George III

1738-1820, king of England 1760-1820 (grandson of George II).

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orig. George William Frederick

born June 4, 1738, London, Eng.

died Jan. 29, 1820, Windsor Castle, near London

King of Great Britain and Ireland (1760–1820); also elector (1760–1814) and king (1814–20) of Hanover.

The grandson of George II, he ascended the throne during the Seven Years' War. His chief minister, Lord Bute, forced William Pitt's resignation and caused intrigue rather than stability within the government. Bute resigned in 1763, but George's political overtures to others were snubbed, until Lord North became prime minister in 1770. England was in financial distress caused by the war, and George supported attempts to raise funds through taxation of the American colonies, which led to the American Revolution. With North, he was blamed for prolonging the war and losing the colonies. He reasserted his power when North and Charles James Fox planned to take control of the East India Company; he forced them to resign and reaffirmed his control through a new "patriotic" prime minister, William Pitt, the Younger. George supported him until the war with Revolutionary France (1793) and fears of related uprisings in Ireland caused Pitt to propose political emancipation of the Roman Catholics. George's vehement opposition led to Pitt's resignation in 1801. In 1811 George's ill health and a return of the madness that had afflicted him for short periods earlier in his life caused Parliament to enact the regency of his son, the future George IV.

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▪ king of Great Britain

Introduction

in full  George William Frederick,  German  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 

born June 4 [May 24, Old Style], 1738, London

died Jan. 29, 1820, Windsor Castle, near London

 king of Great Britain and Ireland (1760–1820) and elector (1760–1814) and then king (1814–20) of Hanover, during a period when Britain won an empire in the Seven Years' War but lost its American colonies, and then, after the struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, emerged as a leading power in Europe. During the last years of his life (from 1811) he was intermittently mad—his son, the future George IV, acting as regent.

Early years

      George III was the son of Frederick Louis, prince of Wales, and Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. From his parents and their entourage, the young George imbibed an unreasonable dislike of his grandfather, King George II, and of all his policies. George was a child of strong feelings but of slow mental development. This unequal growth of brain and heart made him difficult to teach and too easy to command and produced in him an appearance of apathy; he could not read properly until he was 11. His affection for his immediate family circle dominated his life.

      George was 12 when his father died, leaving him heir to the throne. It is clear that, in beginning with his 18th birthday to prepare conscientiously for his future responsibilities, he tormented himself with thoughts of his inadequacy. The curious blend of obstinate determination with self-distrust, a feature of his maturity, was already evident. His method of screwing up his courage was to set himself an ideal of conduct. This ideal George thought he had found personified in John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute (Bute, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of, Viscount Kingarth, Lord Mount Stuart, Cumrae, And Inchmarnock), who became his inspiration, his teacher, and later his chief minister.

      George was potentially a better politician than Bute, for he had tenacity, and, as experience matured him, he could use guile to achieve his ends. But at his accession in 1760 in the midst of the Seven Years' War (1756–63), between Great Britain and Prussia on one side and France, Austria, and Russia on the other, George did not know his own capacity nor the incapacity of his hero. As king, in 1761, he asked Bute for a review of all eligible German Protestant princesses “to save a great deal of trouble,” as “marriage must sooner or later come to pass.” He chose Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and married her on Sept. 8, 1761. Though the marriage was entered into in the spirit of public duty, it lasted for more than 50 years, due to the king's need for security and his wife's strength of character. Bute's only other useful contribution to his royal pupil was to encourage his interest in botany and to implant in the court more respect for the graces of life, including patronage of the arts, than had been usual for the past half century. (In 1768 George founded the Royal Academy of Arts.)

Political instability, 1760–70

      Politically, Bute encouraged the most disastrous of George's delusions. The government of England at the time lacked effective executive machinery, and members of Parliament were always more ready to criticize than to cooperate with it. Moreover, the ministers were, for the most part, quarrelsome and difficult to drive as a team. The king's first responsibility was to hold coalitions of great peers together. But under Bute's influence he imagined that his duty was to purify public life and to substitute duty to himself for personal intrigue. The two great men in office at the accession were the elder Pitt (Pitt, William, the Elder) and Thomas Pelham-Holles (Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of, Duke Of Newcastle-upon-tyne, Marquess Of Clare, Earl Of Clare, Viscount Haughton, Baron Pelham Of Laughton, Baron Pelham Of Stanmer), duke of Newcastle. Bute and George III disliked both. Pitt was allowed to resign (October 1761) over the question of war against Spain. Newcastle followed into retirement when his control of treasury matters seemed to be challenged. The two former ministers were each dangerous as a focal point for criticism of the new government under the touchy captaincy of Bute. The government had two principal problems: to make peace and to restore peacetime finance.

      Peace was made but in such a way as to isolate Britain in Europe, and for almost 30 years the country suffered from the new alignments of the European powers. Nor was George III happy in his attempt to express the agreed purposes of the country that to Bute had seemed so clear. George III might “glory in the name of Briton,” but his attempts to speak out for his country were ill-received. In 1765 he was being vilified by the gutter press organized by the parliamentary radical John Wilkes, while “patriotic” gentlemen, moved by Pitt or Newcastle, suspected that the peace had been botched and that the king was conspiring with Bute against their liberties. For Bute the way out was easy—he resigned (April 1763).

