George V: Mercy or Murder?
46:12 Share

Ready for your next adventure? KLM Royal Dutch Airlines brings you Real Deal Days. Your chance to uncover real adventures and create real memories. Taste the real Amsterdam, explore the real Barcelona, and discover the real Johannesburg, along with many more destinations around the world. Secure your real deal today and seize the moment with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. Restrictions apply. See terms and conditions at klm.com.

I'm ready for my life to change. ABC Sunday's American Idol is all new. Give it your all, good luck, come out with a golden ticket. Let's hear it. This is a man's world. I've never seen anything like it. And a new chapter begins. We're going to Hollywood. Carrie Underwood joins Lionel Richie, Luke Bryan, and Ryan Seacrest on American Idol. New Sundays, 8, 7 central on ABC and stream on Hulu.

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. On the morning of the 21st of January 1936, the people of Great Britain awoke to the news that their monarch, King George V, was dead. Businesses closed and shops put up their shutters out of respect.

The country was mourning the loss of the much-loved man who had guided them through the Great War. There was a huge outpouring of grief and public affection for him on his death. I mean, he lay in state for four days at Westminster Hall. A million people passed by his coffin.

They were told the official account released by the palace, that he had lost his long-fought battle against lung disease, and ultimately, that it had been a peaceful and natural death. But in 1986, a shocking discovery was made. A diary written by the doctor who had treated King George showed that his death was far from natural, and even led some to state that the official cause of death should be recognized as murder.

And so Dawson makes this incredibly bold decision that actually he is going to kill the king. Make no mistake, under British law, Dawson has murdered the king. And did the man responsible also kill another famous royal in a similar way? If that's the case, he's killed two monarchs. That's a pretty impressive murder record.

For half a century, the real cause of King George V's death was kept a secret from the public. Just how did one of the most respected kings in the history of the British monarchy end up being given a lethal injection to hasten his death? Why was it covered up? Who gave the order?

And what reason lay behind the decision to artificially end the King's life and commit the first regicide of a British monarch for nearly 300 years? King George V of Great Britain was born on June 3rd, 1865, the unpromising second son of Edward VII. Initially, he sought a career in the British Navy.

But the untimely death of his brother Albert placed him on the throne. He became king in 1910 and played an active role supporting the troops during World War I. King George V was one of Britain's most highly respected and much-loved monarchs. He had been king all the way throughout the First World War and he had inspired terrific loyalty and passion amongst the average Tommy. We have learned to think of him as more than a monarch.

My very dear people, he has called us on the radio, abandoning the we of majesty for the I of a man and a friend.

I mean, first of all, right from the start, he realized that, you know, it was no good the monarchy being lavish and sort of carrying on as normal during the war. So he wore, for example, you know, military uniform through most of the war. The lavish kind of dinners and spectacles that would have happened at Buckingham Palace didn't take place anymore. There was a real kind of paring down of ceremony.

and he made a lot of visits to the Western Front. So he wanted to very much be seen as representing Britain and being very much at the heart of the war effort. He became king at a time when the monarchy was largely disapproved of, and many felt the monarchy was perhaps coming towards its end.

Realising the danger, I suppose, of the tide of public opinion turning and focusing on the German royal family, you know, he made the very pragmatic and very progressive and very necessary step of changing the royal family name from Saxe-Goburg and Cotha to the House of Windsor.

King George V was a quiet, conservative, naval-educated man who had a great aversion to new ideas and an explosive temper. I think in many ways he was the kind of old-school monarch, I guess. He focused on the need to be seen to serve, to be kind of humble and dutiful, to be moderate in his behaviour.

George was a family man and he was devoted to his wife Mary. I mean, they were a devoted, loyal couple. He didn't have mistresses. He was committed to her and he also relied on her. They were very much a kind of partnership. During the war, there was a sense of, you know, both kind of visiting injured soldiers, him visiting the Western Front. I mean, there was a real sense of being seen and being dutiful and being devoted and both were very much signed up to that.

