The Trials of the King of Hampshire

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 fami