George III

• 1. Introduction

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  George III was born on the 4th of June 1738 at Norfolk House in St James's Square, London, two months too early. Nobody expected the baby to live, so a bishop baptised him within hours, on the very day he was born. The infant nobody expected to survive lived for 81 years and 239 days. He wore the crown for 59 years and 96 days. At his death, no British monarch before him had lived or reigned longer. His reign carried Britain through wars on several continents, a lost empire in America, and a long struggle against Napoleon. It also carried him through repeated collapses of his own mind. So how did a shy boy, raised mostly at home, become the king whom Americans put on trial in the Declaration of Independence? Why have historians spent two centuries arguing over whether to blame him, pity him, or praise him? And what was actually the matter with him?

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• 2. A Sheltered Prince

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  At the age of ten, George stood up in a family staging of Joseph Addison's play Cato and spoke lines newly written for the prologue. "What, tho' a boy! It may with truth be said, A boy in England born, in England bred." The historian Romney Sedgwick argued that these lines appear to be the source of "the only historical phrase with which he is associated".

  By the age of eight, family letters show, George could read and write in both English and German. He could also comment on the political events of the day. He grew into a healthy, reserved and shy child. The family moved to Leicester Square, where he and his younger brother Edward, later Duke of York and Albany, were taught together by private tutors. Their lessons ranged from chemistry and physics to astronomy, mathematics, French, Latin, history, music, geography, commerce, agriculture and constitutional law. Dancing, fencing and riding filled the remaining hours. His religious education was wholly Anglican. George became the first British monarch to study science systematically.

  In 1751, his father Frederick, Prince of Wales, died unexpectedly from a lung injury at the age of 44. King George II had disliked Frederick and had paid little attention to his grandchildren. Now the boy became heir apparent and inherited his father's title of Duke of Edinburgh. The King suddenly took an interest and made him Prince of Wales three weeks later.

  In the spring of 1756, as his eighteenth birthday approached, George was offered a grand establishment of his own at St James's Palace. He refused. His mother, now the Dowager Princess of Wales, wanted him kept at home, where she could instil her strict moral values. Her confidant John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, guided the decision, and Bute would one day serve as prime minister.

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• 3. Crown and Household

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  In 1759, George fell for Lady Sarah Lennox, sister of Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond. Lord Bute advised against the match, and the young prince gave up his hopes. "I am born for the happiness or misery of a great nation," he wrote, "and consequently must often act contrary to my passions." He and his mother also resisted the King's attempts to marry him to Princess Sophie Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.

  On the 25th of October 1760, George II died suddenly at the age of 76, and his grandson became king at 22. The search for a bride quickened. After weighing several Protestant German princesses, the Dowager Princess sent Colonel David Graeme to offer Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz her son's hand. Charlotte accepted. Lord Harcourt, the royal Master of the Horse, escorted her from Neustrelitz to London. She arrived on the afternoon of the 8th of September 1761, and the wedding took place that same evening in the Chapel Royal at St James's Palace. The coronation followed a fortnight later, on the 22nd of September, at Westminster Abbey.

  "Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Britain." George added that sentence to his first speech to Parliament, which Lord Hardwicke had drafted. He wanted to distance himself from German forebears who were thought to care more for Hanover than for Britain. He was the first monarch of the House of Hanover to be born in Great Britain and to speak English as his first language. He never visited Hanover.

  George never took a mistress, unlike his father, his grandfather and his sons. By all accounts the marriage was happy until his illness struck. The couple had 15 children, nine sons and six daughters. In 1762, George bought Buckingham House, on the site where Buckingham Palace now stands, as a family retreat. Kew Palace and Windsor Castle were his other homes, while St James's Palace kept its official role. He spent his entire life in southern England. In the 1790s the royal family took holidays at Weymouth, Dorset, helping to make it one of the first seaside resorts in England.

  Parliament paid off debts of more than £3 million over the course of George's reign. When he came to the throne, the Crown lands earned little, so he handed the Crown Estate to Parliamentary control in exchange for an annuity called the civil list. Some accused him of using that money for bribes and gifts to supporters. Historians dispute this, saying such claims "rest on nothing but falsehoods put out by disgruntled opposition".

  George was deeply devout and spent hours in prayer. He was devastated when two of his sons died in infancy, in 1782 and 1783. Yet he set the surviving children a strict regimen, with demanding lessons beginning at seven in the morning and a life of religious observance. He was appalled by the loose morals of his brothers. In 1770, his brother Prince Henry, Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn, was exposed as an adulterer. The next year Henry married a young widow, Anne Horton. The King thought her unsuitable, since she came from a lower social class and German law barred their children from the Hanoverian succession.

