Three miles south of Windsor Fortress, within the western exurbs of London, stands a 25-ton equestrian statue of King George III, solid from previous cannons within the decade after his loss of life in 1820. Dressed as Marcus Aurelius, in toga and laurel crown, he sits astride his charger, regal and oversize, honored if not revered for a reign that lasted nearly 60 years, from the creation of the primary British empire within the Seven Years’ Conflict via the ultimate defeat of Napoleon.
An analogous statue of George as a mounted Roman emperor as soon as stood in New York Metropolis atop a marble plinth on Bowling Inexperienced, on the decrease tip of Manhattan. Commissioned by grateful American colonists following the 1766 repeal of the detested Stamp Act—supposed by Parliament to boost cash from the calmly taxed colonials—the august determine lasted lower than a decade. In July 1776, infected by a public studying of the newly adopted Declaration of Independence, Continental Military troopers and different vandals broke via the iron fence surrounding the statue, lassoed George with ropes, and tugged him to the bottom—“levelled with ye mud,” as a witness reported.
The mob decapitated the King and whacked off his nostril. Musket balls punctured his torso, and looters scraped away the ten ounces of gold leaf that coated rider and horse. The severed head, initially impaled on a spike outdoors a tavern, can be recovered by a British Military officer and shipped to England for example the “Disposition of the Ungrateful individuals.” Rebels carted the headless rider and mount in fragments to Connecticut, the place Patriot girls melted the lead, ladled it into molds, and shortly despatched George Washington’s military 42,088 bullets. “It’s hoped,” an American surgeon wrote in his journal, “that the Emanations of the Leaden George will make … deep impressions within the Our bodies of a few of his crimson Coated and Torie topics.”
George was that sort of king, inspiring each admiration and regicidal contempt. Because the British monarch through the American Revolution, he has, for 2 and a half centuries, symbolized haughty intransigence and been portrayed as a reactionary dolt incapable of greedy the fervor for liberty that animated his American topics. On Broadway, he minces via Hamilton as a foppish, sinister clown, singing to the estranged rebels, “You’ll be again” and including, “I’ll kill your family and friends to remind you of my love.”
In reality, the general public opening by the British Crown of George III’s papers up to now decade reveals him to be a much more advanced, completed, and even estimable determine than the prevailing caricature. He is also ruthless, self-righteous, and so mulish that he threatened abdication until his authorities maintained a tough line in opposition to American independence. The battle with America, which he thought of “essentially the most severe wherein any nation was ever engaged,” was misplaced on his watch, at an estimated price to his kingdom of £128 million, plus tens of 1000’s of British casualties and a discount of the empire on which the solar supposedly by no means set by half 1,000,000 sq. miles. Not lengthy after the British defeat at Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781 all however ended the conflict, George requested “that Posterity might not lay the downfall of this as soon as respectable Empire at my door.” But posterity has certainly blamed him for what his biographer Andrew Roberts referred to as “the colossal catastrophe, the worst in British historical past till the lack of India in 1947.”
As bloodshed in America intensified following the preliminary gunplay at Lexington and Harmony in 1775, George selected as his nation seat Windsor, “a spot I like finest on the earth.” On this redoubt, with its stout stone partitions overlooking the Thames, away from the nattering courtiers and importunate authorities ministers in London, he may play the nation squire along with his rising household. A army band tootled martial airs each night when the King was in residence, and in 1777 he personally designed the so-called Windsor uniform, a tunic of darkish blue with crimson cuffs that George—his nation’s captain-general—wore as a dressing up of self-discipline and responsibility.
He would spend the ultimate 14 years of his life at Windsor. Right here he can be buried, and right here his papers have been deposited within the Royal Archives. Within the 10 years since they have been made broadly accessible via an initiative, accredited by the late Queen Elizabeth II, to catalog and digitize this trove, historians and biographers have climbed the 102 stone steps and 21 wood stairs to the garret of the Spherical Tower, begun by William the Conqueror within the eleventh century. Listed below are the papers, a number of hundred thousand pages in attractive crimson binders. Many are written in George’s tidy, looping hand—he served as his personal secretary, personally drafting most of his correspondence till late in life, when he started to go blind. Anybody thumbing via these pages will get not solely a tactile feeling of being in his presence but additionally a vivid sense of who he was and why he selected to wage conflict in opposition to his personal individuals for eight years throughout 3,000 miles of open ocean within the age of sail.
