BRITISH historian Andrew Roberts has taken on the monumental task of rehabilitating the reputation of the boogieman of the American Founding Fathers – King George III.
The acclaimed author paints a revisionist portrait of “America’s last king” in his new book, George III: Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch, and is currently touring the United States where he will, no doubt, be facing some difficult questions.
Ever since the Declaration of Independence, George has occupied a central point in the American founding story – as the tyrannical embodiment of an outdated political order. One that placed arbitrary privilege above the universal human desire for equality, reason, and justice.
At the risk of breaking up the cosy tea party – no pun intended – of American historical consensus, Roberts argues that this view is not borne out by the facts.
Since gaining access to over 100,000 pages of documents – opened up by George’s descendant, Queen Elizabeth II in 2015 – the award-winning historian has pieced together a very different picture of the misunderstood monarch.
Far from being a reactionary despot, George ruled the 13 American colonies with a relatively light touch, affording their citizens greater levels of liberty than those in comparable European states, Roberts argues.
His progressive instincts were on display from his youth in the late 1750s when, influenced by Enlightenment thinkers like Charles de Montesquieu, George penned an impassioned polemic against slavery.
The dubious justifications for the European enslavement of Africans should, the king-in-waiting wrote, be “sufficient to make us hold such practice in execration”.
His broad-mindedness extended beyond the realm of words, according to Roberts, who makes a compelling case for George’s liberal credentials.
Writing in the Smithsonian Magazine, Roberts said: “George never owned slaves himself, and he gave his assent to the legislation that abolished the slave trade in England in 1807.
“By contrast, no fewer than 41 of the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence were slave owners.”
This fact renders the description of the British king in the Declaration of Independence – as “a Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people” – somewhat ironic.
In addition to being the king that ‘lost America’, George is also remembered by the, if anything, less desirable epithet – ‘the mad king’.
Roberts wades in here with some revisionism that’s relevant to today’s world, where the de-stigmatization of mental health is championed by almost all organizations and public figures one cares to name.
While Roberts initially suspected George of suffering from a rare blood disorder called porphyria, he is now convinced – backed up by an emerging medical consensus – that his mental maladies were a manifestation of bipolar disorder.
“He was a helpless spectator to his own mental deterioration”, Roberts writes in a part of the book that deals tenderly with the king’s horrible descent into madness.
“He would weep and then laugh uncontrollably for no reason”, Roberts writes. “He would tie and untie handkerchiefs and nightcaps, and button, unbutton and rebutton waistcoats.”
While one doesn’t usually associate a king with the humiliations visited upon the most downtrodden in society, like open derision and mockery, the confines of a straight-jacket, and even torture, by the end of his life, George was no stranger to them.
It is a powerful reappraisal of the man as well as the king that is bound to stir up controversy in a land that has the very opposite characterization etched so deeply into its origin story.
In what reads like a direct address to his American audience, Roberts writes: “The time has therefore come for objective Americans to take a fresh look at their last king.
"It was right for the colonies to break away from the British Empire in 1776 because they were ready by then to found their own nation-state, but despite the rhetoric of their founding document, they were not escaping tyranny, so much as bravely grasping their sovereign independence from a good-natured, cultured, enlightened and benevolent monarch.”
The book’s British title is George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch, while in America it is called The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III.