  George insisted on a law that essentially forbade members of the royal family from legally marrying without the sovereign's consent. Ministers, including his own, disliked the bill, but it passed as the Royal Marriages Act 1772. Soon afterwards, his brother Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, revealed a secret marriage to Maria, Countess Waldegrave. She was the illegitimate daughter of Sir Edward Walpole and was related to the King's political opponents. Neither wife was ever received at court.

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• 4. Taxes and Tea

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  Under the Peace of Paris in 1763, Canada passed to Britain in its entirety. Britain also gained West Florida. Louisiana was split along the Mississippi River. The eastern half, running back to the Allegheny Mountains, went to Britain, while the western half and the city of New Orleans went to Spain. Britain handed the lucrative sugar islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique back to France. Lord Bute resigned after concluding the peace, and the Whigs under George Grenville returned to power.

  Later that year, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 limited the westward expansion of the American colonies and created an Indian reserve. It aimed to steer settlers north to Nova Scotia and south to Florida, and to protect the British fur trade with the Indians. Most settled farmers shrugged it off, but a vocal minority resented it. Meanwhile the government felt that colonists, who were mostly free of British taxes, should help pay for defence against native uprisings and possible French incursions.

  For the colonists, the main issue was not the size of a tax but who could impose it. There were no American seats in Parliament, and they protested that, like all Englishmen, they had a right to "no taxation without representation". In 1765, Grenville introduced the Stamp Act, a duty on every document in the colonies. Newspapers were printed on stamped paper, so the people hit hardest were the best placed to rouse opinion against the tax.

  George, meanwhile, was exasperated by Grenville's attempts to trim the King's prerogatives. He tried and failed to persuade William Pitt the Elder to become prime minister. After a brief illness that may have foreshadowed his later troubles, he chose Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, and dismissed Grenville. Rockingham, backed by Pitt and the King, repealed the Stamp Act. The repeal pleased Americans so much that statues of both the King and Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, were put up in New York City.

  By 1770 Lord North led the government, and most of the colonial customs duties had been withdrawn. The tea duty stayed. In George's own words it was "one tax to keep up the right to levy taxes". In 1773, colonists boarded the tea ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw the cargo overboard. Even Chatham agreed with North that the destruction was "certainly criminal". With Parliament's clear support, North brought in measures the colonists called the Intolerable Acts. The Port of Boston was shut, and the charter of Massachusetts was changed so that the Crown appointed the upper house of its legislature.

  Professor Peter Thomas judged that George's hopes lay in a political solution and that he always bowed to his cabinet's opinions. Thomas concluded that the evidence from 1763 to 1775 tends to exonerate the King from any real responsibility for the American Revolution.

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• 5. The Lost War

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  In April 1775, British regulars and colonial militiamen fought at the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The Second Continental Congress sent petitions to the Crown, asking for help with Parliament, but the King and Parliament ignored them. George declared the American leaders traitors, and a year of fighting followed. Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense called him "the Royal Brute of Great Britain".

  In July 1776, the colonies declared their independence, listing twenty-seven grievances against the British king and legislature. One charge read: "He has abdicated Government here... He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people." In New York, the gilded equestrian statue of the King was pulled down. The British captured New York that year but lost Boston. Their grand plan to invade from Canada and cut off New England collapsed when Lieutenant-General John Burgoyne surrendered after the battles of Saratoga.

  Lord North was not an ideal war leader, yet George gave Parliament a sense of purpose and North kept his cabinet together. Two of his ministers, the Earl of Sandwich at the Admiralty and Lord George Germain at the colonial office, lacked the leadership their posts demanded. The historian George Otto Trevelyan accused the King of being determined "never to acknowledge the independence of the Americans, and to punish their contumacy by the indefinite prolongation of a war which promised to be eternal." Later historians reply that no king of the time would willingly give up so much territory. They add that his conduct was far less ruthless than that of other European monarchs. After Saratoga, both Parliament and the public favoured the war, recruitment ran high, and opponents remained a small minority.