George had ascended the throne in 1760, on the age of twenty-two, England’s youngest king in additional than two centuries. Not like the 2 German-born Georges who preceded him—the Home of Hanover had been supplied the crown in 1714, when Britain was determined for a Protestant monarch—this George was totally English. “Born and Educated on this nation,” he proclaimed, “I glory within the title of Britain.”
A lonely, diffident prince—“silent, modest, and simply abashed,” as one courtier recorded—he had grown into a sturdy, assured king, with a regal bearing, ruddy cheeks, a excessive brow balanced by a dimpled chin, and what have been described as “extraordinarily wonderful” tooth. One author reported that he thought of it effeminate to have a carpet in his bed room, and he typically took to his horse for a gallop early within the morning whatever the climate. George was habitually average; a biographer describes him as a “good-mutton man” who most well-liked a jug of barley water to wine. Shrewd slightly than sensible, he was not simply duped, and he possessed what one duchess referred to as “an exquisite manner of figuring out what goes ahead.”
His “unforgiving piety,” within the phrase of a up to date, prompted him to withstand political concession and to impute ethical deficiencies to his opponents. He disliked dysfunction and loathed disobedience. “My opinion is shaped on precept, not on occasions,” he acknowledged, “and subsequently just isn’t open to vary.” He noticed himself as John Bull, the commonsensical embodiment of Nice Britain, for which he ought to stay an ethical exemplar—a thankless job, given his conviction that he lived in “the wickedest age that ever was seen.”
A couple of guiding precepts formed his reign. The monarch should shun Roman Catholicism and protect the British structure, enshrined in paperwork such because the Magna Carta and the Invoice of Rights of 1689. His powers have been far broader than these wielded by a British monarch at present. However he couldn’t rule by royal caprice; slightly, he wanted cooperation from his ministers and majorities in each homes of Parliament, restrictions that he embraced as a correct restraint on despotism. Not as soon as would he train his proper to veto a parliamentary invoice, even these he opposed. He believed that maritime energy and colonial coverage ought to promote commerce, the bedrock of nationwide prosperity. “I’m born for the happiness or distress of an amazing nation,” he declared, “and consequently should typically act opposite to my passions.”
Good kingship additionally required that he produce an inheritor, and towards that finish he recruited a partner in Charlotte, a 17-year-old princess from a small German duchy. It was mentioned, unkindly, that George winced the primary time he noticed his homely bride, however they married six hours after assembly, and the joyful union proved fertile: She produced youngsters with regularity, finally to quantity 15, in sharp distinction to George’s French rival, Louis XVI, who consummated his marriage to the Austrian archduchess Marie-Antoinette seven years after they wed.
Charlotte—“the Queen of my coronary heart,” George referred to as her—shared his spiritual zeal in addition to his affection for Handel, nation dances, and the theater. (For his half, he indulged her enthusiasm for canines, jewellery, and snuff.) As an Enlightenment monarch, he promoted each arts and sciences, sponsoring the Royal Academy’s founding, in 1768, and constructing an observatory at Richmond Palace, the place he personally took measurements of the transit of Venus throughout the solar, in 1769, to assist gauge the dimensions of the photo voltaic system.
He performed the flute, piano, harpsichord, and organ; wrote a treatise on crop rotation for Annals of Agriculture underneath the pseudonym “Ralph Robinson”; and copied out a recipe for cough syrup—rosemary, rue, vinegar, and brown sugar, all “boiled in silver.” At all times intrigued by how issues have been made, from buttons and pins to canals and warships, George additionally collected 2,000 clocks, watches, chronometers, barometers, and different units, a few of which he disassembled. In his lifetime he amassed the 65,000 books that might kind the core of the British Library.
