Chapter VI
Margaret Nicholson, Descended from Boudicca and Rightful Queen of England
The morning of Wednesday 2 August 1786, St James’s Palace, London. A short, respectably dressed, middle-aged woman loiters outside the royal residence, making casual conversation with two other women she’s just met. According to an early press report, she is in her best clothes, wearing a ‘flowered linen or muslin gown, black gauze bonnet, black silk cloak’ and a ‘morning wire cap with blue ribbons’.
After an hour or so, the king, George III, approaches in his coach. The woman holds up a piece of paper and the king stops at the garden door, opposite the Duke of Marlborough’s Wall, alights from the coach and approaches her, as he customarily does when subjects come to him asking for help, although the woman is allowed only within arm’s length. A special edition of the London Gazette reports that she is ‘rather a little woman, of a swarthy complexion, a native of Durham, her father a barber’. Another paper wades in, guessing she is about thirty-six and calling her a ‘native of Yorkshire’ with ‘the appearance of a foreigner’. Only the last of these facts will prove to be true. She offers the piece of paper to the king – it’s a petition – and as he stoops to receive it he feels a thrust at his belly, passing between his coat and waistcoat. He draws back: ‘What does this woman mean!’ The yeoman jumps in, and a knife is released from the woman’s other hand. The only damage done is to a button on his waistcoat. The ‘petition’ is blank. The king apparently takes stock, then declares: ‘I am not hurt! – take care of the woman – she is mad – do not hurt her.’
The woman is apprehended but giving nothing away. She is ‘taken to the Queen’s antechamber where she remained from twelve until near five, during all which time, though spoken to by several of the nobility, she did not condescend once to open her lips, but appeared totally unmoved’.
According to the London Gazette that week of 1786, the event had quite an effect on the king: ‘His Majesty then went forward into the palace; and, when he had recovered his surprise, appeared to be greatly affected, expressing in a kind of faultering voice, that, “surely! He had not deserved such treatment from any of his subjects.”’ Much will be made of the mercy of the king in his response to Margaret when compared to the French, who have recently dealt with a similar attempt on Louis XVI’s life but labelled it regicide, rather than insanity, and were brutal in their response.
The woman is interrogated and offers her real name: Margaret Nicholson. She says that she will give her reasons when she is ‘brought before proper persons’.
The story is turned around quickly and spun breathlessly for several papers, but the London Gazette of August 1786 trumpets its more or less instant response, getting the truth out there to stop the ‘mischievous effect’ of the ‘thousand fictions’ that were already circulating.1 The paper breaks the suspense with a spoiler – the king is alive and well – and is forensic with ‘Particulars of Margaret Nicholson’s Attempt to assassinate His Majesty’. It makes a fuss of the trivial details – the knife was not hidden inside the petition, as widely reported, but under her cloak. But then there’s a crucial point about the knife itself. The paper says the ‘instrument she used was an old ivory handled dessert knife, worn very thin towards the point; so thin, that a person pressing the point against his hand, it bent almost double without penetrating the skin’. The knife, in other words, was not a lethal weapon. By dialling down the sensation this source becomes the closest to a credible account. Nicholson hadn’t intended to kill the king.
The interrogation is witnessed by the prime minister himself, William Pitt (this is ten years before Pitt bears witness to James Tilly Matthews’s allegations of a treasonous element in his government, and two years before George III’s own mentally instability throws his administration into crisis). Also in the room are the Earl of Salisbury, Francis William Drake of the Royal Navy, a descendant of the brother of the Elizabethan hero, and assorted magistrates. Nicholson begins an account of herself. She came to London at the age of twelve and lived in several ‘creditable services’.2 She measures her words carefully, but it’s not long before the issue of her rightful inheritance comes up. Her composure breaks: ‘she went on rambling, that the Crown was her’s [sic] – she wanted nothing but her right – that she had great property – that if she had not her right, England would be drowned in blood for a thousand generations. Being further asked where she now lived, she answered rationally, “At Mr. Fisk’s, stationer, the corner of Marybone [sic] Wigmore-Street”.’ After an apocalyptic vision she’s back down to earth with the perfectly ordinary details of her residential address.
