America’s Last King: The Story of King George III

And we returned to our American stories. And up next, a story from British historian Andrew Roberts, who’s written the book Churchill: Walking with Destiny and also, for this feature story, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of King George the Third. Today, Andrew shares with us that story and the misconceptions about the last English ruler of this country. Take it away, Andrew.

The thing that Americans assume about King George the Third was that he was a tyrant. And we know that because he was mentioned as being unfit to be the ruler of a free people in the Declaration of Independence. The Common Sense pamphlets that was written by Tom Paine describes him as:

“The royal brute of Britain.”

And of course, we also know that he was an absurd, sort of camp, but sinister and sadistic figure from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton: The American Musical. This is none of this is right; none of this is true. He was not a tyrant.

He was, in fact, a constitutional monarch.

He believed in limited government, a limited monarchy; never believed in the Divine Right of Kings and so on, and never vetoed an Act of Parliament in his life. George the Third was born in June 1738, the son of the Prince of Wales, Prince Frederick.

And his mother, Princess Augusta. It was a very rural society.

About 80 percent of people took their livings from agriculture. It was a very hierarchic society, with a small aristocracy at the top, but an awful lot of working people at the bottom of society. It was an old-fashioned, in a sense, society, because this was before the Industrial Revolution, and it was a country at war for much of its time for the next 100 years, primarily with France. George the Third had a very wide education for the day. He had tutors who taught him much more widely and indeed deeply than the schoolboys of the day, even at the best public schools in Britain. One of the things that he was required to do by his tutor, the Earl of Bute, was to write essays about historical and constitutional issues, and it was a very wide-ranging education, and we can tell from these essays that he had a true belief in limited constitutional monarchy. He was totally opposed to the slave trade and to slavery. It was very remarkable that in the 1750s, when no country in the world had outlawed slavery, and which an awful lot of them were practicing slavery right the way across the globe, that the Prince of Wales should be writing essays really holding the concept of slavery in execration. As he put it, he said that it was the arguments for it was absurd, and this had a major effect on him later on because he didn’t buy or sell a slave in his life; he never invested in the companies that did that, and ultimately he signed the legislation that abolished the slave trade. George the Third was a good-natured, charming, intelligent person. He was very much in love with his wife, which was extremely unusual in the Hanoverian family, which was otherwise an extremely dysfunctional group of kings. And daughter third was a believing, pious, practicing Anglican. He did believe that the Christian faith was something that needed to permeate every aspect of his life, and it did, and he felt that he had a close connection to the Almighty. He much preferred talking to bishops than talking to politicians that he went to church every

Sunday and enjoyed it.

The Seven Years’ War, which started actually here in America before the official outbreak in 1756, continued until 1763 and was fought by Britain and Prussia and the American colonies on one side versus pretty much the whole of the rest of Europe: Russia, Austria, France primarily. So it was a world war; it’s sometimes called by his or into the First World War, because it continued on several continents right the way through to the East Indies, and it was a tremendous victory for the British-led coalition, to the point that in the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the French were flung off the North American continent altogether. The war was tremendously expensive. It doubled the national debt in Britain. George the Third, he had a very conservative, with a small-c, view of the national debt. He thought it was the moral duty of the government to try to pay it down as much as he could, and so in an attempt, two years after the war, to try to get the Americans to help defray the expenses of it, or at least defray the expenses of troops that were stationed in North America. Because every penny of the Stamp Act was going to be spent in North America. They tried to bring in this Act of Parliament, which would raise taxes on printed paper. The Stamp Act was intended to on need to raise a very small amount of money, between 40,000 and 50,000 pounds, which worked out as between the 2.5 million Americans, is only about 2 shillings and sixpence per American per year. But it wasn’t really the level of the Stamp Act so much as the principle of it, because for the last 100 years or so the British had not imposed internal duties. There had been trading dues, of course, and they had been around since the time of Oliver Cromwell, but this was a departure, and one that the Americans were not going to put up with. It was also quite unfortunate that the people who were most hit, most heavily hit by the Stamp Act, namely solicitors, lawyers, journalists, were also and always have been, and indeed are today, the most vocal people in society. America deserved independence. By the 1760s and early 1770s, it was a country of 2.5 million people. It had 7 percent year-on-year growth, a really burgeoning economy. It had more bookshops in Philadelphia than in any other city of the Empire except for London. Also had no external French threat, so the nearest French army was 1,000 miles

away in Haiti.

