Everything you thought you knew about King George III is wrong

He wasn't a brute or a tyrant

King George III, by Allan Ramsay (UK National Portrait Gallery)

In 2022, the British tabloid Daily Star dramatized the perishability of Prime Minister Liz Truss’s leadership by streaming video of a head of iceberg lettuce to see if it would survive longer than the government. The produce, decorated in the style of Mr. Potato Head and dubbed Lizzy, outlasted the 45-day premiership of Truss.

It wasn’t the first time that Britons had chosen such a food analogy for political leadership.

As historian Andrew Roberts noted, the 24-year-old William Pitt the Younger, selected by King George III to lead a government in December, 1783, was considered by critics to be presiding over a “Mince-Pie administration” that wouldn’t last past Christmas.

The mince pie must have turned moldy. The Pitt government “was still in office seventeen Christmases later,” Roberts wrote in his 2021 book, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III.

Choosing Pitt turned out to be a masterstroke for King George. It positioned Britain to overcome its debt woes and the threats posed by the adventurism of the revolutionary regime in France and later, by Napoleon.

“Although it is sometimes said by historians that the King and Pitt had little in common,” Roberts wrote, “in fact both their minds were attracted to logical, mathematical solutions to practical problems such as those of finance, and both were unwavering patriots. This allowed them to … weather some of the greatest perils that Britain has ever faced, especially in the late 1790s.”

George III, Trump and No Kings Day

Roberts is a conservative historian on a mission. His biography convincingly challenged standard depictions of King George III. He was not the “Royal Brute” of Tom Paine’s Common Sense, nor the “tyrant” of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Nor is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton sticking to the record when it satirically imagines King George saying to his rebellious American colonies:

When you're gone, I'll go mad
So don't throw away this thing we had
'Cause when push comes to shove
I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love

Americans are taught in school to think of George III as the exemplar of absolute monarchy. To many, the very word “king” conjures up the image of an ogre who ruled Britain from 1760 to 1820. In Jefferson’s memorable line in the Declaration, George’s character was “marked by every act which may define a Tyrant” and therefore, “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” That turns out to be as deeply unfair as it was deeply influential.

It’s telling that, in a nation formed by its separation from a monarchy, next weekend’s protests against President Donald Trump are proceeding under the banner of “No Kings Day.”

Trump congratulated himself with a social media post concluding “LONG LIVE THE KING,” in February when he announced his effort, which is so far unsuccessful, to kill a traffic-control tolling system in New York City.

The No Kings protests coincide with Trump’s long-sought military parade through the streets of Washington Saturday, June 14, the president’s 79th birthday and the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army.

This week he took advantage of street protests against ICE in Los Angeles to federalize troops of the California National Guard and to deploy U.S. Marines to the area. Critics say that move, coming on top of an extraordinary series of executive orders and “emergencies” since taking office January 20, reveal a president who is grabbing for more and more power.

Peaceful revolution

Choosing ministers was one of the few major powers possessed by King George III. He was subject to constitutional guardrails, unlike his counterpart across the English Channel, Louis XVI. The French king’s absolute monarchy was overthrown, and he and his queen Marie Antoinette were guillotined in 1793.

Britain had been a limited monarchy since 1688. In that year, the Catholic King James II was deposed by Protestant rulers Prince William of Orange and his wife Mary, the ousted king’s daughter.

Parliament drafted, and the monarchs accepted, a Declaration of Rights, which became England’s Bill of Rights. Just a few brief passages from the document show its kinship with the Declaration of Independence that followed from the American colonies in 1776:

Whereas the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom;

By assuming and exercising a power of dispensing with and suspending of laws and the execution of laws without consent of Parliament;

It made clear that kings couldn’t suspend laws passed by Parliament.

“The rights and liberties asserted and claimed in the said declaration are the true, ancient and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom, and so shall be esteemed, allowed, adjudged, deemed and taken to be…”

Even if he wanted to be, and there is no indication he did, George III couldn’t have been a tyrant, given the limits on the crown post-1688. But he did turn out to be the “last king of America” as a result of the ineptitude and short-sightedness of his ministers, and partly due to the king’s own failure to truly understand the thriving colonies he possessed across the Atlantic.

A challenging beginning

George was the eldest son of the eldest son of King George II.

His father, Frederick, the Prince of Wales, made sure George was trained to eventually succeed to the throne. He studied the English system of government and the values of the enlightenment. It made a deep impression. “There was nothing that the young George wanted more for his people than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” Roberts wrote.

George’s tutoring included physics and chemistry, making him the first British monarch schooled in science, according to Roberts. And he developed a lifelong interest in music, theater, books and art. He would later found the Royal Academy of Arts.