Mr Fisk is duly sent for and interrogated. This is the stationer’s point of view via the London Gazette: ‘she had lodged with him about three years; that he had not observed any striking marks of insanity about her – she was certainly very odd at times – frequently talking to herself – that she lived by taking in plain work &c. Others who knew her said, she was very industrious, and they never suspected her of insanity. Mr Monro being sent for, said, it was impossible to discover with certainty immediately whether she was insane or not.’ Mr Monro is in overall charge at Bedlam and the latest in a dynasty of Monros running the hospital. John Monro will appoint John Haslam as apothecary in 1795 and both men go down together after the public enquiry into abuses at the hospital in 1816 thanks, in part, to the testimony of James Tilly Matthews.
Fisk the stationer and the other lodgers all say they found Nicholson ‘quiet and respectable’. To her landlord she ‘always appeared a harmless character and…although she has frequently seemed in a state of absence, he never received greater proofs of his insanity in her than frequently moving her lips as if talking, and appearing agitated although in no conversation with any person’.3
After the flurry of newspapers came the books and pamphlets, widely circulated, their content taken largely from the newspaper reports. These drove a feeding frenzy of gossipy titbits about a woman who said she was the rightful monarch. At least five ‘chapbooks’ came out that August, the most substantial of these street pamphlets being Authentic Memoirs of the Life of Margaret Nicholson, and The Plot Investigated.4 Her landlord and character witness Mr Fisk turned out one of the very first. He published his version astonishingly quickly, just days after the event, on 15 August 1786. Being a stationer, he was well positioned to do this, and sizeable profits followed. The two other accounts of Nicholson vied with Fisk’s to corner the market for news and background, but Fisk had the edge because of his close acquaintanceship. On the cover, just after his name, Fisk had proudly written: ‘with whom she lodged’. Nicholson quickly becomes a commodity.
All iterations of the story agree on something. Her claims were grandiose. She admits that she was a servant until recently, but she wants to stress that this was with an aristocratic household. She remains adamant that she is rightfully the Queen of England and that George III has usurped her. She also pleads mitigation. She did write to her usurper but the letters were sadly ignored. Like James Tilly Matthews, she has been forced to take direct action. She insists her intention was only to frighten the king, and she thought the shock of the knife would do the trick.
Ever more regional papers, books and pamphlets join the fray, rehashing and embellishing the story. A feedback loop gets going between the three chapbooks and the newspapers, each quoting the other, and referencing the notes from ‘The Examination of Margaret Nicholson by the Privy Council’, until it’s unclear who said what in the first place.5 The Hereford Journal backs up some of Nicholson’s claims. She apparently ‘lived formerly in Lord Coventry’s family as an attendant to some of his Lordship’s daughters’. There’s been a reduction in circumstance to a much less comfortable day-to-day existence and ‘since that time she has existed as a sempstress, in the millinery and mantua branches’.
Her claims to an inheritance have surfaced before: the Privy Council learns that six years earlier she lived with Miss Price of Argyle Buildings, whose service she ‘quitted on a pretence’ of a ‘a capital fortune’. She also lived with a hatter – the Hereford Journal of 10 August names him as Mr Watson of New Broad Street – whom she repeatedly told she ‘had a large claim upon government’. Mr Watson is called in and so is a woman called Ann Southby who, the London Gazette says, ‘“lodged in the next chamber” to Margaret’. Margaret does not appear ‘in the least embarrassed’ in front of the Privy Council and specifies again and again exactly what she’s owed. She talks of this ‘claim on government – “law suit” – “just cause” and suchlike sentences’.
Everyone who knew her well seemed to agree that she was a hardworking, modest woman who had taken in work as a seamstress, to make ends meet since leaving service. ‘Her brother is a respectable character according to the papers and keeps the Three-horseshoes public house, the corner of Milford Lane, in the Strand.’
Margaret Nicholson’s proud attitude suggested a woman with a scrupulously well-kept home. The reality was somewhat different.
Westminster magistrates went to her apartment to see what they could find but ‘[N]othing more could be traced than scraps of papers, in which the names of Lord Mansfield and other persons of consequence appeared, with some disjointed writing, mentioning effects, and what she denominated “classics”, a term she did not seem to understand’.6 Beneath the snobbery are signs of a disordered life and fragments of an education. ‘When the magistrates came to search her lodgings, they found nothing but three letters…and in her pockets three half-pence, and a silver six-pence, all the money she had; and as to cloaths, those on her back were her whole stock, and, except her cloak and bonnet, were very indifferent. Lord Sydney ordered her cloaths, and all other necessities, of which she was in great need.’ There’d been no safety net to catch her when she left her position. She was destitute.