  North asked to hand power to Lord Chatham, whom he thought more capable, but George refused. He offered Chatham a subordinate role in North's administration, which Chatham declined, and Chatham died later that year. In early 1778, Louis XVI of France signed a treaty of alliance with the United States, and Charles III of Spain joined France in limited fashion in 1779. In the Dutch Republic, one faction helped the Americans and another helped Britain. Lord Gower and Lord Weymouth resigned from the government. North asked again to resign, but stayed on at the King's insistence.

  In the summer of 1779, a combined French and Spanish fleet threatened to carry 31,000 French troops across the English Channel. George called it the "most serious crisis the nation ever knew". In August, 66 warships entered the Channel, but sickness, hunger and adverse winds forced the armada to turn back.

  Late that year, George urged sending more ships and troops across the Atlantic to the West Indies. "We must risk something, otherwise we will only vegetate in this war. I own I wish either with spirit to get through it, or with a crash be ruined." In January 1780, 7,000 troops under General Sir John Vaughan sailed. Opposition to the costly war kept growing, and in June 1780 it helped feed the Gordon riots in London. Even so, Loyalists could still hope for victory as late as the siege of Charleston in 1780. British troops defeated the Continental forces at the Battle of Camden and the Battle of Guilford Court House.

  Late in 1781, news of Lord Cornwallis's surrender at the siege of Yorktown reached London. North's support in Parliament drained away, and he resigned the following year. George drafted an abdication notice, but it was never delivered. He authorised peace talks, and Britain formally recognised American independence in the Treaties of Paris of 1782 and 1783. In early 1783, he privately conceded, "America is lost!" He reflected that the northern colonies had become Britain's "successful rivals" in commercial trade and fishing.

  Up to 70,000 Loyalists fled to Canada, the Caribbean or England after patriots looted and destroyed their homes and businesses. Others left with them for a different reason. On the 7th of November 1775, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, the last Royal Governor of Virginia, offered freedom to the slaves of rebel masters who enlisted against the rebellion. George had appointed him in July 1771. On the 30th of June 1779, General Henry Clinton widened the offer in his Philipsburg Proclamation, forbidding the recapture and resale of slaves who fled their rebel masters. Roughly 20,000 freed slaves joined the British. In 1783, 3,000 former slaves and their families, carrying British certificates of freedom, settled in Nova Scotia.

  John Adams arrived as American minister to London in 1785. By then George had accepted the new relationship, and he told Adams: "I was the last to consent to the separation; but the separation having been made and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power."

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• 6. Ministers and Invasion

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  In 1783, the Fox-North Coalition introduced the India Bill, which would have moved the government of India from the East India Company to commissioners in Parliament. The Whig Rockingham had briefly returned as prime minister in 1782 but died within months. The King then chose the Earl of Shelburne. Charles James Fox refused to serve under him and demanded the Duke of Portland instead. The Commons forced Shelburne out, and Portland became prime minister, with Fox and Lord North as foreign and home secretaries. George disliked Fox intensely, thinking him unprincipled and a bad influence on the Prince of Wales. The King actually favoured tighter control of the East India Company. But the proposed commissioners were all Fox's allies.

  Once the Commons passed the bill, George authorised Lord Temple to tell the Lords that he would count any peer who voted for it as his enemy. The Lords rejected it. Three days later, the King dismissed the Portland ministry and appointed William Pitt the Younger, with Temple as secretary of state. On the 17th of December 1783, the Commons voted to condemn the monarch's influence on parliamentary voting as a "high crime", and Temple was forced to resign. His departure weakened the government, which lost its majority three months later. Parliament was dissolved, and the election gave Pitt a firm mandate.

  Pitt's appointment was a great victory for George. It showed that a king could pick prime ministers according to his own reading of the public mood, without bowing to the Commons majority. George created new peers at an unprecedented rate to build Pitt's strength in the Lords. The British people admired him for his piety and for staying faithful to his wife. His humane treatment of two insane attackers, Margaret Nicholson in 1786 and John Frith in 1790, added to his standing.

  On the 15th of May 1800, James Hadfield tried to shoot the King at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. The attempt came from the apocalyptic delusions of Hadfield and Bannister Truelock rather than from politics. George seemed so unruffled that he fell asleep in the interval.

  The French Revolution of 1789 alarmed many British landowners. When France declared war on Britain in 1793, George allowed Pitt to raise taxes, raise armies and suspend habeas corpus. Pitt prosecuted British radicals for treason in 1794. In October 1795, crowds attacked the King's carriage on his way to open Parliament, demanding peace and cheaper bread. A month later Parliament passed the Treason and Seditious Meetings Acts. The First Coalition against France broke up in 1795 when Prussia and Spain made separate peace. The Second Coalition, including Austria, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, was beaten in 1800. Britain alone was left to face Napoleon Bonaparte, the First Consul of the French Republic.