I think there was a huge outpouring of sympathy for George V during World War I because let's remember it's only four years into the reign that war was declared and it was said that he aged 10 years because he really had the weight of the monarchy on his shoulders. He'd seen the emperors of Russia, the emperor of Germany, the emperor of Austria fall and the British monarchy was one of the last men standing and that was George V's responsibility was to stabilise the ship.

The cost of the war on Great Britain was huge. There were between 800,000 and 1 million military and civilian deaths, and over 1.5 million wounded. It was a savage and brutal war that took its toll on every country and individual involved. It brought many changes to Britain, but it also brought changes to George V's health. After a serious accident while riding his horse, George was never quite the same again.

George V did not enjoy great health, to be frank. There were two problems with him. First, in 1915, when he was inspecting some troops on the Western Front, when they all cheered out for him, his horse had reared up and he had fallen off and his horse had fallen on top of him and this had probably fractured his pelvis. So this had pretty serious consequences throughout the rest of his life. Secondly, as an extremely heavy smoker, he suffered from a lot of bronchial and pulmonary complaints.

During George's reign, smoking was a hugely popular habit. Cigarette consumption had risen to such an extent in the early 20th century that doctors were starting to make the link between tobacco and lung disease.

I think it's fair to say that the entire royal family in the Edwardian era and through to George V and his sons were very, very heavy smokers, all of the men. George V certainly was. Queen Mary was said to smoke an awful lot and the king already had respiratory problems, so adding 40 cigarettes to it full strength wouldn't have helped, I'm sure. But smoking probably wasn't the only cause of George's problems.

at the old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garrett in London. They hold a number of medical specimens related to George's illnesses. Iris Millis is a specialist in the history of medicine. What we have here is what's called a London lung. While London was still using coal fire, the smog was around. So there are lots of particles in there, but it also is very much resembling a heavy smoker's lung, which the king unfortunately was.

The unprecedented and unrestricted growth of industry meant that cities like London were suffering from serious levels of air pollution. Thick winter fog would mix with the noxious fumes from the many factories to create a dense smog that would be inhaled by the inhabitants.

The particles in there will stop the intake of oxygen while you're breathing, so it will make you short of breath and it will be increasing over time, which means with age and towards the end, there was always oxygen made available to the king. His heavy smoking only further worsened his problems. By 1925, he was diagnosed with obstructive pulmonary disease, more commonly known as emphysema.

He had started smoking as a child and there's no doubt that he continued that. And so really throughout his life, he suffered from bronchial problems, from pulmonary infections, pleurisy, bronchitis at different points. So this was a sort of really underpinned his reign, these bouts of ill health. George still carried on with his royal duties.

shielding the public from his failing health. But his sickness persisted, and George continued to suffer with respiratory problems.

When the king's physician, Lord Dawson, discovered that the king was suffering from pneumonia, the first thing he did is getting a pathologist he had worked with closely before, Lionel Whitby, to come to the palace and produce the whole set of diagnoses. And this was when they discovered that the king actually suffered from pneumonia and they had to change their treatment from general nursing care to a proper cure to the king's illness.

George was lucky enough to have benefited from the latest medical advancements of the age. When King George VI developed pneumonia in 1928, the disease had become more manageable than it had been in the 19th century. There had been a large development. When Louis Pasteur first discovered the bacterium that actually caused pneumonia, which was streptococcus pneumonia,

This is a slide which was produced four years later, part of our collection, where you can see a little cut of an infected lung, which would be put under a microscope and then this would be used to produce a serum, a type-specific serum for the patient to cure them.

He also had a lung abscess on two occasions, which really did lead him, you know, his life hanging in the balance. And, you know, he developed septicemia and it seemed for a number of weeks that he may not survive. In 1928, George became seriously ill. He was found to have an abscess in the lung, which had spread to his bloodstream.

the king underwent an urgent operation to drain the fluid from his lungs. When the king had his treatment for pneumonia, it happened in two stages. There were two operations within a year. And in the first one, when they had discovered that there had been pus developing in the lung, the first thing Lord Dawson did was use a syringe. It would have been fitted with a long rubber tube

which had a needle at the end. You would put the long needle into the chest cavity and you would pull out the pus with the syringe. The procedure of treating the abscess in the King's lung meant that they had to open the chest cavity. At the time, surgical operations of this kind were hugely dangerous.

