This being the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Americans can recall the king their revolution deposed: the hapless George III. But perhaps they should be shifting their thoughts 12 years forward from 1776 to 1788, when George went mad.

Fanny Burney, the novelist and lady-in-waiting to the queen, came across him unexpectedly one evening in October. He spoke to her in “a manner so uncommon that a high fever alone could account for it; a rapidity, a hoarseness of voice, a volubility, an earnestness – a vehemence, rather – it startled me inexpressibly.”

Over the coming weeks poor George got worse. He talked in a rapid and endless stream of consciousness, at one point going on “for nineteen hours with scarce any intermission”. He made obscene proposals to ladies-in-waiting.

According to the historian Christopher Hibbert, George “gave orders to persons who did not exist; he fancied London was flooded and commanded his yacht to go there immediately; he persuaded himself he could see Hanover through Herschel’s telescope; he composed despatches to foreign courts on imaginary causes; he lavished honours on all who approached him, ‘elevating to the highest dignity . . . any occasional attendant’. He had to be forced to have a bath and, after refusing to be shaved for a fortnight, he allowed the barber to attend to one side of his face but not the other.”

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