The madness of Queen Victoria: Never before seen doctor’s diary reveals how monarch was gripped by psychosis after having first son, and Prince Albert feared she’d inherited ‘royal family insanity’ from King George

As the granddaughter of the ‘mad’ King George III, Queen Victoria had much to worry about when it came to her own mental health.

So when she began suffering from extreme post-natal depression and nightmarish visions just days after the birth of her eldest son, it seemed prudent to call the doctor.

And as a BBC Radio 4 documentary reveals, that is exactly what Prince Albert – the monarch’s beloved husband – did.

Dr Robert Ferguson’s diary gives an unprecedented insight into the disastrous state of Victoria’s mental health immediately after the arrival of the future King Edward VII in November 1841.  

The medic recounted how the monarch had suffered from ‘illusions of the eye and ear’, including seeing people’s faces ‘turned into worms’ and hearing voices uttering words that were ‘always the same and always German’.

His diary languished in private hands until it was bought by the Royal College of Physicians in 2009. But, since then, only a handful of experts have studied it. 

Now, speaking on Queen Victoria’s Nightmares, which aired yesterday, scholars have expressed their amazement at the revelations contained in the two-volume trove.  

Dr Fern Riddell, who recently revealed stunning evidence suggesting Victoria may have had a love child with her servant John Brown, says of the diary: ‘It’s incredible, what it tells us is that Victoria was suffering severely with these hallucinations. 

‘She is hearing things, she is seeing things, and there are visions that terrify her.

Dr Matthew Sweet, the presenter of the new programme, adds: ‘Isn’t this extraordinary? There is not a document like this in the whole of the corpus. 

‘We have here an insight into the mental world of the monarch, into their auditory and visual hallucinations.’

Polish historian Mariusz Misztal, an expert at the National University in Krakow, was one of the first academics to properly study Dr Ferguson’s diary. 

He too was stunned by what he read. 

‘Until the diaries of Robert Ferguson, historians knew there was some gossip, some talk about mental problems of Queen Victoria,’ he says. 

‘This is the only now proof that Queen Victoria had really strong mental problems.’

He added: ‘There was always this fear within the Royal Family that mental diseases may be inherited. 

‘And especially Prince Albert. Why? Well because he himself noted that, well indeed, there is something not right in the Queen’s behaviour.’

Dr Ferguson wrote his diary – which originally had locks fitted to its volumes – despite a Palace rule that royal employees should not do so.

But Dr Ferguson was not a full-time member of the Royal Household, meaning he may have felt the rule did not apply to him.

Having been appointed physician-accoucheur (effectively an obstetrician) to Victoria in 1840, he was present at the birth of all nine of her children.

Her first child, Princess Victoria, arrived in November 1840. Prince Albert Edward was born almost exactly a year later.

Days after the birth, a gravely concerned Albert called for Dr Ferguson.

The monarch was, Dr Riddell says in the programme, suffering from ‘horrific’ post-natal depression. 

It prompted fears that her grandfather’s insanity could have been passed down to her. 

Dr Riddell adds: ‘What is further compounded by this is the idea that Victoria might have inherited any form of madness from her grandfather George III.

‘That is something that Albert is very, very aware of. He is terrified that Victoria might become mad, that she might then pass this lunacy onto her children.’

Dr Ferguson recorded the Queen’s horrifying symptoms.

He wrote: ‘I was sent for to the Palace and was ushered up to the room of Baron Stockmar [the Queen’s trusted aide], who at once opened up the reason for my being thus elected from among my colleagues to see Her Majesty.

‘He told me that of late she had been gloomy and desponding, that there were illusions both of the eye and the ear.

‘By the one sense she was deceived into the belief that she saw spots on people’s faces, which turned into worms, and that coffins floated before her, while with the other she heard words, always the same and always German.’

Dr Riddell said the passage demonstrates that Victoria was ‘suffering severely’ with hallucinations.

‘She is hearing things, she is seeing things, and there are visions that terrify her,’ the historian added.

Psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, who once treated Princess Diana, believes Victoria’s symptoms were linked to a feeling of inadequacy.