Yet, despite the risks and without consulting a specialist, George's doctor, Bertrand Dawson, decided to carry out the operation and drained half a quart of fluid from the abscess in the King's lung. The operation was a success, but other members of the King's medical team were furious with Dawson for acting without their approval. But this wouldn't be the last time that Dawson would make his own decisions about the King's life.

Dawson was very much perceived as the man who had saved the life of the King and as a result his profile grew, he was elevated to the peerage, made Lord Dawson of Penn. As the King's physician, Dawson received a great deal of press attention and enjoyed his newfound fame. He had gained such trust with the royal family that he was given unparalleled access to the King and was allowed to make crucial decisions about his treatment and healthcare.

And this almost certainly contributed to the freedom he had to manage and control the circumstances of the King's death. George had become increasingly weakened by the invasive medical procedures he had endured. By 1936, his breathing had become so poor that he would often require an oxygen tank.

In a sense, all of these bouts of illness kind of weakened him and I think made him anxious about the future. Whilst at the same time, in a sense, increasing his popularity among the people, there was a growing sense of affection for him. And of course, you know, he became king in his 40s.

and died in his 70s. So he naturally aged, but I think all the remarkable revolutionary changes that his reign had overseen also put a strain on him together with his ill health. So, I mean, it was a gradually kind of weakening figure. And in the final months of his life, there is a kind of quite rapid deterioration. As his health worsened and his life seemed to be coming towards its end, George began to reflect on the situation of his country

and the looming threat of Nazi Germany.

Well, of World War I, King George V called it absolutely pointless, you know, a pointless, useless war. So to see him approaching very ill health and World War II was almost staring him in the face, the rise of the fascists, the rise of the Nazis in Germany, the rise of Mussolini in Italy, would have depressed him immensely that they'd gone through all of that hell of World War I

allegedly for absolutely nothing because it was only going to happen again just about in his own lifetime. The King's health can't have been improved by personal concerns, the most pressing of which was his strange relationship with his eldest son Edward, the man who would become King after George's death.

King George V was absolutely frantic about the succession, heartily disapproved of his son, the Prince of Wales, said that the Prince of Wales' friends were not gentlemen, which was pretty strong meat for King George V, heartily disapproved of his mistresses, of Frida Dudley Ward and Thelma Furness, who were both married ladies, and the last one, Mrs Ernest Simpson, who had two husbands still alive, a divorcee and an American.

I think George in those final weeks was very reluctant to let go because of course what he was going to unleash was so uncertain and he couldn't rely on his heir. And so I think there's this sense of fight, there's a sense of he needs to hold on. And I think, you know, again, given all the things that he'd endured, all these kind of, you know, political and social strains, the fact, the sort of irony of the fact that the ultimate thing that

really came closest to potentially sort of breaking him and breaking the monarchy was from within his own family. It was the sort of failure of his eldest son to kind of man up to what he was supposed to be doing. His health continued to worsen, and on the 15th of January 1936, George confined himself to his bedroom at the Royal Sandringham estate, complaining of a cold, unaware at the time that he would never leave the room alive.

The next day, Dawson was called for and it soon became clear that the condition was much more serious as the King slipped in and out of consciousness. The King is attended to by two key figures. The first is Catherine Black. She's the nurse and she's been a nurse in the royal household for many, many years to the extent that she even has a pet name. She's called Blackie. And then also the other key figure is the King's personal physician, Bertrand Dawson.

And it's Dawson who will be making some very, very key decisions about the King's healthcare. It was then that Dr. Dawson was once more summoned to the King's bedside. And it was now that the mystery surrounding the King's death was about to begin.

