George III

Today is of course American Independence Day. But who was the head of state the Thirteen Colonies rebelled against?

The almost photorealistic style of the above portrait of the last King of America brings to mind the rather vivid and rationalistic view of the Georgian and Regency eras of British history. Sarada has said that when you look at the trajectory of history, you seem to perceive increasing liberalisation and tolerance along with the gradual easing of oppression and increase in equality. Extending this backwards beyond the Victorian Era, the time of my grandparents, one is left with the impression that there was a time when things were absolutely appalling. There is an element of truth in this of course, but the idea that there is a straight line of progress leading towards the present is often referred to as “The Whig Conception of History”, which I’ve mentioned previously on here. In fact, the Georgian Era was quite like Victorian times with a couple of important exceptions: it was much less puritanical and the Bloody Code was still in place. On the other hand, we’d recently managed to divest ourselves of our Puritans, though that would come back to bite us later. But I’m not going to say it was paradise. It was in fact a bloody nightmare. On the other hand, it was before the Victorians had invented the past, so all the things we tend to assume go back since time immemorial, which incidentally is 5th July 1189, are in fact much newer, so in some ways it’d be hard to recognise the country as it was back then. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1801-1922, and before that the Kingdom of Great Britain, 1707-1801. So that’s one thing which happened during his reign, or possibly rule depending on what else went on.

George III is the third-longest reigning monarch in English history, after the current Queen and Victoria. He was also the third longest-lived monarch of that ilk, dying only four days younger than she. I used to wonder whether this was because he “went mad” and this spared him the stress of running a country, or an empire, but in fact the treatment was probably at least equally stressful and I think it happened quite late in his life (as the Anglo-Saxon has it) anyway. Regarding America, although he did want to hang onto them, the policies which pushed them away were passed by Parliament and weren’t his idea. When I look at English history, I’m left with the rather surprising impression that a lot of it seemed to involve splurging money on wars and then having a problem with lack of money, and the situation with America seems to be fairly typical of this because it apparently cost a lot of money to keep troops over there, we’d had to fight wars with France and Spain there too, plus we were funding the East India Company, so it’s like the British Empire overreached itself and it was costing us a lot of money. This was at a time before income tax too, so the British government ended up introducing extra taxes such as the tea one and the Stamp Act. I always feel like I’m missing something here, because I don’t understand how a government can run out of money. I understand the Gold Standard existed back then, but surely it’s up to the government to invent money rather than just buy and sell stuff? Or they could have slavery, which they had, or whatever, so what’s the issue? Anyway, obviously this was an issue because of the Boston Tea Party and stuff, so I dunno, there you go.

The usual explanation for the madness of King George is porphyria caused by interbreeding. This is where the ring-shaped molecules, porphyrins, destined to become hæm in the hæmoglobin of red blood corpuscles, fail to be completely converted some of the time and build up somewhere, such as in the liver or the skin according to which enzymes aren’t working properly. The skin version has been used as an explanation for lycanthropy and vampirism and the liver version for the madness of George III and also some other historical figures such as Nebuchadnezzar, hence the other pic. In George’s case, it was hepatic porphyria, if that’s what happened. However, it could also have been arsenic poisoning.

His opinion as to why America was lost is worth hearing because by that time he’d been King for sixteen years. His view was that the factors I’ve already mentioned were significant, and also that since the colonies consisted substantially of people who were already discontented with the UK, they had a tradition of dissent going back several generations and were becoming rich themselves. This is all, of course, talked about in terms of people who “matter” as opposed to poor people, slaves and native Americans. He also notes the difference between what would become the US and what would become Canada. It’s been argued that the possibility of the abolition of slavery in the colonies was also on people’s minds in North America, because the abolition of villeinry in England several centuries previously had led to a situation where nobody could be considered a slave in this country, and the general feeling was moving against slavery, which was seen as vital to much of the American economy since it relied on cash crops.

He was the first Hanoverian King to speak English as his first language. Prior to him, the Kingdom had been held at arm’s length and his predecessors had not been that interested in local affairs, but because he was able to engage directly with the people of this country, he was keener on trying to regain some of his power from Parliament. He therefore appointed a Tory government to end the Seven Years War and worked with it to break the Whig hold on power. The Earl of Bute, his appointee and the last favourite in British politics, was the first Scottish Prime Minister and also the first Tory PM. However, both he and the King considered it important to charge the American colonies for their military defence, which was the start of what provoked the Revolution. George then turned to George Grenville for help, and it was he who introduced the Stamp Act in 1765. At this point I’m almost certainly teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, but this was a law requiring all printed matter to be issued on paper stamped to prove it had been produced in London, including of course legal documents as might be involved in internal trade within the colonies. This amounted to taxation without consent and was so unpopular that it was repealed the next year by the King and William Pitt. Pitt then became ill and Lord North was appointed in 1770. His term was dominated by conflict over British attempts to tax America, culminating in the War of Independence from 1775. Looking at this, it doesn’t seem like he could be entirely absolved of responsibility for losing the North American colonies. It was of course difficult with an eighteenth century level of technology to govern colonies on the other side of the Atlantic, and I’m wondering right now whether that difficulty was a factor in the creation of the Electoral College. Maybe if Britain had proposed that, whatever became the US would now be in the Commonwealth.

All of this was quite a strain on the King, and I’m aware that due to his predecessors not being bothered about governing the country, doing so was hardly the family business any longer and it makes me think he may have been doing so without enough experience early on in his reign. In any case, the result was that it affected his health until in 1810 he completely lost it mentally, leading to the Regency, where the Prince of Wales ruled in his place. George IV didn’t become King until 1820, by which time he was forty-eight.

Contemporary with George III was Horatio Nelson, one of whose descendants became a close friend of mine while I was at secondary school, and had quite an influence on my life. It’s quite odd looking at pictures of Nelson, although they tend to be idealised, because they look like my friend. You get something similar more globally with George IV’s successor William IV because he looks like his relatives Adam Hart-Davis and Boris Johnson, and this fact of significant familiarity shows that history is beginning to feel contemporary from about this point. On another personal note, the earliest ancestor of mine I’ve seen a photo of was an old man at the time that photo was taken and was born in the reign of William IV, so in a way it really wasn’t that long ago. Moreover, the earliest books in my family’s possession were bought by my ancestors in the late eighteenth century.

That, then, is a vague sketch of George III written in aid of the fact that today is 4th July.