What on earth to do with Margaret Nicholson? The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, the Attorney and Solicitor General, and Doctors Monro Sr and Jr from the Bethlem Hospital join the Privy Council to chew over the question.
The Council decide to send her to lodge with a Mr Coates, one of the King’s Messengers. Mr Justice Addington visits her there and she repeats her complaint. The king has no right to the crown. It is hers.
9 August 1790, Coates takes her by hackney coach to Bedlam, in Moorfield, north of the City of London, accompanied by a nurse and this King’s Messenger. They tell her they are going to a ‘party of pleasure’ and she readily agrees to the excursion.7 She ‘was in very good spirits’, says the London Gazette ‘and talked very rationally the whole of the way… Upon her entrance into Bedlam, she was asked, if she then knew where she was. She answered, “Perfectly well.” The steward of the hospital behaved with much kindness to her, and invited her and the company to dine with him, which they did, and during the whole time she appeared perfectly collected, except when the name of the King was mentioned’, at which point she said that ‘she expected him to visit her’.
She is admitted without a fight and taken to the west wing, where the women live in cells off the gallery. When asked if she will comply with regulations she answers ‘Certainly’. She is accommodating. Despite this, a chain is ‘put round her leg and fastened to the floor’ but as this was happening ‘she was perfectly composed and did not seem to take any notice of it’. Margaret remains stoic. The Patient Admissions log records her admission. It was confirmed by the Committee on Saturday 12 August 1786.
Margaret Nicholson admitted to Bethlem Hospital, 11 August 1787, ‘admitted on the Incurables’.
A year later, on 11 August 1787, the register shows that she was transferred to the part of the hospital demarcated for ‘Incurables’. Ten years later, on 28 January 1797, one James Tilly Matthews is admitted to the hospital and taken to the men’s quarters in the east wing. Later he, too, is transferred to a section for incurables. Matthews and Nicholson will both spend a very long time at Bedlam and acquire a fame over the years which spreads well beyond the walls of the hospital. But there are no records of what they made of each other inside, either by getting wind of a reputation or after a snatched conversation in person. Men and women would not normally fraternise, but Margaret and James were sometimes given special treatment at the hospital. They both had axes to grind with the authorities. They both tried to maintain a dignified attitude and an intellectual appetite – they were interested in the world. They both believed people in positions of power were doing them down.
As those who raided her apartment had found, Nicholson had few possessions, and, once at Bedlam, ‘accordingly [she] was bought two new shifts…a pair of shoes…a black quilted petticoat’.8 She was scrutinised like a prize heifer, and she invited varied opinions. Her composure slipped again. A physician found her ‘much convulsed and…as if she was making an effort to weep, saying at the same time, “Tears would give her relief!”’ The physician in question decides she is ‘deranged’.9
The Belfast Evening Post of 10 August 1786 reflects on her true state of mind: ‘There are intervals when lunatics assume reason, and are capable of conversing with a seeming rationality; but when close questioned as to a particular crime they may have committed, they wander into the wild labyrinths of distracted imagination, and discover their insanity. Such a one Margaret Nicholson appears to be.’ The staff describe her in much the same way: as highly changeable, swinging from one state to the other. Thomas Monro is in overall charge of the place, the third generation of a great Scottish family of physicians. His appointment has been controversial. He acquired this coveted job without a formal election. The hospital’s money is running out and his leadership and competence are continually questioned. He was a member of the Privy Council so he’s already formed an opinion of Margaret. He offers her some help. Help not just with new clothes, but with getting her story out to the public.
Remarkably, she manages to have her petition published on 28 August 1786. Communicating to the outside world from her cell in Bedlam, she lays out the injustice of her situation on the page, adding a litany of new claims for good measure. She is descended from ‘Boadicca the British Queen’… ‘thy ministers are knaves – they grind the face of the poor with monstrous taxes – they have taxed our ribbons, our gloves, our pomatum, and our scented water… Make me a general, make me master of the ordnance, and I’ll batter down the ramparts at Woolwich, and destroy the rotten stones of the Tower… Her whole fortune is at present a pair of Queen Elizabeth’s stays, and a Queen Anne’s farthing. Pity her sorrows, oh King. Dry up the tears of the afflicted Margaret Nicholson; the heir to the throne of the world wants bread.’ ‘So says Margaret Nicholson,’ she adds, pleading her case in the third person for dramatic effect.10
The reporting continues apace over the next many decades, and diary stories provide updates on Margaret Nicholson’s life on a regular basis. ‘Peg’, as she was nicknamed, was generally portrayed as a mad spinster. But the qualities of a romantic heroine show up in the report of her next bold move.
