The King Who Died on the Close Stool

At about 7:00 on the morning of Saturday, 25 October 1760, the King of Great Britain and Ireland, Elector of Hanover, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, etc., woke in his bedchamber at Kensington Palace, drank his usual cup of hot chocolate, walked unaided to the adjoining water-closet, sat down on the close stool, and died.

He was 76 years old, in reasonable health for his age, and the last reigning monarch of Britain to have been born outside the country. The cause of death, established by post-mortem the same afternoon, was a dissecting aortic aneurysm — a rupture of the wall of the body’s main artery, just above the heart. He would have lost consciousness within seconds and died within a few minutes. He fell forward off the close stool with sufficient force that the noise was heard by his German valet, Mehmet Schroeder, in the antechamber.

It is the most famous British royal death in this particular pose and one of the few that comes with a contemporary medical report. The pose has, since 1760, been a more or less universal source of mild English embarrassment.

What the morning looked like

George II had risen at six, as he did every day. He had drunk his chocolate, which he preferred made the German way (sweeter, thicker, served with a small slice of cake). He had asked whether the wind was favorable for the packet boats from Hanover, where his grandson Prince Frederick had recently died and where some correspondence was overdue. Mehmet Schroeder, the senior of the King’s two Turkish valets — both of whom George had brought back from a Vienna campaign decades earlier and retained for the rest of his life — had reported that the wind was indeed favorable.

The King had then walked into the adjoining closet, closed the door, and sat down. The closet was, in the architecture of an early Georgian royal apartment, a small chamber off the bedroom, containing a chair-style toilet (a close stool, the term Walpole uses) over a covered chamber pot. It had no windows. It was lit by a single candle.

Schroeder, hearing the crash, opened the door and found the King fallen forward with a cut on the right side of his face from the edge of a bureau. He called for help. The royal physicians arrived within twenty minutes. The King was already dead.

The eldest royal granddaughter who could be located, Princess Amelia, was brought in to identify the body. Amelia, then aged 49 and unmarried, lived at Kensington and saw her father most mornings. She entered the closet, looked at him, and said the line that survives in Walpole’s account of the morning: “Hélas, c’est mon père.” (Alas, it is my father.) She had been speaking French at home since girlhood; the King had not encouraged English among his daughters.

What Walpole wrote down

The most detailed contemporary record of the morning is in a letter from Horace Walpole — son of the former prime minister Robert Walpole, gossip-in-chief of mid-Georgian London — to his cousin and correspondent Sir Horace Mann, posted to Florence three days later. Walpole was not at Kensington that morning, but he had the story from his half-sister and from the King’s surgeon within twenty-four hours, and his version is consistent with the autopsy report that was published, in the dignified Latin of the Royal Society, the following spring.

Walpole writes:

“He rose at his usual hour, called as usual for his chocolate, drank it, and walked into a closet adjoining. The German valet de chambre, in waiting, heard a noise louder than the royal wind, and a groan: he ran in and found the King fallen on the floor from the close-stool, and the cut he had given himself in falling on the corner of a bureau hindered the surgeon from seeing the cause of his death.”

The “royal wind” line is Walpole’s. It is the moment that turned the King’s death from a tragedy into a story.

The autopsy, performed by Frank Nicholls, the King’s physician — and published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1761 — found the cause of death to be a rupture of the right ventricle of the heart, with a tear in the aorta about four inches above the valve, that had bled into the pericardium. This is the classic finding of a Stanford Type A aortic dissection. Modern cardiology would diagnose it instantly from the symptoms. In 1760, it was a novel observation; Nicholls’s paper is one of the earliest detailed clinical descriptions of an aortic dissection in the English medical literature. The condition was named in the eighteenth century after his case.

The King thus contributed, through the manner of his death, to a clinical entity that would eventually carry his name into medical textbooks. Almost none of the textbooks mention how the original case presented.

The succession

George II had outlived his eldest son, Prince Frederick, who had died in 1751 of a lung infection contracted (the standard story goes) by a cricket-ball injury. The Crown passed to Frederick’s son, who became George III, then aged twenty-two. The new King was Frederick’s son, raised at Kew, intellectually serious, deeply unlike his grandfather, and would later, in the 1810s, lose his mind. The 1760 succession was uneventful. Parliament was notified the same afternoon. Coins were redesigned within weeks.

The King’s body lay in state at Kensington for three days. The funeral was held in Westminster Abbey on the evening of 11 November 1760, at night, in the Hanoverian tradition. The coffin was placed in a vault that George II had had constructed to his own design under the Henry VII Chapel. He had given specific instructions that the wall of the vault between his coffin and the coffin of his late queen Caroline (who had died in 1737) should be removed at his death, so that their two bodies would mingle.

The instruction was carried out. The bones of George and Caroline of Ansbach are now indistinguishable. The fact is recorded by the abbey’s antiquaries. It is the only royal couple in Westminster Abbey whose coffins have been deliberately opened to each other.

It is also the only detail of the morning of 25 October 1760 that the King himself would have wanted remembered.