But George was born into a toxic family. “Personality clashes, oppositional politics and vicious rows over money all combined to ensure that George grew up in an atmosphere overshadowed by his grandfather's hatred of his father, a loathing that was fully reciprocated,” Roberts observed. When Prince Frederick died suddenly while still a young man, King George II let the prince’s body sit in the house for three days.

He “disliked George, boxed his ears and allowed the stench of his beloved father's decomposing corpse to pervade his living quarters.” But it was young George, age 22, who assumed the throne when his grandfather died and who got the chance to apply his schooling in government to real life.

George III, by Sir William Beechey (U.K. National Portrait Gallery)

George’s arranged marriage to Princess Sophie Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz grew into a true love match. They had 15 children.

The eldest, Prince George, caused endless headaches for his family by piling up a mountain of personal debt and consorting with his father’s political foes. By his late teens, he admitted, he had become “rather too fond of women and wine.” George III wrote to his son, just after his 18th birthday, “‘Your love of dissipation, has for some months been with enough ill nature trumpeted in the public papers, and there are those ready to wound me in the severest place by ripping up every error they may be able to find in you.’

Losing a war

When George III succeeded his grandfather in 1760, his American subjects at first expressed enthusiasm. Militiamen in Boston fired their guns in his honor.

As Roberts noted:

“The exertions Britain was making in blood and treasure to protect her American imperial brethren from incursions over the previous six years of what was then known as the French and Indian War were greatly appreciated. 'I have been here about sixteen years,' a Bostonian noted, 'and I don't know of one single man but would risk his life and property to serve King George the Third.’”

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, there was little animosity expressed toward the king. But while the actions of Parliament were really the target of colonists’ ire, George came to personify the evils of imperial rule, in the Declaration of Independence and for centuries afterward.

Seeds of division

American colonists were richer, and their population was growing faster, than their brethren in Britain. They saw themselves as self-governing and bitterly resented long-distance rule from Westminster.

While the British reasonably thought colonists should help pay for the military forces that guarded their safety, they repeatedly imposed taxes from afar instead of consulting the governments of the colonies to find a mutually agreeable solution. Parliament would vote a tax on the colonies, and if necessary, eventually repeal it to quell unrest overseas. With each such episode, anger against London mounted.

In the Declaration of Independence, Parliament is not named. Instead the king was accused of 28 offenses against the rights of the colonists. Roberts subjects each of these to a close examination, and concludes that only two were justified — that taxes had been imposed without the colonists’ consent and that Britain’s legislature had been “invested with power to legislate for us.”

“Yet those two were so important that they went to the heart of the issue, and justified the whole rebellion on their own,” Roberts concluded. “The other twenty-six were a mixture of political propaganda, hypocrisy, hyperbole and ex post facto rationalization, tacked on to the first two paragraphs of superb prose which will justly live for as long as democracy and self-government still matter in the world.”

Colonists who hoped the king would repudiate Lord Frederick North and the other ministers who enforced the will of Parliament were cruelly disappointed. “The American reaction to the dawning realization that the King was not about to overturn the North ministry's policies varied from sorrow and perplexity to indignation and resentment,” Roberts observed.

George had known North since boyhood, and he refused his old friend’s repeated requests to resign as prime minister, even though they both must have suspected North had no business presiding over a wartime government.

North’s prime ministership survived a series of strategic and tactical disasters. Not least was the British Army’s failure to coordinate its forces when General “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne quartered his troops in Saratoga for an eventual march on Albany, in an effort to cut off New England from the rest of the colonies.

General William Howe insisted on using his forces to make a vainglorious conquest of Philadelphia, a prize he had to abandon only months later, rather than to help prepare the ground for the assault on Albany. Burgoyne’s army of 5,700 troops was forced to surrender at Saratoga.

When Britain did score battlefield victories, George predicted the colonists’ desire for independence would wane. It never did.

Roberts argued that defeating the Americans “would have required total war at home, with mass conscription on the Continental model and vastly increased taxation, as well as a scorched-earth policy in America. And it is not clear that even those tactics would have been enough,” he observed. After France and Spain entered the war on behalf of the United States, Britain feared losing its lucrative colonies in the West Indies, and chose to move some troops from America to the Caribbean.

The loss of the American colonies was a bitter pill for King George III but he accepted it. After Britain and the United States agreed to peace terms, the new nation sent John Adams to London as its ambassador. Writing from a hotel in Westminster on June 2, 1785, Adams told John Jay that he and the king had exchanged respectful words. Adams said to the monarch that he hoped the friendly ties between the former colonies and Britain could be restored.

“The King listened to every Word I Said: with dignity, it is true, but with an apparent Emotion,” Adams wrote to Jay. “Whether it was the Nature of the Interview, or whether it was my visible Agitation for I felt more than I did or could express, that touch’d him, I cannot Say, but he was much affected, and answered me with more tremor, than I had Spoken with…”

According to Adams, George said, “I not only receive with Pleasure, the Assurances of the friendly Dispositions of the United States, but that I am very glad the Choice has fallen upon you to be their Minister.”