Right now the so-called King’s Library is housed in a six-story glass tower that rises via the foyer of the British Library. The cabinets trace on the breadth of George’s pursuits: a 1476 version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—apparently one of many first books printed in England—in addition to a dozen editions of Don Quixote in varied languages, a 1759 treatise by Thomas Barnes titled A New Methodology of Propagating Fruit-Timber, and Flowering-Shrubs, and 200 variations of the Bible, together with a 1455 Gutenberg. “He was an Enlightenment-type collector, in that he wished to gather all the pieces,” Karen Limper-Herz, the top of Printed Heritage Collections, instructed me. “Successfully, he was making an attempt to gather his kingdom.”
That prolonged to his realm in North America, as he tried to make sense of the colonial agitation. The gathering consists of An Account of the European Settlements in America, by Edmund Burke; The Historical past of the British Dominions in North America, which began with their first discovery, by Sebastian Cabot, in 1497, and ended with the conclusion of the Seven Years’ Conflict, in 1763; and 14,461 pamphlets, amongst them a 1776 version of Frequent Sense, wherein the polemicist Thomas Paine, who had just lately emigrated from England to Philadelphia, denounced George as “the Royal Brute of Nice Britain.”
If habitually curious, George remained a homebody, by no means as soon as visiting his dominions in Scotland, Wales, Eire, and even northern England, a lot much less Europe or America. Nonetheless, the broad world appeared to put at his toes. Early in his reign, spoils gained from France and Spain through the Seven Years’ Conflict included Canada, Florida, a number of West Indian sugar islands, and an immense tract between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories,” one joyful Briton reported. London grew to become the middle of the Western world, and Britain now possessed each essentially the most highly effective navy in historical past and a service provider fleet of some 8,000 vessels.
The creation of this primary British empire introduced its personal vexations. Weighted with conflict money owed, the treasury spent half of the federal government’s annual tax income on curiosity funds. It appeared solely honest to the King and his authorities that colonists ought to assist shoulder the burden; a typical American, by Treasury Board calculations, paid not more than sixpence a yr in Crown taxes—one-Fiftieth of the typical Englishman’s fee—whilst Individuals benefited from the eradication of the French and Spanish threats and from the navy’s safety of North American commerce.
But Individuals bridled in any respect makes an attempt by Parliament to extract additional income from them with out the approval of their very own provincial assemblies. For generations, a British coverage of “salutary neglect” had left colonists accustomed to self-sufficient autonomy. Additionally they resented British prohibitions in opposition to making hats, woolens, and different items which may compete with producers within the mom nation. The deployment of British military regiments in America to maintain white colonists from encroaching on Native lands to the west additional aggrieved males resembling George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, who noticed alternative and wealth simply over the horizon. Nearly imperceptibly, a quarrel over taxes and filial responsibility metastasized right into a battle over sovereignty.
Whereas rescinding earlier tax measures, together with the Stamp Act, Parliament, with the King’s settlement, asserted its personal fiscal authority by protecting a small residual tax on tea. Whooping insurrectionists, mentioned to be “dressed within the Indian method,” responded by dumping 45 tons of British tea into Boston Harbor in December 1773. The King’s coronary heart hardened. Spurning pleas for moderation, he denounced “a harmful spirit of resistance” amongst “my deluded topics” in America, whom he likened to froward youngsters. This resistance to Crown authority, with its sulfurous whiff of republicanism, threatened not solely to undermine Parliament’s authority but additionally to convey ethical dysfunction and the collapse of European hegemony within the New World. “Blows should determine,” George wrote of the colonists in November 1774, “whether or not they’re to be topic to this nation or impartial.” He advocated “essentially the most coercive measures.”
