Was King George III slandered by historians? A biographer thinks so.

Can the reputation of Britain’s King George III be rehabilitated after centuries of vilification? In “The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III,” author Andrew Roberts calls him “the most unfairly traduced sovereign in the long history of the British monarchy,” and he sets out to prove it.

Roberts is in familiar contrarian territory. His earlier book “Napoleon: A Life” portrayed Bonaparte as the living embodiment of all the best qualities of the French Revolution (because nothing says “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” quite like making your brother king of Spain). Roberts argues that George III was not the monstrous oaf typically described by historians, but was practically perfect in every way, as pure an example of the Enlightenment as could be imagined – except, Roberts implies, where the Enlightenment got things wrong. 

“The Last King of America” is every bit as compulsively readable as anything else Roberts has written. In this case, he’s had the benefit of the 200,000-page Georgian Papers in the Royal Archive, recently opened to the public. Access to the papers, containing vast amounts of research not previously easily accessible to scholars, allows him to paint a fuller picture of the man, and particularly the politician, than authors of previous books about the monarch. 

Most people know only two things about George III: that he lost the American Colonies, and went mad at the end of his life, leaving England to be ruled by his son, the prince regent. Roberts makes a convincing case for a diagnosis of severe manic depression. This picture of an intelligent, sensitive man believing that his own mind was betraying him is an extremely touching one. It does more to humanize George III than anything else written about him. If Roberts had been content with that, all would be well. But instead, he consistently tries to superhumanize.

His George III is the perfect Renaissance prince, displaced to 18th-century London. The king invited Mozart to Buckingham House, championed Handel and Haydn, played a variety of musical instruments himself, and took an informed interest in botany, zoology, art, gardening, landscaping, architecture, and astronomy. He “promoted the scientific aspects of Captain Cook’s voyages ... promoted vaccination despite losing a child to smallpox post-inoculation, established a book bindery at Buckingham House,” etc.  

But no matter how earnestly Roberts wants to talk about the king’s accomplishments, he still must deal with the fact of those lost American Colonies. According to Roberts, the American Revolution began as a series of “proxy protests against British political control by a people who sensed they could now thrive as an independent country.” The conflict didn’t boil down to taxation without representation, as generations of American schoolchildren have been taught, but rather to conflicting ideas of government. “It was the genius of the American founding fathers,” Roberts writes, “to excite their countrymen and replace a perfectly valid political legitimacy deriving from the sovereignty of Crown and Parliament with their own form of legitimacy, which was equally valid but incompatible with the first.”  

All of which sounds fairly innocent, but the only way Roberts can keep his hero’s crown untarnished is to press his case. “Before the Americans revolted, no newspapers were closed; no popular meetings were banned; no arrests were made without trial; no troops were put out on the street,” he writes, “except latterly in one city, Boston, and even then only once the unrest had already begun.”  

Never mind that King George III gave his royal consent to the Quartering Act in 1765, long before – and in large part responsible for – the unrest that would come in the next decade. Never mind the circumlocution of saying the king wasn’t a tyrant except for the times when he was. Since Roberts insists that George III never read the Declaration of Independence, the king must be innocent of all the abuses it attributes to him. 

Americans likely won’t be convinced. But every reader will learn a lot, either way. And they’ll wonder who Roberts’ next subject will be. Genghis Khan the avid stamp collector?