The King was at Sandringham in January 1936 when he entered into his final illness, which was a huge respiratory trouble that he evidently wasn't going to recover from. His son, the Prince of Wales, was sent for who flew to Sandringham. The Royal Physician was in attendance, Lord Dawson. Dawson was treating the King largely with sedatives of morphine, it seems from his notes.

But by the 20th of January, it became clear that the king was not going to recover. George spent the next few days slipping in and out of consciousness. And on January the 20th, Dawson released a statement to the press, saying... This is London. Following bulletin was issued at 9.25. The king's life is moving peacefully towards its close.

Just before midnight, the announcement came that King George V of Great Britain had died peacefully of complications arising from bronchitis. "It has pleased almighty God to call to his mercy our late sovereign Lord King George V."

There was a huge outpouring of grief and public affection for him on his death. I mean, he lay in state for four days at Westminster Hall, a million people passed by his coffin. I mean, it was a huge moment really for the country. And I think in a sense, it was a kind of, I mean, it was a full stop, I guess, from

you know, a paragraph which was his reign that was completely full of unprecedented change and suffering and, you know, the most profound sort of revolutionary currents really. Through Westminster Hall, set on the west flank of the new Parliament buildings, the Parliament was rebuilt in 1840. All the great figures of English history since William the Conqueror have passed.

To this historic building they have brought our King for his lying in state, and the mourning crowds of his devoted subjects stretch for hundreds of yards beyond the Victoria Tower, waiting, hours on end, for the privilege of passing by his coffin. I think the country learned to love King George V and Queen Mary because they were almost a throwback to the Edwardian era, to an era of certainty.

when life in Great Britain was relatively safe before the war, before the First World War. So he was looked on as a sort of paterfamilis for the country.

There's no doubt that he was a very devoted husband and father. And, you know, in the midst of monarchy, actually, there was this kind of committed, loving family. And yes, he had a problematic relationship with his son, politically, really, and also that spilled over into kind of personal resentments. But, you know, his wife and his children absolutely felt the loss of him. I mean, it was a personal grief as well as a sort of public loss.

And, you know, there's no sense that it wasn't anything other than genuine. But, of course, relief, I guess, after, you know, months of suffering and decline and a sense that finally, I guess, that was over. George's legacy was considered dull by many historians. He was a stoic character who preferred a subdued and quiet life at home.

spending his time shooting and amusing himself with his hobby of stamp collecting. He was often remembered for his lack of controversy, but all that was about to change. You may get a little excited when you shop at Burlington. What a little place! Did you see that? They have my favorites! It's like a whole new world! I can buy two!

I'm saving so much! Burlington saves you up to 60% off other retailers' prices every day. Will it be the low prices or the great brands? You'll love the deals. You'll love Burlington. I told you so. 50 years after the death of King George, the world was a very different place, and events from the 1930s seemed almost irrelevant.

But the discovery of the personal diary of his doctor, Lord Bertram Dawson, would cause one of the biggest scandals in royal history because many believed that it showed that the king was murdered.

In 1986, Dawson's diary is unearthed by a biographer and there's this stunning revelation that Dawson has actually injected the king with this enormous overdose of cocaine and morphine that's obviously killed him. And in them he makes it clear that the overdose was a deliberate decision to end the king's life. Just what had happened in that room? And why had it taken 50 years to come to light?

On the night in question, seeing that the king's life was hanging in the balance, Dawson decided to make a public statement. Dawson issues this now very famous medical bulletin which states the king's life is now drawing peacefully to its close. This obviously suggests that his death is imminent, but

Dawson is thinking, how much longer has he got? Is he going to be in pain? A decision needs to be made. Now, what's informing Dawson? Is Dawson worried about the king's own well-being? Is he going to have a peaceful, relatively painless death? Or is Dawson worried about something else? Strangely, Dawson had become concerned about how the news of the king's imminent death would be made public.

Dawson writes that prolonging the suffering would only cause more distress for the family and would not be proper for the dignity of a king. His other concern, which is more controversial and interesting, was that he wanted the news of the king's death to be announced in the Times newspaper of London in the morning.