The blows started to fall, first at Lexington and Harmony in April 1775, then at Bunker Hill in June. By August, George had declared the colonies—“misled by harmful and ill-designing males”—to be in “open and avowed Revolt.” Anybody abetting the insurgent trigger was deemed a traitor. To his prime minister, Frederick Lord North, he wrote in October 1775, “Each technique of distressing America should meet with my concurrence.”
Some Britons opposed the eventual deployment to America of virtually two-thirds of the British military and far of the Royal Navy. William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, who had orchestrated Britain’s victory within the Seven Years’ Conflict, was incensed. “You can’t conquer America,” he instructed the Home of Lords. “If I have been an American, as I’m an Englishman, whereas a overseas troop was landed in my nation, I might by no means lay down my arms, by no means — by no means — by no means!”
However Parliament yr after yr supported the King’s laborious line.
Sure strategic misconceptions, nevertheless, had seeped into British conflict coverage. The presumption that army firepower would deter the opposite 12 colonies from following Massachusetts into armed riot proved flawed; bloodshed at Lexington and on different battlefields infected rebels from Georgia to New Hampshire. The King and his ministers, inspired by senior British generals and self-serving Loyalist functionaries, additionally insisted {that a} majority of the two million white Individuals remained a minimum of tacitly loyal to the Crown. But that, too, was delusional. Trendy scholarship means that Loyalists constituted maybe 20 p.c of the colonial inhabitants, by no means ample to regulate the levers of energy—the Second Continental Congress and state governments—or to show decisive in fight, regardless of the 1000’s of armed Loyalists who reworked the Revolution right into a civil conflict.
Maybe most wrongheaded was the conviction, embraced as an article of religion by the King all through the conflict, that failure to reassert London’s authority would finally unstitch the empire by encouraging insurrections in Eire, Canada, the Caribbean, and India. Dominoes would topple. Conceding independence to America would plunge Britain into “a state of inferiority,” as George wrote to Lord North, and “into a really low class among the many European states.” He added, “I hope by no means to dwell to see that day.”
Not like most of the English monarchs who preceded him, George lacked army expertise, though he had lengthy thought of the military “to be his personal division,” one adviser reported. He threw himself into the main points of expeditionary warfare: the selection of discipline commanders, using secret codes, the choice about whether or not seagoing colliers needs to be transformed into men-of-war.
Because the combating intensified in America, he reviewed not solely authorities correspondence to and from his generals but additionally intelligence reviews, paymaster directions, and commissary dispatches. He was consulted concerning the cargo of salt and candles throughout the Atlantic and about whether or not an amphibious expedition ought to strike North Carolina. He weighed in on which widows and orphans of redcoats killed in Boston ought to obtain pensions, and whether or not American prisoners should be transported to India, the place British territories have been in need of white settlers. He visited his troops in army camps and drafted detailed lists: of “Ships Constructing and Repairing” and “Oak Timber in Retailer” at varied dockyards; of the commanders of his cavalry models; and of royal ships “in Abnormal”—the reserve fleet—together with the variety of weapons every mounted.
George’s intensive library of army texts and books about America included Institutions of His Majesty’s Land Forces and Garrisons (1778), a quantity certain in crimson morocco, with each British regiment recorded in wispy threads of black ink, together with its dimension, per diem allotments for officers, and different statistics. A Checklist of Your Majesty’s Royal Navy, additionally in crimson morocco, knowledgeable the King throughout greater than 100 pages that he commanded 125 ships of the road—every carrying 60 weapons or extra—plus 270 frigates and lesser craft, right down to sloops, cutters, and hoys. These vessels would collectively be manned by 45,000 sailors in 1777.
Along with a primary version of Paradise Misplaced and a two-volume 1775 treatise titled American Husbandry, the King amassed tens of 1000’s of maps, permitting him to check his realm from an armchair. These included beautiful battle maps of varied British clashes in opposition to the American rebels, in Boston, Brandywine, Germantown, Charleston, and, finally, Yorktown. A very poignant map, annotated in 1783, depicts “the boundary of the brand new republic of the US.” The King’s Library, one scholar wrote, offered “a retreat and even a solace for a monarch of retiring disposition whose lengthy life was punctuated by bitter political acrimony.”