She’s been allowed to walk about freely in the garden at Bedlam and used the time to make a plan. ‘She formed, with some ingenuity, a ladder from…the handles of two brooms, connected by strong slips torn from her blanket,’ says the Kentish Gazette of 30 November 1790. ‘By this simple apparatus, she was able to ascend the wall, and thus made her escape without difficulty.’ She escapes from the hospital.
Where can she go? She runs to the ‘respectable’ establishment run by her brother George, the publican at the Three Horseshoes on the Strand. The hospital quickly works out where she has gone, however, and staff hurry after her. She is apprehended. This time she apparently puts up a fight, but she is overpowered without much difficulty. More than a century later, just after the First World War, ‘Madame M’ will attempt something similar out of her Paris asylum, desperate to continue her guerrilla war against the conspiracy of substitute doubles. She will also be unsuccessful.
Margaret is back in Bedlam for the long haul. So how did a self-effacing and diligent woman come to believe not just that she’d been cheated out of a fortune, but that the throne of England was rightfully hers? Where did the delusion come from?
Parish records in the market town of Stokesley, near Stockton-on-Tees, in north Yorkshire show that Margaret Nicholson was born on 9 December 1745, making her forty when her name hits the papers for the first time. The reporters weren’t far off with their biographical sketches. Her father, Thomas Nicholson, was a barber, and Margaret was the fourth child born to him and his wife Anne.11
In the year of her birth, episodes of anti-Catholic unrest connected to the Jacobin uprising in France disturbed Stokesley. A mob pulled down and burned a mass house in the town. John Wesley preached at Stokesley many times between 1752 and 1790 in the Methodist chapel built for him in the town. The mainstay of Stokesley’s economy was the manufacture of linen from flax, and the associated spinning and weaving. When Margaret was growing up the work was only partially mechanised and still largely a cottage industry. The waste from the linen trade went to the mill to make paper.
Authentic Memoirs admits rather snootily that she was literate, and got her impressive needlework skills ‘from the indulgence of her parents’, receiving an ‘education something superior to that usually given to the daughters of ordinary tradesmen in that part of the country… She was taught to read, write and work at her needle…in the latter she was perfectly adept, working with that delicacy and skill as to have been able to earn a comfortable subsistence.’ There was a local charitable school. She may have developed her abilities with a parish apprenticeship in household service. Later, like ‘Madame M’, she is a lady of letters, and her writing has a vivid quality, confidently organised by themes and images, even though the letters make almost no logical or grammatical sense at all. She consumes literature enthusiastically. In one letter she quotes Viola in Twelfth Night, and William Knollys, 8th Earl of Banbury, describes her being given ‘dictionaries to read’ while chained to the floor at Bedlam.12 Margaret’s brother George says ‘she employed herself in reading Milton’s Paradise Lost and such high styled Books’.13
George came up to London from Stokesley at some point, too. Evidently a barber’s wages couldn’t support a large brood at home in Yorkshire, and even if Margaret’s mother Anne supplemented the family income by taking in work for the linen trade, as many women did, both Margaret and her brother were required to be self-sufficient. They saw greater opportunity down in London. George did well. The Three Horseshoes thrived under him.
At the age of twelve, maybe thirteen, Margaret became a maid, and worked in a few notable households including that of Sir John Seabright, before she was employed by Lord Coventry. No one recorded any mention of mental illness.
Authentic Memoirs contains additional observations about her character which confuse the generally accepted picture of her as a hardworking servant. One source says she’s on the make, as those young girls are, with a ‘boldness, cunning and intrepid address, seldom to be found at a more advanced period of life’. The volume suggests she got ideas above her station from an ‘appearance of probable promotion’ with the Boothbys, evidently a household of particularly high status. This ‘kindled the latent sparks of pride which lay hid in the recesses of her heart’. Pride, ‘ruinous pride’, is her downfall. It leads to ‘insolent superiority’ with fellow servants. She thinks she’s better than them. The brother she ran to also tells tales on her. George Nicholson apparently told Fisk that his sister ‘had been insane for some years, and that her insanity was occasioned by pride’. Here is another person ensnared in a cautionary tale.