  The Act of Union, passed by the British and Irish parliaments in 1800, took effect on the 1st of January 1801. It joined the two kingdoms into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. George used the moment to drop the title "King of France", which English and British sovereigns had claimed since Edward III. Someone suggested he become "Emperor of the British Isles", but he refused.

  Pitt also planned to lift certain legal disabilities from Roman Catholics. George argued that emancipation would break his coronation oath to maintain Protestantism. Facing opposition from both the King and the public, Pitt threatened to resign, and the King suffered a relapse that he blamed on worry over the Catholic question. On the 14th of March 1801, the Speaker of the Commons, Henry Addington, formally replaced Pitt. Addington opposed emancipation, introduced annual accounts, abolished income tax and began disarmament. He made peace with France in October 1801 and signed the Treaty of Amiens in 1802.

  George never thought the peace was real, calling it an "experiment". War resumed in 1803, and an invasion by Napoleon seemed close. Volunteers poured forward to defend England. On the 26th and the 28th of October 1803, George reviewed 27,000 of them in Hyde Park, watched by an estimated 500,000 spectators each day. The Times reported: "The enthusiasm of the multitude was beyond all expression." A courtier noted that the King's beds were ready and that he could move at half an hour's warning. George wrote to his friend Bishop Hurd that, if Bonaparte's troops landed, he would "certainly put myself at the head of mine, and my other armed subjects, to repel them." Admiral Lord Nelson's victory at the Battle of Trafalgar ended the invasion threat.

  In 1804, after another bout of illness, George saw Addington resign and Pitt return. Pitt wanted Fox in his ministry, but the King refused. Lord Grenville, seeing an injustice to Fox, would not join either. Pitt's Third Coalition, with Austria, Russia and Sweden, collapsed in 1805, as the first two had. The setbacks wore on Pitt's health, and he died in 1806. Grenville became prime minister of the "Ministry of All the Talents", which included Fox. Fox died in September 1806, and relations between the King and the ministry turned openly hostile.

  On the 25th of March 1807, George signed An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which banned the transatlantic slave trade in the British Empire. Grenville had pushed it through both houses of Parliament by large majorities. The historian Andrew Roberts says that "George never bought or sold a slave in his life. He never invested in any of the companies that did such a thing. He signed legislation to abolish slavery." Roberts adds that George wrote a document in the 1750s attacking every argument for slavery. Yet the King and his son the Duke of Clarence also backed the London Society of West India Planters and Merchants in delaying abolition for almost 20 years. Between 1791 and 1800 alone, almost 400,000 Africans were shipped to the Americas on 1,340 slaving voyages from British ports.

  In February 1807, the same ministry proposed that Roman Catholics be allowed to serve in all ranks of the armed forces. George told them to drop the measure and to promise never to bring it back. They agreed to drop the current bill but would not bind themselves for the future, so he dismissed them. The Duke of Portland became nominal prime minister, with real power held by Spencer Perceval, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. A general election gave them a strong majority. George III made no further major political decisions in his reign.

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• 7. The Royal Illness

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  In the summer of 1788, George went to Cheltenham Spa to recover at the end of the parliamentary session. In August he and the Queen travelled with their daughters the Princess Royal and Princesses Augusta and Elizabeth. They visited the Bishop of Worcester at Hartlebury Castle and Viscount Mount Edgcumbe at Cotehele in Cornwall. It was the furthest he had ever been from London, and his condition worsened.

  In November 1788, he became seriously deranged. He sometimes talked for many hours without pause, until he foamed at the mouth and his voice turned hoarse. He repeated himself often and wrote single sentences of more than 400 words. His vocabulary grew "more complex, creative and colourful", which may be a symptom of bipolar disorder. Spurious stories spread, including a claim that he had shaken hands with a tree, believing it to be the King of Prussia. His doctors, among them Francis Willis, were largely baffled. By modern standards their treatment was primitive. They forcibly restrained him until he calmed, or applied caustic poultices to draw out "evil humours".

  In the reconvened Parliament, Fox and Pitt fought over the terms of a regency. Both agreed that the Prince of Wales should act as regent. Fox, to Pitt's alarm, claimed it was the Prince's absolute right to act with full powers. Pitt feared dismissal if that were so, and argued that Parliament must name the regent and limit his authority. In February 1789, the Commons passed a Regency Bill authorising the Prince of Wales to act. Before the Lords could pass it, George recovered. He suffered brief relapses in 1801 and 1804, and permanent illness from 1810 onward.