So it was the right time for America to become self-governing. And at the same time, the British government passed a proclamation saying that the Thirteen Colonies could not expand over the Allegheny Mountains westwards, and so it essentially preserved the whole of the American continent west of the Alleghenies as one gigantic Native American reservation, essentially. And this was something that a lot of the Founding Fathers who had shares in speculative land deals, especially in the Ohio River Valley, were not going to put up with. So these things all coming together created by the mid-to-late 1760s an intellectual movement in America that understood that the best thing for the country was to become a country and a self-governing one. The truly important factor in the creation of the American Revolution was not issues over taxation and representation. Frankly, both the South Carolinian and the Virginian delegates to the Stamp Act Congress were told not to accept representation if it were offered. But it was about sovereignty. It was about who ultimately was in control of the laws that were passed in America, and when American local legislatures could be vetoed by the London Parliament,

that was something that

went to the heart of whether or not America was going to become a sovereign nation.

And you’re listening to Andrew Roberts tell a heck of his story, and it’s true. It was our first civil war. More from Andrew Roberts, the book The Last King of America. Go to Amazon or the usual suspects and buy it. After these messages, and we continue with Our American Stories and our final segment on the story of The Last King of America, King George the Third, here on Our American Stories.

And.

We’re back with Our American Stories and our story on The Last King of America, King George the Third. And by the way, pick up this book on Amazon. You won’t put it down. It’s terrific writing and a real suspense yon in some ways. When we last left off, Andrew Roberts was telling us about what kind of man King George was. He hated slavery, he was a constitutional monarch, and unlike popular perception, he wasn’t a tyrant. But in order for us to gain our independence, he had to be painted as one. Let’s continue with the story.

Although the American Founding Fathers quite rightly wanted to clothe themselves in the man of the Great Revolutions of 1642 against Charles the First and 1688 against James the Second, that required trying to straitjacket George the Third into being a Stuart absolutist monarch, which he absolutely was not, and so instead they needed to try to turn him into a tyrant, which he also was not. We know what tyrants did in the late 18th century, when only had to look at Russia, Austria, or Prussia. What the Spanish were doing in New Orleans, what the French were doing in the Corsica to see what despotism looked like in the 18th century. And George the Third was doing none of that. He never arrested an American editor, closed in an American newspaper. He didn’t station armies in the American cities except for Boston after 1768. He was not a tyrant in the 18th century meaning of the phrase, which was cruel or despotic. The Boston Tea Party was an attempt in December 1773 to keep the price of tea high for those Bostonian merchants, many of whom were also smugglers, to profit from, and the British government wanted to allow the dumping, essentially, of huge amounts of tea from the East India Company, which was going bankrupt at the time. This would have been very good for American consumers of tea because they would pay much less for their tea, but this wasn’t good at all for the Bostonian merchants, who had their men attack the ships that were bringing the tea into the harbor and through 9,000 pounds in weight of tea, tons and tons of tea, into the harbor. So this encouraged the Lord North government back in London to passed various tough acts—called the Intolerable Acts in America, the Coercive Acts in Britain—against the Port of Boston and the Province of Massachusetts Bay. And the King was told that by the royal governors that the other provinces would not stand by Massachusetts. And it was one of many, many appallingly bad pieces of advice that he got from his men on the ground.

It was always disastrous.

When the royal governors and other important peoples, just like General Sir Thomas Gage, the commander-in-chief of the British Army in America, told the King that the Americans would react meekly to the Coercive Acts, he couldn’t have got it more wrong. In fact, they reacted with fury and also in a unified way. Once the Declaration of Independence was published famously on the Fourth of July, 1776, the reaction across the Thirteen Colonies was immediate, and on the Ninth of July, the King’s statue in the Bowling Green in southern Manhattan was pulled down, melted down to create 44,000 LED bullets for the Continental Army, and right the way across the colonies, his role insignia was taken down and burnt. He was burnt in effigy. The names of various colleges and streets and even cities were changed to get rid of British monarchical nomenclature. So it was a really very powerful and immediate response. The British people split on a number of different lines. On religious lines, the Anglicans being more in favor of the war, the Dissenters against it. On class lines, it tended to be a much more middle-class thing to be in favor of the war; the working classes didn’t much like the idea, and also, actually interestingly, regional lines. Some counties supported it, other counties didn’t. In America, some one-third of the population were Loyalists. They didn’t want the war to break out at all. Quite a lot of them actually raised arms against the Patriot Cause and the Continental Army. So it was an element of civil war as well, which explains the atrocities. In all civil wars, you get much worse atrocities than in normal state

on state-on-state wars.