And then, in the very final chapter of his pamphlet, Margaret’s landlord Mr Fisk drops a sensational allegation. Stop press: he’s had the chance to look over ‘several particulars concerning Margaret…lately communicated to me’. He doesn’t say what these particulars are – he’s just the messenger – but ‘Mr Paul [a mutual acquaintance of Nicholson and Fisk], Mrs Fiske, and some others think differently’ about this woman and her so-called madness. She’s not delusional at all. The word is she ‘exercised great cunning and dexterity’ in the ‘science’ of ‘swindling’. She’s after financial support from a ‘generous’ king. She’s been trying to trick our beneficent monarch into giving her money. It’s worked, hasn’t it? She’s got new clothes and a roof over her head for free.
Every time we think we’re getting to know Margaret, building a picture of her, the elements of the photofit are mixed up again. The records are full of hearsay which has become established fact simply by endless circles of repetition, one source quoting a rumour back at another, round and round. Are people using Margaret to make money, even pulling her into their own paranoid conspiracies? If Margaret is a master swindler, could her history be something else altogether?
There are gaps. She moves from household to household but only a few of the most recent families employing her are named. No one mentions her religion, or lack of it. There is Margaret Nicholson in the records who married a Richard Wilson on 5 September 1773, in Kirkby, Cleveland, two miles from Stokesley. Our Margaret would have been twenty-seven. A Richard Wilson, born in 1736, died at Stokesley in 1822, aged eighty-six. Another Richard Wilson died in Stokesley in 1784. And another on 27 April 1777 in Stainton. But there will be Margaret Nicholsons in the area, it’s a local family name, and there’s no suggestion that our Margaret was ever married, or that she left London in the 1770s. Still we’re seeing doubles of Margaret and a phantom husband, parallel lives.
Fisk was experienced in peddling sensational allegations for profit. In 1781 after being falsely accused of forgery by a tenant he published The Case of Jonathan Fiske, bookseller: tried and honourably acquitted at the sessions of the Old Bailey, held in June 1781, upon the infamous prosecution of Patrick Roche Farrill, for forgery: with anecdotes of the prosecutor and his adultress confederate, Alice Harriot Herbert who cohabits with him.14 He reserves the haughtiest contempt for Alice the ‘adultress confederate’.
Most likely Margaret was in service for all these years in London. There are moments when we can confidently place her in a certain household, getting on with her work.
One such moment places her at the centre of a compromising event, in the house where she was living and working. This time it’s the Scots Magazine dropping a shock allegation into its copy. There is a witness. The paper lines up the details and charges the innuendo: ‘Margaret Nicholson lived some years ago with a lady of quality in Brudenel Street, as her own servant. Her master’s valet-de-chambre paid his addresses to her.’ Margaret had a man coming to call at night. You wouldn’t have guessed what was going on all initially. She thought she was clever enough to keep the visits secret, ‘her conduct before the family was very reserved; but one of the family happening to remain up after the rest were a-bed, in walking upstairs softly, at a late hour, surprised the valet-de-chambre going out of her bed-room’.15
The family member was, apparently, shocked. It hadn’t crossed any of their minds for a moment that she had it in her, the London Gazette says, because until that evening they had considered her ‘reserved and thoughtful cast; seldom subject to the livelier sallies of mirth; this constraint of temper was considered by her fellow servants as prudery’. The family couldn’t have imagined ‘he had any prospect of success with her’. These are weapons’ grade backhanded compliments. She’s far too straightlaced and boring to be guilty, but that just makes it all the more shocking that she is. The household source, whoever it was, could not resist a good gossip. ‘On such a discovery as this, everyone knows how anxious the discoverer is to unburthen his mind…and next morning the servants were entertaining themselves at the expense of the reserved, as they called her, prude; the news soon reached the mistresses [sic] ears.’ The unmistakable whiff of a sex scandal.
