MAO MONARCHS ON EUROPEAN THRONES.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3295, 14 August 1911, Page 3

MAO MONARCHS ON EUROPEAN THRONES.

ROYAL LUNATICS AND IMBECILES. The melancholy fact which has lately been chronicled, apropos of the sixtythird birthday of King Otto of Bavaria, to the effect that, while this monarch is physically as robust as ever, there is no change in his mental condition, recalls the tx-agio story of the thi-one ol this State of the German Empire. It is twenty-five years ago since King Otto ascended the throne, succeeding his brother, King Louis 11., who went mad and committed suicide by drowning himself in Lake Staremberg, while attempting to escape from the restraint under which he had been placed by the

Government. Iving Otto lives in a lonely castle, Furstenried, cut off from the rest of the ivorld, with, four keepers who attend him night and day, never leaving him for a moment. Except doctors, no visitor, not even a relative, ever enters the King’s presence, a 6 any communication from the outside world •arouses him) to frenzy. Indeed, his own mother was compelled to refrain from seeing him. During the insanity of these two monarchs Bavaria has been ruled by their uncle, Prince Leopold of Bavaria, and it might be mentioned that the grandfather of King Louis and King Otto—Louis 1.. although a well-mean-ing and intellectual monarch —was forced to abdicate, on account of hi 6 connection with the notorious Lola Montez, an adventuress whom Louis created Countess of Lansfeld and allowed £SOOO a year. A GILDED PRISON. The pathetic history of King Otto reminds one of that, of Murad V. Sultan of Turkey, who ascended the throne of the Ottoman Empire in May, 1870, only to be removed three months later on account of his insanity. For thirty years he lingered behind the gilded bars of his prison palace at Constantinople, and ultimately died without recovering hie sanity. King Frederick William IV. of Prussia, grand-uncle of the present Kaiser, spent the last five years of his life in a state of insanity, under the most strict kind of restraint, owing to the violent character of his mania, although his queen insisted that he was in his right mind and that he had been proclaimed as mentally incapable merely to satisfy the unscrupulous and impatient ambition of his brother, the Regent, who died as the Emperor William. Then again, the late King of Holland by reason of his dissipated life, became a physical wreok towards the end of his reign and for practically two years before he died in 1890 the people were ruled in his name by his consort, Queen Emma, who also acted as Regent until her daughter, Queen Wilhelmina, came of age in 1898. INSANE ENGLISH MONARCHS. George 111. is the only British monarch who, in modern times, has been placed under restraint and deprived of his authority because of insanity, though similar measures were at one time contemplated with regard to his son, George IV., the monarch who has been described as '‘a bad son, a bad husband, a. bad father, a bad subject, a bad monarch, and a bad friend,” and whoso conduct, while on the throne, was characterised by an eccentricity which bordered on lunacy. The insanity of George 111. was really brought about by the dangerous illness of his youngest and favorite child Princess Amelia. The unlikelihood of her recovery preyed upon him and hastened the attack of mental derangement whfch incapateitated 1 him _ from reigning, although he had previously sufferd from this malady. 'He died hopelessly insane, at Windsor, after losing his sight as well as his senses.