George additionally took the lead in hiring auxiliary troops in Germany, which he insisted could possibly be had “at a less expensive charge, moreover extra expeditiously than if raised at house.” In in search of such mercenaries to bolster his British legions, he dictated the deal factors for pay charges, transportation preparations from Europe to America, and the conflict materiel to be offered. On his orders, the British colonel negotiating with varied German princelings was instructed, “Get as many males as you may,” as a result of “the King is extraordinarily anxious.” Finally some 30,000 “Hessians”—as all German troops have been referred to as, no matter their particular origins—would battle the rebels.
At first these rebels had averted accusing the King of complicity in prosecuting the conflict, preferring the fiction that solely his hard-line ministers and different bellicose Britons have been at fault. That discretion ended with the publication of Paine’s scathing Frequent Sense, which excoriated George and repudiated monarchy basically. Quickly sufficient, his portrait was burned all through the colonies; the royal arms vanished from American avenue indicators and buildings; and he was topic to mock trials, executions, and funerals, a contempt that wounded him personally. The Declaration of Independence listed what Samuel Adams referred to as George’s “Catalogue of Crimes,” a hyperbolic, 16-sentence indictment that charged him with tyranny, turpitude, and unhealthy religion. Down got here that gilded statue on Bowling Inexperienced in New York.
A lot about this conflict baffled George, together with how his reign had grow to be entangled in a squalid brawl within the empire’s most distant marchlands. Crushing the insurgency proved much more vexatious than the King and his males had anticipated. Paine pressed the purpose in an open letter to the British printed in 1777. “In all of the wars which you will have previously been involved in, you had solely armies to deal with,” he wrote. “On this case, you will have each a military and a rustic to fight.”
British officers deftly tailored European fight techniques to American terrain by stressing mobility, prolonged battle strains, and uniforms higher suited to woodland combating. However frictions beset the King’s trigger. Senior commanders feuded with each other and with their political masters at house. Penny-pinching prevented a well timed growth of the Royal Navy and full mobilization of the military early within the conflict. A clumsy British provide system splintered duty for transporting troops and provides throughout the Atlantic among the many Ordnance Board, the Navy Board, the Victualling Board, and the Treasury, relying on whether or not the cargo to be shipped was a gun, a person, a horse, camp equipage, meals, or different conflict requirements.
The King and his males continued to misjudge the American temperament, each within the broad, visionary dedication to a republican future and within the seething resentments that fueled the riot—not least from Britain’s incineration of greater than half a dozen American cities. After Normal Washington’s profitable shock assault on the Hessian garrison at Trenton on Christmas evening 1776, Lord George Germain, who directed the conflict from London because the American secretary, instructed his emissaries he hoped “that the surprising success of the Rebels there is not going to to date elate them as to stop them from seeing the actual horrors of their scenario.”
Months later, the final remnants of an Anglo-German military of 8,000 males, who had invaded New York from Canada, surrendered at Saratoga on the Hudson River—a “most deadly occasion,” within the judgment of Prime Minister North. Unbowed, the King declared the calamity “very severe however not with out treatment.” But quickly the French would come into the conflict in opposition to Britain, to be adopted by the Spanish and finally the Dutch. Britain remained all however friendless, as the dominion had been since 1763, with solely tiny Portugal as a putative ally.
Parliament sought a manner out by renouncing its authority to tax the Individuals and appointing a peace fee empowered to supply different concessions. However granting full independence to the rebels remained nonnegotiable. George refused “to enter into what I look upon because the destruction of the empire.” Lord North, depressing and overmatched as a wartime prime minister, pleaded a dozen occasions to resign, however the King balked at releasing his most trusted courtier. “Recruit your thoughts,” he urged North. To the Earl of Sandwich, he declared, “If others is not going to be lively, I need to drive.”