She tells the programme: ‘We are seeing her as a very vulnerable and disturbed young woman, who wasn’t confident, particularly not around labour when she was in confinement, when she had to bring forth something from her body.

‘And she didn’t feel that she was a substantial enough person. That’s the taste I get of it.’

Fellow expert Dr Caroline Horton, who researches sleep and dreams at Lincoln Bishop University, believes Victoria was wracked by nightmares rather than experiencing visions while awake.

She tells Dr Sweet: ‘I don’t think there is evidence that she is seeing hallucinations in the waking state.

‘We don’t know, we are very far removed from what actually happened.

‘I think she was more disturbed by her dreams and just by the visceral and emotional nature of these visions.’

The term psychotic refers to someone who has lost touch with reality, often meaning they hear or see things that are not really there.

Dr Horton added: ‘We are psychotic really when we dream.

‘As long as those hallucinations, those visions, those moments of being out of control occur when we are asleep, and then when we wake that they stop, typically once individuals start believing things that are not there and start seeing things, they do normally recognise that they are not real when those hallucinations, those psychosies, start.’

Dr Ferguson believed Victoria’s symptoms could be down to something she had eaten. He told how she was ‘much comforted’ when he expressed his view to her.

The doctor also recounted that Victoria and Albert had expressed their own view on what her visions might have been caused by.

Nearly a decade earlier, she had been greatly distressed by a book that recounted the story of the entrails of a princess being kept in a jar that then breaks, causing a ‘sudden and intolerable’ stench.

Dr Riddell concludes: ‘There’s a real grotesquery to it. And I think for Victoria, knowing that her body is something that is not her own, it is the property of the court, to read that this is how her body might be abused after death would have been incredibly traumatic.

‘Reading these two things together, I see it in a way that I hadn’t seen before, that it is all a fear of control, of loss of control, of the fact that she is the bodily property of Albert, she is the bodily property of her court and she has no control over it, and her mind is reacting.’

But Victoria’s childhood may also have had a heavy bearing on her fragile mental state.

After the death of her father, Prince Edward, when she was a baby, Victoria had grown up under the strictures of what was known as the Kensington System.

On the orders of her mother, the Duchess of Kent, she was kept away from other children and almost never left alone.

Her mother’s ‘boyfriend’ – as he is described by Dr Sweet – was the nefarious Joseph Conroy, who also exercised control over the young princess.

He had plotted to have Victoria declared an ‘idiot’ – then a precise medical term for someone not fit to live independently – so that her mother could rule as regent.

Dr Ferguson would go on to record this traumatic childhood.

On December 8, 1841, he told in his diary how another of Victoria’s doctors, Sir James Clark, had recounted to him the ‘ambition’ of the ‘foolish, bad man’ Conroy.

‘I can scarcely credit such wickedness and folly’, he said.

Though she would eliminate Conroy’s influence when she became Queen, Victoria’s childhood trauma had a lasting impact.

She is known to have hated being pregnant, despite having had seven more children after the births of her eldest daughter and Edward.

And she was particularly revolted by breastfeeding. 

As Edward grew up, relations with his mother became ever more fraught.

Just as the Queen had been strictly controlled by her own mother, she obsessively kept checks on her eldest son and her other children.

As for Albert, his fears that Victoria might have inherited the madness suffered by George III never went away.

He would be left terrified by her outbursts of fury during rows. But despite the tempestuous nature of their marriage, the couple were deeply in love.

After Albert died suddenly aged just 42 in 1861, probably from typhoid, Victoria was bereft.

She famously wore black for the rest of her life and made only a handful of public appearances as a widow.

The public almost became aware of Dr Ferguson’s diary a little over a century ago, when his son approached major publisher John Murray.

But, aware that Victoria’s eldest son was still on the throne and many of her other children were also alive and well, the decision was taken not to bring it to light. 

Murray wrote to Dr Ferguson’s son in 1908: ‘My dear Ferguson, of the interest of this diary there can be no doubt, but it is by no means easy to suggest the best way of dealing with it. Here are some of the difficulties. 

‘There are several passages and those amongst the most interesting which it would be undesirable to publish now at any rate, as being too private, or as referring to persons whose near relations are still living.’