Margaret and the valet were both dismissed. Together they looked for a new place to live, and found one, where they remained for some time. But they had to leave that one, too, and sought a third, and this is where things really took a turn for the worse for Margaret. The valet cut his losses and deserted her. And then he chased the money, paying ‘his addresses to a person who had some property; whom he married and then left the place he shared with Margaret to take an Inn on the Western Road’.
Margaret had been viewed (generally) as hardworking and disciplined. Now she was an outcast, sexually available, promiscuous. The only evidence: a fleeting glimpse of a man outside her room after dark. The dignity her tireless domestic work had earned was gone in a casual whisper. There were more whispers that she had become pregnant and that the baby had been removed from her shortly after birth. She was humiliated, shamed.
According to the tabloid editorial of the London Gazette Margaret hid away from other people. The journalist offers an explanation for a mental imbalance like hers: ‘Intense thought upon one object debilitates the mind; and with a temper already prone to melancholy, an accumulation of thought and distress must encrease intense thinking, which cannot but produce paroxisms of madness.’ Here was the old complaint rearing its head. At this point in time, melancholy is a sentimental frame for the sad story of a woman driven mad by heartbreak. But it also refers us back to very practical advice in Robert Burton’s masterwork on the subject. The guidance comes in handy again after more than one hundred and fifty years: ‘Society and variety are necessary to remove the ill consequences of melancholy; neither of these it appears she sought for; even her brother acknowledged that she seldom called on him.’ It appears she cut herself off even from the only family member available to her. The Plot Investigated picks up the romantic angle on her predicament. Other papers joined in and ran with new details about what happened next. ‘After this she stopped looking for positions as a servant and started earning her living through the needle.’ The Scots Magazine chips in: ‘From that time she abandoned herself to solitude; and hence, perhaps, was planted the root of her disorder.’
Margaret had supported herself in skilled service from the age of twelve but when we catch up with her next she is scratching around for piecemeal work. Without a position, she’s getting together a living taking in sewing. She has skills, but this was an overcrowded and poorly paid market; a hand-to-mouth existence.
The London Gazette embellishes an update on Nicholson’s sad case with a sharp reminder of just how easy it was to slip out of ‘good society’ after only a couple of instances of bad luck or a bad personal decision or two: ‘It is no secret how many thousands of women are in want of bread, who strive to live by the needle; therefore we must infer that her mode of living must be penurious and low, the want of nourishment, with the attendant anxiety on this, must increase that mental debility which is the result of melancholy; therefore the effusion of a mind under these circumstances, must be out of the control of reason.’
Who is to blame for her reversal of fortune? It’s hard to say. There’s nothing she can do about a lover who chooses to reject her for someone richer.
And so Margaret begins to construct an alternative version of the events that had led her to this dire situation. She is, in fact, a person of high birth. Accordingly, she deserves courtesy, dignity, even admiration. And there is an inheritance to go with this birthright which she must fight for. There is even a crown. The ‘monarch’ keeping her place is an imposter. He must do the right thing and give her back what is rightfully hers, or she will have no option but to take more drastic action to right the wrongs and restore her reputation.
The delusion gives her an itinerary. It brings her to St James’s Palace with a blank petition in one hand and a small, blunt dessert knife in the other.
The story of Margaret Nicholson becomes an important one in the history of delusions. Her ‘grandiose’ delusion bumps her up the social ladder above the king himself. It also turns her into a cause célèbre. Prospective visitors express horror at what she did that day at St James’s, but they still want to meet her. She is interviewed by doctors and members of the public while incarcerated, and their wide-eyed appraisals invite us into her intimate world. The world of the asylum.
‘Peg’ Nicholson will be an object of curiosity at Bedlam for four decades. Many journalists call on her over the years, sometimes bringing artists along to draw her likeness. Close attention is paid to the way she dresses as well, her features exaggerated to the point of caricature.
Like Spira’s before her, Nicholson’s delusion is turned again and again into propaganda. She is brought into the debate over the state of the mental hospitals in Britain. In a Rowlandson caricature in 1793 called ‘A Peep into Bethlehem’ she appears as a wild-eyed grotesque crowned with straw and clutching fistfuls of the same in her outstretched hands. In another cartoon she is Charles James Fox in drag attacking the king. A portrait etching in an oval frame for the cover of the New Lady’s Magazine is positively glamorous, with pearls and ribbons in her hair. But the most surprising is a late portrait. This is Margaret Nicholson in old age by John Thomas Smith, a painter, engraver and Keeper of Prints for the British Museum, as well as a mentor to a young John Constable and a long-time acquaintance of William Blake. Smith was a gossip and gadfly, in close touch with the artistic and literary life of London for over sixty years.16 He was known for his unsentimental approach, capturing his subjects with what could be ‘malicious candour and vivid detail’. His portrait of Nicholson shows a woman with a deep well of experience behind the eyes. She fixes the viewer with a penetrating stare from under a mob cap and headscarf.