Drive he did. At all times stalwart within the face of peril, George rallied the nation when an enormous Franco-Spanish invasion fleet appeared off England’s southern coast in August 1779. Quickly sufficient the armada sailed away, beset by illness, poor seamanship, and confusion, with out a single enemy soldier setting foot on English soil or the opposing fleets exchanging salvos. But victory remained out of grasp. Even a British army triumph was unlikely to yield a permanent political answer, given the animosity aroused by years of killing and the prodigious growth of the American colonies, which have been doubling in inhabitants each quarter century, an explosive development unseen in recorded European historical past and 4 occasions England’s charge.
With the give up of one other British military at Yorktown in October 1781, the conflict was all however over, though one other two years can be wanted to barter the peace treaties. The Home of Commons had delivered a surprising rebuke to the King by resolving that “the affect of the Crown has elevated, is growing, and should be diminished.” George contemplated giving up the throne, and in March 1783 drafted an abdication announcement, “a self-indulgent and characteristically self-pitying personal expostulation written to make himself really feel higher,” Roberts, the biographer, would write. George put aside the speech undelivered, to be found in his papers. Because the King later admitted to John Adams, the primary minister to the Court docket of St. James’s from the newly impartial United States of America, “I used to be the final to consent to the Seperation.”
Such obstinacy would outline his legacy for hundreds of years to return. Failing to acknowledge the broad hole that had developed between Britain and the colonies, he couldn’t perceive the primal American yen for autonomy or the grievances accumulating throughout the Atlantic. Maybe solely nice knowledge and a knack for compromise may have averted the violent rupture of 1775, however George possessed neither advantage.
His life nonetheless had nearly 40 years to run after the American Revolution, a span replete with glory—together with Napoleon’s crushing defeat at Waterloo—but additionally abject distress. As a younger king, George had been briefly by a mysterious sickness as soon as regarded as porphyria, a uncommon blood dysfunction that may ravage the nervous system. In October 1788, when he was 50, the illness returned with depth, maybe, one doctor speculated, on account of studying King Lear. Over the course of a number of months, he grew erratic, delirious, and “so ungovernable,” an aide wrote, “that recourse was needed to the strait waistcoat: His legs have been tied, & he was secured down throughout his Breast.” A phalanx of docs additionally used such doubtful remedies as leeches utilized to the temples and blistering of the top and toes. The assaults abruptly ended, however returned with redoubled fury for a number of months in 1804, to once more be handled with the straitjacket.
This “insanity,” because the habits can be labeled in a Twentieth-century stage play and movie, is now believed to have been “mania, a extreme model of what we now label ‘bipolar dysfunction,’ ” in response to Sir Simon Wessely, a former president of the Royal Faculty of Psychiatrists. Maybe triggered by the loss of life of George’s youngest little one, Princess Amelia, in 1810, the manic agitation recurred, this time lasting the rest of his years. With the King incapacitated, his eldest son, George, the Prince of Wales, acted in his stead underneath the Regency Act of 1811.
George quickly descended into abject dementia and now not acknowledged his household. Queen Charlotte noticed him briefly at Windsor for the final time in June 1812, then by no means visited once more. Blind and partially deaf, he grew an extended white beard and performed the harpsichord regardless of being unable to listen to the notes. He died of pneumonia in 1820 at age 81, after 59 years on the throne, however with out ever assembly the granddaughter who had been born just a few months earlier to Prince Edward, his fourth son. That little one, named Victoria, would take the crown in 1837, then rule for greater than six many years and preside over the rise of a second British empire.
As for that equestrian statue of George on Bowling Inexperienced: The whereabouts of the top are unknown—it disappeared shortly after it was shipped to England. All that is still of the rider and horse are just a few fragments, together with the mount’s tail, displayed by museums in New York and Philadelphia, plus just a few unearthed musket balls with the identical chemical signature as the unique lead statue.
Assist for this text was offered by the British Library’s Eccles Institute for the Americas & Oceania Phil Davies Fellowship. It seems within the November 2025 print version with the headline “The Fable of Mad King George.” Once you purchase a e book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.