Royal prerogative

British General John Burgoyne surrenders at Saratoga, a key moment in the Revolutionary War. (By John Trumbull)

King George had more control over the choice of ministers than the modern-day monarchs of the U.K. do, and for a time, ministers reported directly to him rather than through the prime minister, as is the current practice.

But he frequently had to accept ministers he personally opposed and policies that galled him. Still, he never vetoed a bill passed by Parliament. (The last time a British monarch refused royal assent to a bill was in 1708.)

George was also subject to a lively, often hostile and mostly free press; he was attacked by Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke and Lord Byron, among many others, Roberts pointed out.

The criticism ultimately didn’t dent George III’s popularity. So when the king periodically experienced bouts of mental illness, the public reaction was widespread sympathy.

“'The look of his eyes, the tone of his voice, every gesture and his whole deportment represented a person in a most furious passion of anger, Sir George Baker noted on 22 October 1788, and he informed William Pitt of the King's 'agitation of spirits nearly bordering on delirium'.”

“Part of the horror of the situation was that the King knew that he was not behaving normally, and yet could not prevent it; from the very outset he was a confused and helpless spectator at his own catastrophic degeneration.”

At first he was treated by doctors who had no experience in dealing with mental illness and instead tried sedatives, scarification, blistering, bloodletting and drugs to provoke vomiting.

The Cabinet eventually consulted a doctor who actually had treated the mentally ill. Rev. Francis Willis had run an asylum and brought along his three medically-trained sons to help treat George.

Willis “used advanced methods to deal with the King's acute bipolar disorder, which were far more humane than the near-tortures imposed by the traditional doctors, and which ultimately worked. Yet when his patients, including the King, got violently out of control, he did employ gags and the 'strait-waistcoat' (that is, straitjacket), where today tranquillizing drugs would be used,” Roberts wrote.

The progress of the king’s illness was covered daily by the press, and there was a national expression of relief when he appeared to be cured in 1789. A service of Thanksgiving was held at St. Paul’s Cathedral. The king himself selected the lesson for the service, from Isaiah 12 (O Lord, I will praise thee: though thou wast angry with me, thine anger is turned away, and thou comfortedst me.)

“Beilby Porteus, the Bishop of London, preached the sermon, observing that the King represented 'everything that is dear and valuable to us, as men, as Britons, and as Christians'.”

The contrast between the British and French attitudes toward monarchy was striking. A prominent Whig politician, Charles James Fox, “was to be disappointed by the lack of echo in Britain for what was taking place in Paris,” wrote Roberts. “The more the French insulted their monarch, the more the British revered theirs, almost as an anti-Gallic reaction; and just as Britain celebrated her King being saved from lunacy, so France underwent a revolution which led to the execution of her own king and shortly afterwards to the collective tragedy known as the Terror which took the lives of 50,000 innocent people.”

Final illness

In 1809, Britain celebrated the 50^th anniversary of George’s reign. But later that year, facing the prospect of his favorite daughter’s imminent death from tuberculosis, the king faltered. “On Wednesday 24 October, the day before his fiftieth year on the throne was completed,” Roberts wrote, “the King started to feel symptoms of stress and agitation, brought on by catching a cold. Before this final attack he had only been mentally afflicted for a total of about twelve months, but now he was never to be sane again.”

George lived another decade, with his much less popular son serving as the prince regent until the king’s death in 1820. He then ascended to the throne as King George IV.

While George III was deeply mourned, his son was regarded much less highly. “There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king,” wrote the Times of London, at his death in 1830.

King Charles on King George

King Charles gives speech from the throne to open Canada’s parliament in May, 2025 (Canada Prime Minister’s office)

The current occupant of the British throne, King Charles, agrees with the argument made by Lord Roberts that history has been unkind to George III.

“For many years I’ve been fascinated by my ancestor,” the then-prince said in a 2004 BBC documentary. “George III led Britain through 60 years of enormous social upheaval, industrial revolution and terrible hardships inflicted by war with Napoleon. Yet history remembers him above all as the ‘mad king’ or the king who lost America. This is a travesty…”

“For me, one of the greatest tragedies of George III’s reign is that he never visited the American colonies. If a royal tour could have been a conceivable undertaking in the 18th century, perhaps the leaders of the colonies might have understood the mother country better. It’s possible that his energetic, down-to-earth presence might have changed their minds.”

Maybe that thought occurred to King Charles when he accepted an invitation to visit Canada and formally open its Parliament last month.

Losing the 13 colonies was bad enough; if Canada became the 51^st state, as Trump has proposed, the U.K.’s monarchy might go into a permanent funk.

The art of the emergency