Infamous as harbingers of death and disaster, two death’s-head hawkmoths turned up in King George Ill’s bedroom during his second bout of “madness” in 1801. His physician, Robert Willis, kept them. Pinned while still fresh, the specimens became a family heirloom. They are on display at the Museum of Zoology at the University of Cambridge thanks to Willis’s grandson, who worked there.
To country people, the sight of one of these massive moths flying in through an open window at night foretold a death in the family.
Natives of Africa, these insects are rare enough in Britain to be noteworthy even today. So it seems extraordinary that the King should have been visited by two of them. Some suggest that the real story is altogether more sinister. Poor George loathed the brutal Dr Willis and his two sadistic brothers. Might the brothers have deliberately planted the creatures in the royal bedchamber? Could these menacing moths have been a bizarre weapon in their campaign to terrorise the King and consolidate their own power?
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IN FEBRUARY 1801, the King began to feel decidedly unwell, just as he had in 1788, during his first attack of “madness”. The severe abdominal pains, the aching limbs, the port-wine-coloured urine returned. These symptoms are now known to be classic signs of an inherited metabolic disorder, porphyria.
The mental derangement was even more alarming. As spring approached, the King became agitated, restless and confused. Night after night, he rose from his bed to fling open the shutters of his bedchamber and engage in violent prayer. Perhaps the insomniac monarch awoke one warm night to see creatures as heavy as a mouse and with a wingspan as broad as a hand flying about his chamber. Each monstrous moth bore a hideous skull motif and ghostly “ribs” along its body.
As George flailed at the apparitions, they cried out, making a weird sound that has been variously described as a voice of anguish, a dismal, melancholy cry, a plaintive piping or a breathy squeaking. It was not for nothing that, just a few decades earlier, Linnaeus had named the moth Acherontia atropos: after Acheron, the river of sorrow that flows through Hades, and Atropos, the eldest of the three fates charged with severing the thread of life.
The arrival of a death’s-head hawkmoth is never easy to ignore. Strong fliers and determined migrants, they even turn up on oil rigs in the North Sea, where they are quickly swatted by disconcerted workers. “When it happens to fly at night in at an open window to a bedroom,” one Victorian naturalist remarked, “there is no more sleep for the occupants until the noisy powerful creature is caught and in some way silenced.” But to those closest to the ailing king, the creatures might have prompted quite different thoughts.
During George’s first bout of madness, the Reverend Dr Francis Willis had been called in to treat the King, apparently on the strength of his thriving lunatic asylum in Lincolnshire. A brutal man, Willis said of his charges that he was accustomed to break them in like horses. Banning any contact with the King’s wife and children, he systematically tortured George with straitjackets, blistering compounds and emetics.
By 1801, Willis was 83, so his three sons-the doctors John and Robert and the clergyman Thomas-were put in charge. Robert was said to be the chief protagonist of a “treatment” regime that consisted of restraint, seclusion, punishment and coercion. The Willis brothers’ presence soon took on a positively menacing character as the triumvirate became the arbiters of the King’s health. His ministers grew even more worried when Robert remarked that he could obtain the royal signature on any amount of papers. The doctors were now, in effect, the “men in power”, remarked Edmund Burke, elder statesman of the Whig party.
Yet their status in the royal household remained very precarious. As summer approached, George began to recover, and the brothers’ services were dispensed with once again. George slipped off to convalesce at Kew, and was looking forward to a holiday at his favourite Weymouth. The Queen took fright at the King’s enjoyment of his new-found freedom and asked the Willises back. They leapt at the chance. The three brothers, with four madhouse assistants in tow, dashed to Kew and took bodily possession of the poor King once again.
It seems curiously convenient that the moths seem to have mysteriously appeared then, just when the brothers felt their authority needed bolstering. Was it coincidence that not one but two rare and terror-inducing moths flew into one particular room during an English summer? Or could it have been a ruse dreamt up by cruel men greedy for power? We’re condemned to guesswork, as references to royal hawkmoths have yet to be discovered in the voluminous crown archives. Only one thing seems certain: the disconcerting appearance of the moths would not have prompted much in the way of sympathy from the beleaguered sovereign’s physician.
As for the insects themselves, they would have been on the lookout for beehives to rob. These hawkmoths break through the waxy combs with their short, stout probosces and suck up the honey. But why do they sport the death’s-head motif that people find so unnerving? British naturalist Miriam Rothschild reckons it’s designed to make the hive-raiding moths resemble an enormous queen bee, as they sing their impersonation of her piping sound. The moths squeak through their proboscis, exploiting a specialised pulsed airstream technique that closely parallels the human method of making sounds, and is remarkably loud at close range.
Before their demise in 1801, the moths now preserved in Cambridge almost ertainly entranced a hiveful of apian observers. Whatever the moths’ significance for the king, they would certainly have foretold disaster for the bees.