He knows that the one place that befits the sovereign, you know, for his death to be announced is in the august pages of the Times newspaper, which was then always called the newspaper of record or the first draft of history. Lord Dawson rung his wife and sort of said, tell the Times to hold the front page. We want to make this announcement in the morning papers. That was seen as the best place.

Dawson's wife, Lady Minnie Dawson, made a phone call to John Walter, editor of the Times newspaper. She relayed her husband's message, stating that the king will be dead before the end of the evening.

If the king dies after the Times' deadline at around 11 o'clock that evening, the king's death is therefore going to be reported in the morning newspapers, which are considered to be very below-stairs kind of reading and not the type of newspapers that the king's death should be reported in. And so Dawson makes this incredibly bold decision that actually he is going to kill the king.

But for Dawson to end the King's life, he would need to do it in a way that would look like natural causes and leave no obvious trace. The use of opiates in treating patients in the early 1900s was not unusual. Until the 70s, every doctor, every general practitioner could carry a little case

with little tubes of tabloids. They usually were things like cocaine, morphine, other barbiturates. So all of these were available to doctors and especially for severe pain like the King was in.

As the king, you know, lay dying in the late evening, he was injected with lethal, I suppose, amounts ultimately of cocaine and morphine, which hastened his death by a few hours. Dawson gave the king two consecutive injections administered directly into his bloodstream.

The jugular vein runs down either side of the neck into the chest cavity where it joins the heart. If you were to inject into the jugular vein, you'd be able to distribute the medicine around the body in the quickest possible time. It was easy to produce the right dosage because the tabloids were already mixed in a way so that they could be just dissolved in the right amount of water to be then used for your injections.

Usually for morphine, you would give something between 5 and 15 milligrams. But Dawson's injections contained one grain of cocaine and three-quarters of a grain of morphine. Each of these injections would have been lethal on their own. Together, death was a certainty. Euthanasia was illegal at the time, as it still is now. So George V's death could be viewed as a murder.

There is no other way of putting it. He doesn't ask the king's permission, whether would you like to die, your majesty, or anything like that. So Dawson takes it upon himself to actually kill the sovereign. This is a huge decision. But was it a decision that Dawson made by himself? Or could the decision have been made with the knowledge and support of the king's family? I think it's fair to say that this decision taken by his physician

wasn't actively discussed, openly discussed with the family. I don't think it's likely that Dawson acted on his own. I think that that is probably too big a risk for him to take, to take the life of someone's father, you know, right in front of them, in Sandringham, in the middle of the royal court, effectively. I think it's highly possible that he would have sought some sort of approval.

When the revelations from Dawson's diary became public, the royal household were asked to comment. One of the surprising things was that Buckingham Palace seemed barely concerned. They simply issued a brief statement saying that it all happened a long time ago and everyone concerned is now dead. You have to remember that the British royal family is probably the best theatre director in the world.

they are fantastic at stage managing, not only weddings and christenings and all those sort of happy moments, but they're also fantastically good at managing the transition of power from one monarch to the next. And so therefore that when a king dies, it is a choreographed,

stage-managed presentation to the people out there. So the people will be reading the Times at breakfast with the very sad news that their monarch has passed away. It's all very, very precisely timed. And that's what Dawson was giving the royal family and the royal household. He was helping to maintain the very dignified, serene air of majesty to the proceedings.

We do know that Queen Mary and the Prince of Wales said that they didn't want him to suffer unnecessarily, which is possibly a green light to ease his pain. 1936 was obviously a time of great instability and uncertainty, and this may have informed Lord Dawson's decision to try to make the transition as clean and dignified as possible.

He'd done what he was supposed to do, which was to ease the king's suffering and oversee his passing, and that's what had happened. The immediate focus on the king's death is announcing it, and then we see great outpourings of popular affection, not surprised that the king has died, but actually mourning his loss, and then recognizing this loss of this father figure for the country, which people had really regarded him as.

