Roberts, Andrew. The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. New York: Viking, 2021.
His Majesty, King George III, was a man more sinned against than sinning. Everything bad we have heard against King George needs to be taken with a grain of salt. True, he did suffer from some sort of mental illness for a time. To be sure, he did not always choose the best of advisors, and his opposition to Pitt the Younger is hard to explain, as it did not benefit George in any tangible way. Nonetheless, the criticisms made by Whigs like Walpole and Freemasons and Deists in the colonies were almost certainly wrong. His Majesty was a pious and patriotic man. Although he lost America, he simultaneously checked French and Spanish power (and perhaps, ironically, made parts of America safer for Americans).
This review will praise King George III. He was not perfect, though, and on a number of counts he was wrong. Interestingly enough, none of these overlaps with the criticisms made by Jefferson and Whig historians. George’s son, the Prince of Wales, was a profligate, though never as bad as Amnon and Absolom. And while George opposed slavery, he never made its abolition a public policy. That was done by Wilberforce and Pitt.
His Upbringing
Again, contrary to Horace Walpole (that phrase should be a theme in this review), His Majesty had a disciplined and rigorous education.
His Marriage
Unlike many monarchs then (and politicians today), George was chaste and faithful in his marriage. For nearly sixty years the royal purse did not have to make payments to royal mistresses. Indeed, even years into their marriage, George, returning from a tour and longing to see his wife, upon seeing her carriage approach, “he was so impatient to see the Queen that he opened the chaise and jumped out before any of his attendants could come to his assistance. He seized the Queen, whom he had met at the door, round the waist, and carried her in his arms.’ Roberts concludes: “Alone of the Hanoverians, his marriage was a genuine love-match” (230).
His Person
He was a pious monarch. Upon coming to the throne, he “issued a proclamation ‘for the encouragement of piety and virtue
Among his own people, he was a truly popular monarch. As London was rioting over the actions of the pro-democracy advocate and p0rnographer John Wilkes, George had no qualms about appearing in public, noting, “My people will not hurt me” (229). He was correct. Later on, when a different mob became more serious, threatening to march on Buckingham Palace, George replied, “that he wished they would push their insolence so far; he should then be justified in repelling it, and giving proper orders to the guards’ (by which, presumably, he meant shoot to kill)” (184). He was again correct. Mobs that riot in favor of p0rnographers should be dealt with in such fashion.
Around the French and Indian War
England had to win this war. That might have been the problem. It saddled England with debt, to be sure, but there is nothing strange about that. That is true of every country. It does not even bother modern-day America. To face this debt, George knew he had to cut expenditures and raise taxes. He was going to be unpopular.
The first cut was to the army. Britain now had a smaller army to defend a larger frontier. This puts to rest another line of American propaganda: the British army was not the finest force in the world. It was relatively small and its soldiers untrained.
In terms of taxes, the American colonials paid less than many Britons. Moreover, most of the tax money stayed in America. As taxation went, the colonies had it easy. That is not to say they did not have a good case for independence. They certainly did. For all practical purposes, America was its own country.
Nonetheless, as historians are coming to realize, the rhetoric about “oppression” in the colonies was sheer nonsense. Roberts cites Hans Kohn’s Idea of Nationalism: “Politically the colonists were infinitely freer than any people on the European continent; they were even freer than Englishmen in Great Britain” (cited in Roberts, 108). As Roberts notes, they had a chance to work out the implications of Locke and Milton while Britain’s armies protected them.
The Revolution
There was no injustice in taxing the colonies, yet there was no wisdom in how it was done. The Stamp Act had the unfortunate effect of targeting the merchant and lawyer classes, the very ones who would vocally oppose it. To make matters worse, the projected revenue from the tax would nowhere near cover the burden of the debt.
As to quartering troops, it was George who opposed the clause that allowed for billeting troops in a home. Rather, the colonies were required to build barracks and inns for the troops. The sensational horrors of rude redcoats taking liberties with colonial women were largely stories. Good stories, but still fiction, nonetheless. In any case, the colonies had been quartering troops for a good part of twenty years before they perceived a problem with it.
If George were truly a tyrant, he would have stationed more agents of the Crown in the colonies. The very fact that the colonists could make the case for independence based on decades of practical autonomy belies the claim that George was truly an autocrat. Moreover, if George were truly a tyrant, it stuns belief that he would have allowed the colonies even to set up their own Congress. Moreover, if George were truly a tyrant, would he have allowed Thomas Paine to return to England after the war? Paine, it should be noted, in the pay of the American government, had been planning a French invasion of Britain. The man deserved to be hanged. George ignored him. To echo Mark Antony, “This is hardly the stuff of ambition [tyranny].”
The Olive Branch Petition
Peace was still possible after the war had started. Indeed, some colonial leaders were even willing to submit to the crown, if only under limited circumstances. While it might have seemed wise for George to accept the Olive Branch Petition, to do so would be to go against Parliament. Technically, George was king in Parliament. Going against Parliament would mean legally going against himself. Moreover, such an act would have been actually tyrannical, thus justifying the charges that Jefferson and others brought against George. This makes it abundantly clear that George was anything but a tyrant.
For all of the rhetoric about King George’s “tyranny,” if the colonists wanted to see what European tyranny looked like, they could examine the actual torture and mass slaughter engaged in by Russia, Spain, France, and Austria. Or they could even look at how the colonists tarred and feathered the king’s officials, a blatant violation of Romans 13.
