Elizabeth Foyster

A Guardian best history book of 2016 Eccentric, shy aristocrat … or mad, bad and dangerous to know? Neighbour Jane Austen found the 3rd earl of Portsmouth a model gentleman and Lord Byron maintained that, while the man was a fool, he was certainly no madman. Behind closed doors, though, Portsmouth delighted in pinching his servants so that they screamed, asked dairy-maids to bleed him with lancets and was obsessed with attending funerals. After he’d lived this way for years, in 1823 his own family set out to have him declared insane. Still reeling from the madness of King George, society could not tear itself away from what would become the longest, costliest and most controversial insanity trial in British history.

Madness, Secrecy and Betrayal in Georgian England

The Trials of the King of Hampshire

Professor Elizabeth Foyster

Exposing the 'hidden' history of marital violence between the Restoration and the mid-nineteenth century.

An English Family History, 1660-1857

Marital Violence

Helen Berry

2007 assessment of the most important research published in the past three decades on the English family.

Elizabeth Foyster

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