But in recent years, speculation has arisen that King George may not have been the only patient to receive Dawson's special treatment. There's another twist to the story of Dawson, because it's also likely he didn't just bump off one crowned head of Europe, but a second, Queen Maud of Norway, who also happened to be George's sister. Queen Maud of Norway came over to London in 1938. At the time, she was healthy and showed no signs of illness.

And when she was here, she suffered from this abdominal complaint that required surgery. Who was present but Dawson? What happens to Queen Maud? She dies.

Your data is like gold to hackers. They're selling your passwords, bank details, and private messages. McAfee helps stop them. SecureVPN keeps your online activity private. AI-powered text scam detector spots phishing attempts instantly. And with award-winning antivirus, you get top-tier hacker protection. Plus, you'll get up to $2 million in identity theft coverage, all for just $39.99 for your first year. Visit McAfee.com. Cancel anytime. Terms apply.

Still getting around to that fix on your car? You got this. On eBay you'll find millions of parts guaranteed to fit. Doesn't matter if it's a major engine repair or your first time swapping your windshield wipers.

eBay has that part you need ready to click perfectly into place for changes big and small. Loud or quiet, find all the parts you need at prices you'll love. Guaranteed to fit every time. But you already know that. eBay. Things. People. Love. Eligible items only. Exclusions apply. The official cause of her death was said to be heart failure.

But a letter from Dawson to Queen Maud's physicians in Norway has led many to conclude that Maud may have been euthanized. His letter states: "When reading this account, you will agree that the Queen's sudden death was a relief, and which saved her from these last painful stages of the disease both you and I know only too well."

Knowing what we do know now, after 1986, about what Dawson did to her brother the King back in 1936, just two years before, it now seems very likely that Dawson may have given Queen Maud one of his big trademark injections. If that's the case, he's killed two monarchs. That's a pretty impressive murder record. Was Dawson aware of the consequences of his actions?

What would have happened to him if it had come to light at the time that he had administered lethal injections? If it had been found out in 1936 that Dawson had actually killed the king, which, let's face it, he did kill the king...

I think there would have been an absolute scandal. And it is possible, in legal terms, for him to have been put on trial for murder and regicide, and killing a king in this country carries the death penalty. So, under law, Dawson could have hanged for what he had done. Was Dawson playing God, deciding when and how the king should die?

Can it really be considered a murder? Or was this simply an act of mercy in the hope of easing the passing of a dying man? However, another way of looking at it is the fact that maybe there was an acceptance or an ethical acceptance at the time that this kind of voluntary euthanasia to a comatose individual who was beyond all hope was a widely and very quietly accepted form of treatment that physicians could do.

I think the British public are very pragmatic, and I'm sure euthanasia was practiced very, very often, whether it was in royal circles or middle-class circles or working-class circles. It doesn't really matter. It's a kind release. Although Dawson felt that euthanasia did have a place in medical practice, he actually spoke out against it being made legal.

It's clear that Dawson felt that euthanasia of this type was a common and accepted practice. A few years later, he spoke in the House of Lords in response to a bill proposing to legalise euthanasia. He argued that euthanasia was a common practice, a growing practice, and widely accepted by doctors.

But I think, you know, he probably wouldn't have regarded what had happened with the king as euthanasia as such. I mean, you know, this was about administering certain amounts of morphine and cocaine, morphine that may well have been used anyway, but just in certain amounts that would have speeded up a sort of natural process. Dawson, who signed off on the death certificate, knowingly falsified the cause of death.

There's no doubt this was a very sensitive matter and Dawson of course knew that recording the King's death as lung disease was going to be the way forward. He wasn't going to go into the ins and outs of exactly what had been administered when. But I mean, you know, being a royal physician was a position of ultimate trust. I mean, being a physician to anybody at a time of death is a position of great confidence and intimacy and that's even more so for a monarch.

In some sense, I don't think we should see him being cautious about what kind of information is released as particularly aware of the need to cover up.