Bedlam’s myriad visitors exemplify the eighteenth century’s curiosity about the ‘mad’. Some are family to the residents, like James Tilly Matthews’s loyal relatives, some foreign dignitaries in London, some simply day-trippers who treat Bedlam as an entertainment much as they would a zoo. The governors outlaw this, but, as the years roll on, Margaret is still the character people want to see more than anyone else.
Nicholson was officially insane but she was elevated to a ‘personality cult’. Something about her story, her version of reality, and her belief in what she was due, spoke to people. They identified with her and indulged her grandiosity.
The German novelist Marie Sophie von La Roche got close access to Margaret Nicholson. She was a great traveller and kept a detailed diary. The prelude to the encounter was a tour of London when she taken right up the entrance to St James’s Palace and shown the very place where ‘the mad Nicholson woman made an attempt on the King’s life’.
Von La Roche then pays a visit to Bedlam, which she calls a ‘shrine of pilgrimage’ for Germans. The great scale of the building and the imposing statuary at the entrance impresses her. She finds the place surprisingly calm inside, the cells relatively well appointed, and she is impressed with Monro, the doctor in charge. She is taken to see the star of the hospital: ‘“And now,” said the supervisor, door key in hand, “I will show you Mistress Nicholson.”’17 Von La Roche gives a vivid account of the reveal: ‘I shuddered at seeing a person with murderous instincts,’ she says, but she is presented with a woman ‘tidily attired, her hat upon her head with gloves and book in hand, stood up at sight of us, and fixed her horrible grey eyes wildly upon us’.
Like James Tilly Matthews a few years later, Margaret was given certain privileges not afforded to other delusional patients, including pen and paper with which to express herself. During her audience our traveller von La Roche witnesses a touching and intimate scene between the patient and an inspector. The official notices pens lying on the floor and Nicholson says they are useless. Nicholson is writing a letter to a royal. She wants to marry the Prince of Wales. She lifts the page, revealing elegant handwriting, but she is not happy with the composition. ‘See here, the first lines were good, but I cannot let the Prince see the rest,’ she says. The inspector offers to get her new pens. Von La Roche watches on as ‘the sad woman thanked the inspector’. The inspector asks her if she has enough to read. She shows him the few pages she has left, and he says he will bring more books. Nicholson goes back to her current tome: ‘It was Shakespeare she was reading so intently,’ says von La Roche.
Another traveller, Jacques de Cambry, paying a visit from pre-revolutionary France, provided an additional snapshot of Nicholson in Bedlam two years later, in 1788. His point was political: this would-be regicide was being dealt with very differently from the man who tried to kill Louis XVI. Louis’s assailant was considered sane and shown no mercy. Just like von La Roche, he finds Nicholson well turned out in a black hat. She is now reading The Merry Wives of Windsor.18
Nicholson was still a voracious reader of the canon. Perhaps Samuel Richardson’s popular novel of 1740, Pamela, was brought to her at some point. The work was already a classic, and boasts a heroine, a servant, who ends up marrying her master. Pamela represents an era in which social mobility is possible, even for women. Potential is recognised and the virtuous and talented can overcome class barriers. Professional roles remained out of reach but making a good marriage was a perfectly legitimate route and used a woman’s natural abilities. A romantic scandal could still nullify hard-earned respectability for ever. Nicholson knew this only too well.
By now the dilapidation at Bedlam was accelerating. In 1814, when Nicholson had been in the institution for nearly thirty years, Edward Wakefield, a Quaker and leading advocate of ‘lunacy’ reform, visited the hospital several times. He finds it failing to respect the guidelines of a progressive ‘moral treatment’: patients are not appropriately categorised, and are all bundled in together, regardless of the level of violence they display.
