Magic of George III
George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch
By Andrew Roberts Allen Lane £35
In a brief introduction, Andrew Roberts lists those against whom this superb royal biography is pitched.
They range from the 18th-century radical Thomas Paine to Lin-manuel Miranda, the writer of the hit musical Hamilton, via a host of Whig, Whiggish, or otherwise unsympathetic, 19th- and 20th-century historians and biographers.
For all these, George III was either a brutal tyrant or an incompetent buffoon, or a combination of the two.
Roberts counters this long tradition of denigration, propagated by the American Founding Fathers, still thriving anarchically in remote corners of the American press. There are passages of trenchant reasoning, including a point-by-point rebuttal of all but two of the 28 charges against the King in the Declaration of Independence.
It is largely by quoting the King’s own words that he makes his case. Roberts is one of the first biographers – along with Jeremy Black, whom Roberts calls his mentor – to make use of tens of thousands of documents from the Royal Archives and Royal Library published online as part of the Georgian Papers Programme inaugurated in 2015.
There is almost no incident in the life of the longest-reigning monarch before Victoria that cannot be reported from first hand. The King’s own letters and memoranda are usually dated, like email, not merely by the day but to the hour and the minute. There are also those of other members of Royal family, along with the memoirs of those in close service at court such as Fanny Burney and Robert Fulke Greville, and the correspondence and memoirs of his various ministers and other senior officials.
At one point, Roberts protests, ‘If, as Jefferson, alleged, George had held any desire, let alone plan, to establish a dictatorial tyranny over America of the totalitarian kind implied by the language of the Declaration, there would be some evidence of this. And yet, among around 100,000 pages of George’s personal archive, not a single scrap of paper exists to support such a contention.’
Character will out. In politics, George was a passionate, lifelong defender of the constitution and showed no inclination to expand the royal prerogative.
If he supported the war against the rebellion in America, it was to uphold the rights of Parliament to tax those to whom it afforded its protection.
If he touched a nerve at home, it was precisely in disturbing a complacent Whig establishment. He sought to form less oligarchic and more consensual, ‘broad-bottom’ governments with Tory ministers. Thereby he transformed a political landscape based on the divisions created by the Glorious Revolution. Roberts shows that it was under George III, and in no small part owing to his personal influence, that the modern constitutional monarchy and cabinet government came fully into being.
On a domestic scale, too, George set the pattern even more than Victoria. The very idea of the more modest and workaday Royal Family, as opposed to a full-scale court, was his. He was a keen promoter of public pageantry. George commissioned the hugely expensive and uncomfortable Gold State Coach. He backed proper formality at levees. And he was the first working Royal engaged in a busy round of patronage, serving interests that ranged from astronomy to pig-farming.
This new royal ethos did not suit everyone. George was naturally hardworking and uxorious – Roberts describes him as enjoying the company of bishops more than of statesmen.
But the Prince of Wales, the dissolute ‘Prinny’, the future George IV, found it hard going. At one point, the prince’s personal debts were equal to one quarter of the kingdom’s annual non-military expenditure. Roberts calls him ‘a spendthrift of sociopathic proportions’.
Of George III’S madness, famed in film, Roberts also has new things to say. Guided by expert advice, he rejects the diagnosis of porphyria, arguing that the King suffered from a severe form of bipolar disorder.
A book so diligently researched cannot fail to be rich in curious detail and amusing turns of phrase. There are plums on almost every page.
When a farmer, unaware that he was addressing the King, remarked that he had heard he ‘dresses very plain’, George replied, ‘Aye, as plain as you see me now.’