The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [106]
Isolated at Pynsent, Chatham in a manic upswing ordered the gardener to have the bare hill that bounded the view covered by a planting of evergreens. Told that “all the nurseries in this county would not furnish a hundredth part” of what would be needed, he nonetheless ordered the man to obtain the trees from London, from where they were brought down by wagon. Pynsent was an estate willed to Pitt by its irascible owner, a kinsman of Lord North, who had been so enraged by North’s vote for the cider tax that he had him burnt in effigy and changed his will, leaving his estate to the national hero. To occupy it, Pitt had sold his own estate of Hayes, where he had spent great sums buying up nearby houses to “free himself from the neighborhood.” Now he was seized by an insistent desire to recover Hayes and could not rest until his wife, forced to beg the influence of her brothers, with whom Chatham had quarreled, was able to persuade the new owner to sell it back.
No happier at Hayes, in the grip of gout and despair, Chatham could bear no contact. He refused to see or communicate with anyone, could not suffer his own children in the house, would not speak to servants, sometimes not even to his wife. Meals had to be kept hot at all times to be wheeled in at irregular hours when he sounded his bell. His temper erupted at the slightest defect. For days at a time he sat staring vacantly out the window. No visitor was admitted, but Lord Camden, told of the condition, said, “Then he is mad.” Others called it “gout in the head.”
Gout in the days of heavy diet and heavy drinking of fortified wines played a role in the fate of nations. It was a cause of the abdication of Charles V, Emperor in the time of the Renaissance Popes. A leading physician of Chatham’s time, Dr. William Cadogan, maintained that the disease had three causes, “Indolence, Intemperance and Vexation” (in modern times ascertained to be an overproduction of uric acid in the blood, which, when not absorbed, causes the inflammation and pain), and that an active and frugal life was the best preventive and possible cure. That physical exercise and a vegetarian diet were remedial was known, but the theory of opposites, one of the least helpful precepts of 18th-century medicine, was preferred by Chatham’s physician, a Dr. Addington. A specialist in lunacy, or “mad-doctor,” he hoped to induce a violent fit of gout on the theory that this would drive out the mental disorder. He therefore prescribed two glasses of white wine and two of port every day, double his patient’s usual intake, over and above Madeira and port at other intervals. The patient was also to continue eating meat and avoid exercise in the open air, with the natural result that the affliction grew worse. Chatham took no part in government through 1767 and 1768. That he survived at all under Dr. Addington’s regimen and was, indeed, to recover his sanity represents one of man’s occasional triumphs over medicine.
While sometimes linked to gout, probably through pain, madness appeared not infrequently in the 18th-century governing class. Two central figures in the American crisis, Chatham during and George III afterward, showed symptoms of it, and in America, James Otis, who had been acting wildly for some time, went definitely insane in 1768. Walpole’s nephew, the Earl of Orford, from whom he was to inherit the title, was intermittently insane, as were Lord George Germain’s two brothers, one of whom, heir to the Sackville earldom, cut down all the trees at Knole and was declared mentally incompetent by his family and eventually died “in a fit.” The other, Lord John Sackville, a victim of melancholia, spent a wandering life in Europe in secluded poverty “fighting off madness.” The Duchess of Queensberry was “very clever, very whimsical and just not mad.” The poet William Cowper, as already noticed, was mad and so too was the minor poet Christopher Smart, whom Dr. Johnson