They tell me that he executed Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. The head-chopping used to be seen as funny. Now people see it for what it was: violence against women. I think that change has happened partly because of the Wolf Hall novels of Hilary Mantel, who drew him so convincingly as an untrustworthy man, and also because of the influential musical Six, written in 2017. (If you’ve not seen it, the premise is that Henry’s six wives get together to form a girl band.) Since then, the focus has shifted even further out, beyond the wives. The latest exhibition at Hampton Court is all about the wider Tudor world. People often ask me: “Why, oh why, can’t we stop talking about the Tudors?” The answer is that each generation deserves its own new version of the old story. Because each retelling is less about the 16th century than about who we are now. - Read more | Was this the moment Henry VIII became a tyrant? 2. A terrible tyrant? Poor George III was terribly ill For my own generation of history students, it was Alan Bennett’s 1991 play The Madness of George III, and the film adaptation that followed, that rewrote this king. Before that, George had been perceived as a brutal, despotic figure who lost America and repressed liberty at home. Bennett’s genius was to humanise him instead – as a suffering, frightened man restrained in a chair by his own doctors, howling: “I am the King of England!” only to be told: “No, sir, you are the patient.” I inherited the job of deciding how to tell his story as part of the team that reopened Kew Palace, the little red-brick west London house where George III was sent when he was ill. When I started spending time there, from 2003, it had been shuttered for years and felt almost forgotten, despite standing in the middle of a Royal Botanic Gardens visited by millions of people. Getting it reopened involved raising money, stripping 23 layers of paint from the library to find the original scheme, and tracking down the king’s original furniture from the Royal Collection. We also had to decide what, exactly, had been wrong with George when he underwent treatment here; clearly, visitors would want to know. When Kew reopened, we presented the theory that was current in the 2000s: that George’s affliction wasn’t ‘madness’ at all but porphyria, a rare metabolic disorder that can cause abdominal pain, discoloured urine and hallucinations. It was an attractive, tidy answer, and it let us present a king betrayed by his biochemistry rather than his mind. My own ideas changed after talking to researchers at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, who’d analysed George’s enormous surviving correspondence comprising more than 33,000 letters, essays and notes. They found exactly the pattern you’d expect from bipolar disorder: waves of manic, garrulous, tangled prose, followed by recovery. If true, that meant returning to the very word we’d tried to move away from. George may indeed have experienced what an unkinder age called madness. If you go to Kew Palace today, you’ll be told a story about mental illness – one that’s worth telling, because if a king could experience mental illness, so could anyone. This has also meant correcting a myth: that George was hidden at Kew out of shame. In fact, 18th-century opinion regarded his illness with pity rather than embarrassment. His recovery in 1789 was celebrated with dinner plates painted with the words “God Save the King”. There’s an argument that Kew was chosen not because it was hidden but because it was already a place where scientific and medical minds came to study. Understanding that transformed a locked, sad little palace, which seemed almost haunted by illness and fear, into one of the best-loved and most human places Historic Royal Palaces has in its care. - Read more | The illness and decline of King George III 3. Bloody Mary? A lurid nickname tarnished the pioneering Tudor Dubbing Mary I “Bloody Mary” was one of history’s most successful smear campaigns, and I’ve always felt that she’s the Tudor most overdue a fairer hearing. The nickname is essentially a Protestant value judgment dressed up as fact, cemented by harrowing woodcuts in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs illustrating the burning of supposed heretics. This powerful history of her reign was put together from second-hand testimony by a brilliant propagandist who wanted to make Mary look monstrous. Yet Mary’s rate of religious executions, though horrifying to us, wasn’t wildly out of step with those of her father, brother or sister, all of whom also killed in religion’s name. It’s simply that hers were uniquely well documented by a hostile pen. The sources for Mary’s life written in her mother’s birth country of Spain have been largely ignored by generations of English-speaking historians. In them, you’ll find a very different queen: pragmatic, moderate in her religious policies, praised for the same firmness against heresy for which English writers damned her. Mary’s life was one of extraordinary resilience. Exiled from court and separated from her mother as a teenager, threatened and bullied into recognising her own illegitimacy, she raised 10,000 supporters and rode to claim a throne that had been engineered away from her. She was the only 16th-century Tudor monarch to seize the crown. She then had to invent from nothing a coronation ceremony fit for a queen regnant, in an abbey full of men who openly doubted a woman’s fitness to rule. I’ve spent a long time puzzling over the strange, swollen-bellied wooden effigy that once topped Mary’s coffin, now kept in the triforium at Westminster Abbey. Older history books call her two failed pregnancies “hysterical” – a loaded term for what we’d now call pseudocyesis, an involuntary phantom pregnancy driven by desperate psychological need. But the odds of genuinely experiencing pseudocyesis twice are vanishingly small. I’ve come to wonder whether what really killed Mary in 1558 was ovarian cancer, misread by a body politic that thought her hysterical. But Mary’s real tragedy is, I think, that her achievements as England’s first queen have simply been eclipsed by her more sparkling sister. Quite literally, in fact: her modest monument at Westminster Abbey was later subsumed into the far grander one built for Elizabeth. Mary was the one who tore up the rulebook to become England’s first queen regnant, who survived a traumatic childhood to govern for five years without civil war, all while facing a lifetime of ill health. Meantime, Elizabeth learned from watching her sister’s mistakes, not least the disaster of marrying a foreign prince. Mary I went first – and paid the price for it. 4. Warm, funny and clever… what’s