For centuries, European courts presented their monarchs as flawless beings, set apart by divine right and royal blood. The reality was far messier. When kings and queens, princes and princesses, were born with visible conditions, psychological struggles, or developmental differences, they rarely received compassion. More often, they became family secrets, confined to monasteries, remote estates, or the locked wards of asylums.

Their illnesses were hidden, their names scrubbed from official records, and their fates sealed by the very families meant to protect them. The line between madness and political convenience was often blurred. When a ruler themselves lost their grip on sanity, the consequences could reshape entire nations. In 1453, King Henry VI of England suffered a complete mental collapse after a devastating defeat that cost England nearly all its territory in France.

He fell into a state often described as catatonic schizophrenia, unable to rule or even respond to those around him. The urgent question of who would govern in his place ignited the Wars of the Roses, a dynastic conflict that tore England apart for decades. Henry’s claim to the French crown came through another troubled king, Charles VI of France, whose own descent into madness had begun years earlier. Charles had started his reign well, beloved by his subjects.

Then one day, without warning, he attacked his own knights in a violent frenzy. His condition worsened steadily, until he became convinced that his entire body was made of glass. He demanded that no one approach him, and rods were sewn into his clothing to keep his fragile body from shattering. His subjects renamed him Charles the Mad.

The glass delusion was not unique to Charles. It was a surprisingly common psychological condition in Europe until the seventeenth century, tied to the growing presence of glass in daily life. Princess Alexandra Amalie of Bavaria suffered from it in the nineteenth century. She believed she had swallowed a glass piano and that any wrong movement would shatter it inside her.

She refused to wear anything but white and became obsessively fixated on cleanliness. Her parents tried everything, enforcing an early bedtime to stop her endless rituals and once staging an elaborate trick, throwing out a small piano figurine to convince her that the object had passed from her body. Nothing worked. She was placed in an asylum for three years, but the delusion never left her.

At one point, when a brother of Napoleon I considered proposing to her, her father talked him out of marrying his own daughter. Despite the confinement and the diagnosis, Amalie lived a rich intellectual life and became a published author. Not all women labeled mad received even that much understanding. Juana of Castile, known to history as Juana the Mad, saw her reputation weaponized against her.

When she inherited the kingdom of Castile from her mother in 1504, both her father and her husband declared her insane so they could rule in her place. Juana, almost constantly pregnant and fiercely devoted to her unfaithful husband, was certainly emotional and prone to dramatic outbursts. But the rumors of madness spiraled out of control after his death, when she spent months transporting his body to Granada for burial. Rumors spread that she opened the coffin and kissed her husband, that she refused to let any woman near his corpse.

Her father used these stories to strip her of power and confine her for nearly fifty years. Yet many contemporaries with no stake in the crown described her as completely sane. In her case, madness was less a diagnosis than a political tool. Perhaps the most famous story of royal madness is that of George III, now widely known through popular portrayals.

Even in his youth, the king suffered episodes of mental disturbance, noticing insomnia and a decline in his cognitive abilities. These episodes were usually temporary, and he returned to normal life, marrying Queen Charlotte and fathering fifteen children. The real crisis came in 1788, preceded by the deaths of two of his children, the loss of the American Revolutionary War, and a deeply tense political climate. The king began hallucinating.

His speech and writing dissolved into incoherent rambling, and he made inappropriate advances toward women. Medical treatment was brutal. Doctors restrained him and applied harsh chemical compresses to draw out bad fluids. When he became violent, servants gagged him and bound him in a straitjacket, leaving him to struggle until he exhausted himself.

Good behavior was rewarded with visits from family or proper cutlery. Bad behavior meant restraint or being fed mashed food with a wooden spoon. He briefly seemed to recover at times, but the episodes kept returning. The final collapse came in 1810, leaving him permanently mad, blind, and deaf.

He no longer recognized his wife and did not mourn her death. Modern understanding suggests bipolar disorder may have been the true cause, but by then it was far too late. These stories did not end with the eighteenth century. As late as the twentieth century, royal families still hid their ill members.

Prince John of the United Kingdom, son of George V and Mary of Teck, was kept largely secret. His epilepsy, then widely considered a psychiatric disorder requiring isolation from society, led his family to send him away. At age four, he had his first seizure. Over the years, the attacks grew more frequent and severe, and he showed signs of developmental delay.

Doctors warned his parents he would not live to adulthood. He was moved to Wood Farm, away from the palace, and was absent from his parents’ coronation. He appeared less and less in family photographs until many forgot he existed. The press later accused the family of cruelty, but the record is more complicated.

His siblings played with him when they visited, and his grandmother Alexandra of Denmark grew roses especially for him and gardened with him. He spent his last Christmas with his family and died peacefully on January 18, 1919. His mother wrote that he had been spared much suffering, that he had simply slept quietly into his heavenly home without pain or struggle. It took another twenty years for society to accept that epilepsy was not a condition requiring isolation.

Perhaps the most disturbing royal case involved Princess Alice of Battenberg, mother of Prince Philip and grandmother of King Charles III. Born deaf at Windsor Castle, she learned to speak both English and German and married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark. But Greece was wracked by conflict, and the monarchy teetered. After a revolution forced the family into exile, Alice, deeply religious by nature, came to believe she could heal people and communicate with Christ.

Doctors diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. She was placed in the hands of Sigmund Freud, who subjected her to a highly controversial treatment, repeatedly x-raying her ovaries in an attempt to induce early menopause and suppress what he believed was the source of her condition. Alice insisted she was sane and tried to leave the asylum. After two years, she succeeded, traveling incognito across Europe, likely afraid of being confined again.

She had no contact with her family for years. Whether she was truly mad remains unclear, but her later life, sheltering Greek Jews during World War II and founding a religious order, hardly fits the image of a completely insane woman. The most haunting story is that of the Queen’s cousins, Nerissa Bowes-Lyon and Katherine Bowes-Lyon. The world learned of them only because a journalist, walking through a cemetery, noticed a familiar royal surname on simple graves and decided to investigate.

They were daughters of the Queen Mother’s older brother John. Both sisters had severe intellectual disabilities, barely speaking and with a mental age of no more than three to five years. Their mother cared for them at home for years, but after she was widowed and the Second World War began, it became too much. In June 1941, Nerissa and Katherine, along with three cousins with similar conditions, were placed in the Royal Earlswood Hospital.

They received almost no financial support from the family, only a small annual payment for their care. Their mother visited occasionally until her death in 1966. After that, no one from the family ever came again. In 1982, hospital volunteers wrote to the Queen Mother informing her that her nieces were still alive.

She responded with a check to buy them toys and sweets and a note suggesting more funds might follow. When Nerissa died in 1986 at age sixty-seven, no money was allocated for her funeral. She was buried in a pauper’s grave marked only with a number tag, the very grave the journalist had discovered. Katherine was moved between institutions several times and died in a care home in 2014, buried next to her sister under a modest cross.

Her death went unnoticed by the royal family, who faced heavy criticism, especially since the Queen Mother was patron of several mental health organizations while her own nieces had been forgotten. The story raised a question that remains unanswered: who should bear responsibility for the fate of two forgotten sisters?