  Until the mid-20th century, the King's illness was generally taken to be psychological. In 1966, Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter proposed a physical cause, the blood disease porphyria. The idea won wide scholarly acceptance despite some contemporary opposition. A study of his hair published in 2005 found high levels of arsenic, which can cause metabolic blood disorders and so might have triggered porphyria. Nobody knows where the arsenic came from, though medicines or cosmetics are possible. Alan Bennett's play The Madness of George III, and the film that followed, fixed the porphyria theory in the public mind. From 2010, the theory has been increasingly challenged, and the 1966 study criticised. Recent scholarship discounts porphyria and holds that the illness was psychiatric, most probably bipolar disorder.

  In late 1810, at the height of his popularity, the King was nearly blind with cataracts and in pain from rheumatism. He relapsed into mental disorder and became dangerously ill. He blamed the relapse on stress over the death of his youngest and favourite daughter, Princess Amelia. Her nurse reported that "the scenes of distress and crying every day... were melancholy beyond description." George accepted the Regency Act 1811, and the Prince of Wales ruled as regent for the rest of his father's life. Hopes of recovery rose in May 1811, but by the end of the year George had become permanently insane. He lived in seclusion at Windsor Castle until his death.

  Spencer Perceval was assassinated in 1812 and replaced by Lord Liverpool, who oversaw British victory in the Napoleonic Wars. The Congress of Vienna then brought Hanover significant territorial gains and raised it from an electorate to a kingdom. George, by then suffering from dementia and growing blind and increasingly deaf, could not grasp that he was declared King of Hanover in 1814. He could not grasp that his wife had died in 1818. At Christmas 1819 he spoke nonsense for 58 hours, and in his last weeks he could no longer walk.

  George died of pneumonia at Windsor Castle at 8:38 pm on the 29th of January 1820. His fourth son, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, had died six days earlier. His favourite son, Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, was at the bedside. The King lay in state for two days, and his funeral and burial took place on the 16th of February in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle.

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• 8. Farmer George

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  Satirists nicknamed him "Farmer George", at first to mock a king more interested in mundane matters than in politics. Later the label turned flattering, portraying a man of the people whose homely thrift contrasted with his son's grandiosity. Under George III, the British Agricultural Revolution reached its peak. Rural population growth was unprecedented, and it supplied much of the workforce for the Industrial Revolution then under way.

  His collection of mathematical and scientific instruments now belongs to King's College London, though it has been on long-term loan to the Science Museum, London, since 1927. He had the King's Observatory built at Richmond-upon-Thames to watch the 1769 transit of Venus. When William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, he first named it Georgium Sidus, or George's Star, after the King. George later paid for the construction and upkeep of Herschel's 1785 telescope, which at 40 feet was the biggest ever built.

  George gave the Royal Academy of Arts large grants from his private funds, and he may have given more than half of his personal income to charity. His most notable art purchases were Johannes Vermeer's Lady at the Virginals and a set of Canalettos. He is best remembered, though, as a collector of books. The King's Library was open to scholars and became the foundation of a new national library.

  George once hoped that "the tongue of malice may not paint my intentions in those colours she admires, nor the sycophant extoll me beyond what I deserve". The Declaration of Independence accused him of "repeated injuries and usurpations" meant to establish an "absolute Tyranny", and its wording has shaped the American view of him as a tyrant. Accounts of his life fall into two camps. One reflects the late reign, when he stood as a revered symbol of resistance to French ideas and French power. The other draws on the bitter party strife of the first two decades and echoes the opposition.

  British historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Trevelyan and Erskine May, built on the second view and wrote hostile interpretations. In the mid-twentieth century, Lewis Namier, who thought George "much maligned", began a re-evaluation. Later scholars such as Butterfield, Pares, and Macalpine and Hunter tended to treat him sympathetically, as a victim of circumstance and illness. Modern scholars note that in fighting the colonists, George believed he was defending an elected Parliament's right to levy taxes, not enlarging his own powers. During his long reign, the monarchy kept losing political power while growing into the embodiment of national morality.

  His sons George IV and William IV reigned in turn, and both died without surviving legitimate children. The throne passed to Victoria, the only legitimate child of George's fourth son, Prince Edward.

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