In order to try to subdue the Thirteen Colonies, the British had to send an army which never exceeded 50,000 men, and for most of the war was between 30,000 and 35,000 men, which was nothing like enough for an enormous country of 1,800 miles from top to toe. It was a force that had to be given one-third of a ton of supplies per man, and so that also was a tremendously difficult logistical problem to get that across the Atlantic, 3,000 miles of the Atlantic, with the Royal Navy, especially when later on in the war these ships were being attacked. And it’s always very dangerous to fight against people who actually used their marksmanship to put food in their children’s mouths, and that was true of an awful lot of Americans. The actual marksmanship was something that the British Army was not prepared for. They were—the American militiaman, minutman, and later Continental Army soldiers—were an awful lot better than the British were expecting them to be. The British had a strategic plan, really the only workable strategic plan of the war from the British side, which was to send Sir William Howe up the Hudson Valley from New York with one force at the same time as Sir John Burgoyne came down from Canada to Albany with another, and they were going to meet and thereby secure the Hudson Valley and cut off the New England Colonies from the rest of the Thirteen Colonies, and that if it had come off, might have won the war. But Sir William Howe veered off eastwards and captured Philadelphia, and that led to Sir John Burgoyne being captured at Saratoga in October 1777. At the time of the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga, the public opinion, which hitherto hadn’t really mattered very much in British politics, suddenly became an extremely important aspect, and it turned against the war. The Radical Whigs in Parliament openly sided with the Americans. They wore blue-and-buff clothes, which was the color of the Continental Army officers, and was a highly difficult moment for the whole of the British political setup. The government essentially was in very great danger of falling, and…

You’re listening to Andrew Roberts tell a heck of his story, and it’s true. It was our first civil war. More from Andrew Roberts, the book The Last King of America. Go to Amazon or the usual suspects and buy it. After these messages, and we continue with Our American Stories and our final segment on the story of The Last King of America, King George the Third. When we last left off, Britain was in crisis as public perception on the war began to turn, and things were about to get worse for Britain. Here again is Andrew Roberts with the rest of the story.

What happened then was that the French got involved in the war in February 1778. The French were always there when they need you. And in 1780, the Spaniards declared war, and in 1780, also the Dutch.

So the British were…

…suddenly fighting a world war against these three major European powers, which turned the whole of the American War of Independence into a colonial backwater.

Whilst we fought for our very existence.

There was one point in 1779, when the Franco-Spanish fleet with 30,000 men was about to land in Britain and invade Britain. So instead of having 50,000 men in America, we had to drop that down to 35,000 and just stay in the Eastern Seaboard cities that we’d already held by that stage. We were to capture Charleston in 1780, which in many ways was the greatest British victory of the war, but it didn’t change the overall balance of forces because the war was being fought in Gibraltar and in the East Indies and the West Indies, Africa, and so on. There were any number of reasons why the American War of Independence was lost by the British. Some military historians, including me, in fact, think that it couldn’t have ever been won after the escape of George Washington from Manhattan, if the Battle of Bunker Hill hadn’t been such an extremely expensive…

Pyrrhic victory for the British.

If Valley Forge had gone differently and there were more desertions, and the sublime, charismatic leadership of George Washington had either not been there or not been so impressive, then there was a chance of that rebellion being being smothered in its cradle. However, by the time that he had got through the Valley Forge months, it was pretty much, and especially when the French turned the whole thing into a world war, it’s so much more difficult to fight on more than one front. There were also lots of other problems in that the British War Office hated the Admiralty and vice versa. Lots of the generals all hated each other. The generals often hated the admirals and vice versa. I mean, it was quite extraordinary the amount of internal bickering that went on, especially, of course, when it looked like it was going to be a losing war. Once the British were fighting a war not just on two fronts, but on five or six fronts, the torrent was just too strong, and George the Third took a long time to recognize that actually we were going to lose the Thirteen Colonies, that they were going to become independent, and that the sooner the war…