not to love about Caroline of Ansbach? I would put money on you barely having heard of Caroline of Ansbach, which has always struck me as one of history’s great injustices. For years, I worked in an office carved out of the private bedroom of her husband, George II, at Kensington Palace. For a break, I would climb the back stairs into her private closet, open to visitors, which she packed with artistic and natural treasures. And I would wish I could have met her. Caroline arrived in England in 1714 as the wife of the heir to a minor German ruler nobody had expected to inherit the British throne. Where her father-in-law, the new King George I, and her husband, the future George II, were cold, socially awkward and widely disliked as foreign interlopers, Caroline was warm, funny and formidably clever. She once had to referee a bitter argument between her two pet philosophers, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, over who had really invented calculus. It’s hard to imagine any other British royal bothering. That intelligence had real consequences. In the 1720s, when the Turkish method for inoculating humans against smallpox arrived in England, Caroline examined the evidence and had her own children inoculated. It seemed counter-intuitive to make a well child sick, but Caroline looked at the data and decided that it worked. When every one of her children survived, it began to melt public suspicion about a technique associated with women and “the Turks”. Caroline’s brave decision would lead, decades later, to the discovery that using cowpox for inoculation was a safer alternative to smallpox itself, and the practice evolved into vaccination as we know it. She was genuinely a queen of the Enlightenment, placing her faith in medicine rather than the magic healing touch that her Stuart predecessors had believed lay in their hands. Contemporaries were aware that Caroline was much sharper than her husband. Yet George II did not realise how many decisions he owed to her subtle influence behind the scenes, partly because he was busy pursuing mistresses. One gloriously rude contemporary cartoon shows Caroline literally administering a sedative up her husband’s backside in order to keep him under control. She also began the experimental gardens at Richmond that eventually burgeoned into the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, filling them with follies and curiosities that reflected her restless, enquiring mind. Her closet at Kensington was laden with treasures because if, as a queen, she couldn’t go out to explore the world, at least she could have its most curious artefacts brought back to her at home. Her end was as remarkable as her life. In 1737, an umbilical hernia she’d hidden for years ruptured, and her doctors made the catastrophic decision to cut away the protruding loop of her bowel rather than to push it back in. Ironically, the queen of 18th-century science was killed by a medical misunderstanding. It took her 10 agonising days to die. Her husband, who had neglected her for years, returned to her side at last, and promised her he’d never remarry. I think Caroline deserves to be remembered as far more than a footnote to two forgettable Georges. 5. Why George IV was simply the wrong man for the job of king Unpopular opinion: I don’t think George IV was a bad man, exactly. I just think he was catastrophically unsuited to the job of king. Polls asking the public to name Britain’s worst monarch always have him near the top, and Queen Elizabeth II’s own mother called him “Old Naughty”. But the more time I’ve pondered his life story, the more I’ve come to see a case study in addiction and unsuitability rather than pure villainy. His childhood explains a lot. Sent away from his wider family aged just eight to Kew for a brutally strict education, beaten for bad behaviour, denied the military career he craved and kept on a comparatively modest allowance by his father, George went feral the moment he got the chance. By the time he became Prince Regent in 1811 he was 48, weighed more than 17 stone, and was edging towards dependency on alcohol and laudanum. The Duke of Wellington once recorded, in open astonishment, George devouring a breakfast that included two pigeons, three beefsteaks, most of a bottle of wine, champagne, port and brandy. George himself seems to have half-understood the problem of his appetites, writing that “the disorders of the body in general with me owe their source to the mind”. Where I part company with the “worst king” verdict is that he actually did some positive things. Nobody disputes that his treatment of his wife, Caroline of Brunswick, was disgraceful, or that he obstructed the ending of the transatlantic slave trade, or that his reaction to the Peterloo massacre was shameful. But George also possessed a genuinely sophisticated eye for art and architecture that his contemporaries lacked. His portrait commissions from Thomas Lawrence, still hanging in the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor, are magnificent. He is, alongside Charles I, the single greatest contributor to the Royal Collection. Windsor Castle’s iconic skyline, Buckingham Palace’s state rooms, the Brighton Pavilion – all of them are his. He gave the monarchy, and Britain’s tourist industry, much of the pageantry it still relies upon today. George the fantasist was obsessed with Napoleon, whom he never met and certainly never fought. That didn’t stop him reminiscing about Waterloo as if he’d been on the battlefield himself, and he spent a fortune acquiring the emperor’s personal possessions in the hope some of the glamour might rub off on him. I think his 1821 coronation – which he personally masterminded, right down to the silk stockings his peers were forced to wear – was probably the most spectacular in British history. By all accounts, even his critics were moved when the crown finally touched his head. A piece in The Times that followed his death in 1830 was pitiless. “There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures,” it opined. I’d argue that that judgment says as much about the puritanical century evolving around him as it does about George himself. He wasn’t the right man for the job of king. As his estranged wife said, he would have been much better off as a hairdresser. This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine Authors Lucy Worsley is a historian, author and broadcaster, and is also joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces. A familiar face on British TV screens, she has presented a host of history programmes including Royal History’s Biggest Fibs, Blitz Spirit with Lucy Worsley, Suffragettes with Lucy Worsley and Victoria & Albert: The Royal Wedding.