Wakefield’s reports of incurable patients at Bedlam still in chains leads a House of Commons Select Committee to look into major reform. The findings in 1816 result in Thomas Monro’s resignation. He was found ‘wanting in humanity’ towards his patients. The same report forces John Haslam out. James Tilly Matthews’s evidence of abuses at the hospital carried weight despite all those years of argument about whether or not he was sane. In another ironic reversal, it is Thomas Monro who was asked to give an opinion on George III’s mental illness. After his fall, Monro begins a new life as a major art collector and patron, establishing a prominent artists’ circle in his London townhouse, which included J. M. W. Turner. In his later years Monro reportedly suffered from a delusion of his own. He claimed that he could raise people from the dead, and send others to the underworld.
With the old regime booted out, a new Bedlam hospital is eventually commissioned and the old one left to sink into the ‘town ditch’ rubbish tip on which it was built. Margaret Nicholson and the other Bedlam patients are transferred from the Moorfields site to the new one on St George’s Fields in Lambeth in August 1815. They travel in a convoy of hackney coaches. James Tilly Matthews is somewhere among their number.
An anonymous insider gives an account of Bedlam, written when Margaret has been inside for thirty-six years. She is still denying she ever meant to hurt the king, and insists she always held him in high esteem. She says she only went to see him in person because she had known him as a child. Nicholson never renounced her royal connections. She is granted yet more privileged living arrangements because, even after all these years, she ‘never evinced any prominent symptoms of insanity’, and is ‘tranquil and calm’ just as the people she lodged with observed all those years ago. Now she is even allowed to live apart from all the other criminal inpatients ‘in a ward appropriated as a nursery for the aged and infirm, such as are quiet and harmless. She enjoys a good state of health, is regular, cleanly, and attentive to her little concerns, and is desirous to render herself useful, such as her great age will permit.’
During her later years she apparently develops an aversion to bread, but is allowed gingerbread as a replacement, which she likes, and snuff, which she adores: ‘her favourite luxury of which she takes a great quantity’.
Eventually she becomes totally deaf and can rarely be persuaded to speak, but is said to be in good health and spirits right up until her death.19
On the evening of 15 May 1800 there was another attack on George III. James Hadfield fired a pistol at the king at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. He was brought to Bedlam. Did Nicholson ever know Hadfield? Did James Tilly Matthews? Probably not. The governors at Bedlam built a wing for the ‘criminally insane’ after another regicide attempt in 1816.
Margaret Nicholson died on 14 May 1828 after forty-two years in Bedlam. She outlived George III by five years and was convinced to the day she died that she was the rightful owner of half of England.
The subversive potential of Nicholson’s case was noticed by a young poet named Percy Bysshe Shelley. His Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson is published in 1810, the same year as John Haslam’s book about James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom. Shelley’s work is a collection of poetry subtitled: ‘Being Poems found amongst the Papers of that Noted Female who attempted the Life of the King in 1786’. The pamphlet is a playful hoax. The fragments purport to be Nicholson’s scribblings and ephemera found in her apartment among her personal effects. These fragments are in fact fictional creations of Shelley, and they include letters in which Nicholson lays out her claims to royal status. If it’s a game, it’s a serious one. Shelley attacks the British monarchy dressed up as Margaret Nicholson far more savagely than Margaret ever did with her blunt dessert knife. He calls the institution oppressive, and highlights the mad injustice of primogeniture.
Nicholson’s encounter with the King of England took place just a few years before the revolution that swept across France. Her belief in her right to the throne was deluded, but it was also disruptive. Her delusion was a personal power grab, but it was also a symbolic act critiquing a society rigged in favour of the few. This was a demand for attention and influence made by an ordinary woman, a needleworker, the daughter of a barber from north Yorkshire, the sister of a publican. Absolute monarchs beware.
The papers settle on the cause of Margaret Nicholson’s delusion, somewhere between love and ambition. We can try to piece together a more accurate photofit of the woman with cuttings. In the end, though, we can’t see Margaret, or trace the line of her biography, through all the conflicting reports, rehashings and gossip. But we can listen to the delusion itself; listen to everything Margaret says. This is the clearest communiqué we have. The rest is noise. She’s telling us how to treat her. She’s telling us about her hopes and fears, about injustice, wretched bad luck, a thankless working life. That’s it. That’s the point of a delusion – it’s as clear as a bell, when everything else is confused, contradictory or opaque.