Unfortunately, even the great Edmund Burke was not immune to revolutionary propaganda. His Present Discontents blasted “the personal rule” of the king (209), arguing that he “worked through a cabal or Junto.” Burke supplies no evidence for his claim and George III had the same powers, which he did not exercise, that William III had one hundred years earlier. William, it should be noted, was a model for Burke of good government.
Burke’s fallacious argument notwithstanding, King George firmly exercised but one prerogative: “the rights of the Westminster Parliament over his American colonies” (211). Had he not upheld those rights he would have been truly guilty of breaking the law.
Response to Thomas Paine
Although the p0rnographer John Wilkes was now quiet, George had to deal with, or at least suffer, the incessant ravings of the Deist Thomas Paine. Let us get this over with. Roberts surveys the works of several historians, noting that Paine was “full of rage at the ways the Old World had kept him down” (287). But we shan’t speak of his character or personality, though, unfortunately, the latter seeps through into his writings. At this point I will quote Paine’s words along with commentary by Roberts. That alone will serve as refutation.
Paine: King George was “a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.”
Roberts: “Calling the King sottish was particularly inaccurate in relation to someone who rarely drank alcohol and never to excess–unlike Paine himself” (288).
Paine: “the royal brute of Britain, the royal criminal…a full-blooded Nero.”
Roberts: “He argued that Americans had to choose between independence and slavery, which as one of his modern critics David Pryce-Jones points out was ‘imagining a polarisation that sounded urgent but was factitious, quite false’ since the status quo was of course neither of those things” (288).
Paine wrote for the average reader, not the educated one. And if he did not write well, per se, he wrote effectively.
Response to the Declaration
Thomas Jefferson was a far more formidable opponent than Thomas Paine. Paine was good at using adjectives and superlatives, never at logic and facts. While Jefferson’s use of logic is quite tenuous at times, he was a more serious thinker. The second section of the Declaration, listing a number of charges against George, deserves a point-by-point rebuttal, at least of the more outlandish claims.
Jefferson: “ The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.
Roberts: “These charges were kept deliberately unspecific regarding places and dates, for the obvious reason that most were untrue, since George had never sought to establish any kind of tyranny over America” (295).
Jefferson: He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
Roberts: “This probably refers to the vetoing of colonial laws creating paper money, granting divorces, etc…Flooding the colonies with inflationary paper money would hardly be ‘wholesome and necessary to the public good’” (296). Moreover, the king had the legitimate right to veto laws, just like the American president does today. And America has the same right to the Acts of the Puerto Rico legislature. As Roberts notes, “This is what empires do.”
The second and third charges are rather technical, about which nobody cares. Charges four through six refer to interference with legislatures. They refer to specific actions after the revolutionary movement had begun. As Hutchinson commented, “Thus…the regular use of the prerogative in suppressing a begun revolut is urged as a grievance to justify the revolt’” (quoted in Roberts 297).
Jefferson: refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers…”
Roberts: The long time was “three months” and the danger of invasion came not from without, but from patriot mobs within, one of which burned Hutchison’s home.
Charge seven deals with naturalization of foreigners, which was designed to check smuggling.
Jefferson: “The king had kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of the legislatures.”
Roberts: Aside from Jefferson’s earlier and excised remarks about slavery, “this was perhaps the most hypocritical allegation of those that remained…A standing army on the western border had been the only way of protecting the colonies [, and] the assemblies had actually voted their thanks for what the British Army had done” (298-299).
Charge thirteen is interesting–and confusing. It seems that “George was being criticized by Jefferson for not vetoing bills in America, even though he had not and was not to veto any in his whole reign, just as George I and George II had not” (300). He is being criticized for inaction, hardly the stuff of tyrants.
Charge fourteen dealt with housing troops, “and here Jefferson was on slightly stronger ground.” Practically, though, this had been life for the past twenty years and no one complained until now.
Charge sixteen “attacked the king for cutting off trade with all parts of the world.” What Jefferson neglected to mention was this had been in the books since Oliver Cromwell in 1651.
Charge eighteen complained of non-jury trials. This was technically true in some instances, but it was a fact of life–one which the United States used to combat smuggling until the twentieth century (302).
Charge twenty-four complained of ravaged coasts and burned towns, “a reference to the destruction of Norfolk (which was mainly carried out by Patriots).” The acts of George in response to the uprising are now given as causes for the uprising itself (303).
Even John Adams himself thought much of the Declaration was over the top: “I never believed George to be a tyrant in disposition and nature…I thought the expression too passionate and too much like scolding” (quoted in Roberts 306).
Gordon Riots
Though I loathe everything about John Wilkes, I will credit him on this point: he took an active role in stopping the Gordon Riots. I will leave it at that.
After the Revolution
Britain won a series of key naval battles between the defeat at Yorktown and the signing of the Treaty. This effectively removed French naval power from the West Indies and India, securing the latter under British rule until 1947. George may have lost thirteen colonies, but he gained an entire subcontinent.
Nonetheless, Britain lost the colonies, some of them anyway, and she lost it under George’s watch.
Conclusion
This is historical writing at its finest. Lord Roberts brings all his skills to bear.
A Patriot King 