However, when the first kind of biographer of Dawson wanted to, you know, write about what had happened and talk about the King's death, I think Dawson's widow was very aware of not wanting to reveal all the details of his papers and be a little bit circumspect about all of that. So perhaps she realized how it might be perceived. The doctor wrote on a death certificate that the King died of lung disease.

whereas in actual fact he died from an injection of cocaine and morphine. The doctor probably did this because he knew that he could be prosecuted. In the UK, no matter how serious the condition or illness, it is still illegal for a doctor to carry out euthanasia. And it's something even now that, you know, the monarchy don't want to kind of particularly make a big thing out of. It belonged to a kind of past era. It doesn't change anything. But the fact remains the king's death was brought on artificially by his doctor.

It was later revealed that some people had actually known about Dawson's actions prior to his diary being released in 1986. When the author Francis Watson was tasked with writing Dawson's biography in 1950, he actually included the event in his book. This biography did originally include

that the story that Lord Dawson had effectively ended King George V's life, but that it was taken out of the biography. I would imagine this would be in respect of Queen Mary, who was still living until 1953, and King George V's granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II. So yes, I would have thought respect alone would have prevented that being included in an official biography.

One of George V's biographers, Kenneth Rose, made a statement in 1986 when the notes were released that expressed the view that it was in fact a murder.

But of course, nothing could happen to Dawson because he died in 1945. So, you know, he's in the clear. It is really an extraordinary story. It may seem like just a very small thing just to inject a man who's on his way anyway. But actually, there was no consent. The king didn't agree to it. There was no formal consent given by the family. And if you are going to apply the full weight of law to Dawson, he's a murderer and a regicide.

Was Dawson acting for the benefit of king and country? Why did he take it upon himself to determine the end of the king's life? And what drove his concern with how the news of George's death should be announced? To this day, Dawson's actions still divide opinion. For some, they were the acts of a kind and merciful man, determined that a much-loved king should not endure further suffering.

For others, the opposite is true. For them, Dawson was self-obsessed and autocratic, a doctor who played God and got away with nothing less than an act of murder. Some might feel that this is the most recent case of regicide and the first since Charles I, more than 300 years earlier. King George ruled the waves, but Lord Dawson waved the rules.

I think there was an open secret around the royal household that Dawson had actually committed this act of murder. Because this jingle went around the royal household and it went, "Lord Dawson of Penn, he kills lots of men." So that's why we sing, "God save the king."

He was dying, you know, everybody was clear that the end was near. So it was simply a case of timing and it was about, you know, whether he was going to die in the morning or in the evening. So I think that, you know, although we can perhaps imagine that if it got out, it could have been a sensational story, actually, when you put it in the context

of those hours, it really wasn't. And it was just about really giving the king pain relief, but turning up the volume on that in such a way that meant he would die then.

There's no doubt that Dawson was acting with the best intentions, and I think it should be recorded as mercy, not murder. There was no reason why Dawson would want to have brought about the King's death for any reason other than easing his suffering and trying to facilitate the best kind of transition of power. But actually, beyond that, of course, there was no malicious motive there. It was about mercy, and in that sense, I guess he was doing

perhaps what many, many physicians at that point would have done too. Unexplored catacombs buried beneath the city. A crumbling castle perched on a mountain peak. A top-secret government bunker. A cursed mansion cloaked in legend. I'm Sasha Auerbach. Join me and Tom Ward every Wednesday and Sunday as we reveal the mysteries and histories behind these abandoned places and ask, "Where Did Everyone Go?"

We'll hear from Sascha, who knows the history the best. In fact, there's a very famous book by a chap named Marcus Rediker called The Many-Headed Hydra, and he talks about pirate ships as an experiment in radical democracy. And me, who knows nothing. Aeronautical scientists can't quite explain it. They say, we don't actually know how it gets up there. No, no, no. How it stays up. You're just not good at a science. No? There are explanations? There are explanations. Oh, okay, fine. It's just plain physics.

Brought to you by Like A Shot, makers of Forbidden History. Search for Where Did Everyone Go? on your favorite podcast platform.