 George realized too late that his clumsiness had destroyed one political combination and made any other difficult to assemble. He turned to George Grenville (Grenville, George), to his uncle, William Augustus, duke of Cumberland, to Pitt, and to the 3rd duke of Grafton for help. All failed him. The first decade of the reign was one of such ministerial instability that little was done to solve the basic financial difficulties of the crown, made serious by the expense of the Seven Years' War. Overseas trade expanded, but the riches of the East India Company made no significant contribution to the state. The attempt to make the American colonists meet their own administrative costs only aroused them to resistance. Nor was there consistency in British colonial policy. The Stamp Act (1765) passed by Grenville was repealed by Lord Rockingham in 1766. Indirect taxes, in the form of the Townshend Acts (1767), were imposed without calculation of their probable yield and then repealed (except for that on tea) as a maneuver in home politics.

      George III was personally blamed for this instability. According to the Whig statesman Edmund Burke (Burke, Edmund) and his friends, the king could not keep a ministry because he was faithless and intrigued with friends “behind the curtain.” Burke's remedy was to urge that solidity should be given to a cabinet by the building up of party loyalty: the king as a binding agent was to be replaced by the organization of groups upon agreed principles. Thus the early years of George III produced, inadvertently, the germ of modern party politics. In truth, however, the king was not guilty of causing chaos by intrigue. He had no political contact with Bute after 1766; the so-called king's friends were not his agents but rather those who looked to him for leadership such as his predecessors had given. The king's failure lay in his tactlessness and inexperience, and it was not his fault that no one group was strong enough to control the Commons.

      By 1770, however, George III had learned a good deal. He was still as obstinate as ever and still felt an intense duty to guide the country, but now he reckoned with political reality. He no longer scorned to make use of executive power for winning elections nor did he withhold his official blessing from those of whose characters he disapproved.

North (North, Frederick North, Lord)'s ministry, 1770–82

 In 1770 the king was lucky in finding a minister, Lord North, with the power to cajole the Commons. North's policy of letting sleeping dogs lie lulled the suspicions of independent rural members who were always ready to imagine that the executive was growing too strong. As a result, 12 years of stable government followed a decade of disturbance.

      Unfortunately, issues and prejudices survived from the earlier period that North could only muffle. America (American Revolution) was the greatest and the fatal issue, and North could not avoid it because the English squires in Parliament agreed with their king that America must pay for its own defense and for its share of the debt remaining from the war that had given it security. George III's personal responsibility for the loss of America lies not in any assertion of his royal prerogative. Americans, rather, were disposed to admit his personal supremacy. Their quarrel was with the assertion of the sovereignty of Parliament, and George III was eventually hated in America because he insisted upon linking himself with that Parliament. North would have had difficulty in ignoring the colonists' insults in any case; with the king and the House of Commons watching to see that he was not weak, he inevitably took the steps that led to war in 1775.

      By 1779 the typical English squires in Parliament had sickened of the war, but the king argued that though the war was indefensible on economic grounds it still had to be fought, that if disobedience were seen to prosper, Ireland would follow suit. He argued also, after the French had joined the Americans in 1778, that French finances would collapse before those of Britain. So the king prolonged the war, possibly by two years, by his desperate determination. The period from 1779 to 1782 left a further black mark upon the king's reputation. By 1780 a majority in Parliament blamed North's government for the calamities that had befallen the country, yet there was no responsible or acceptable alternative, for the opposition was reputed to be both unpatriotic and divided. At the time people believed that corruption alone supported an administration that was equally incapable of waging war or ending it. This supposed increase in corruption was laid directly at the king's door, for North wearily repeated his wish to resign, thus appearing to be a mere puppet of George III. When North fell at last in 1782, George III's prestige was at a low ebb. The failure of Shelburne's ministry (1782–83) reduced George to the lowest point of all. North joined with the liberal Whig Charles James Fox (Fox, Charles James) to form a coalition government, and George even contemplated abdication.

George and the Younger Pitt (Pitt, William, The Younger), 1783–1806

 Yet within a year the king had dramatically turned the tables, carrying out amid applause the most high-handed act of royal initiative in 18th-century England. When Fox and North produced a plan to reform the East India Company, which aroused fear that they intended to perpetuate their power by controlling Eastern patronage, the king reemerged as the guardian of the national interest. He let it be known that anyone who supported the plan in the House of Lords would be reckoned his enemy. The bill was defeated, and the ministers resigned. The king was ready with a new “patriotic” leader, William Pitt, the Younger. This initiative was dangerous. Pitt's government was in a minority in the Commons, and the discarded ministers were in a mood to threaten a constitutional upheaval. Everything depended on the verdict of a general election in March 1784. The country, moved by real feeling as well as by treasury influence, overwhelmingly endorsed the king's action. The king did not go on after his victory to further demonstrations of power. Though many of Pitt's ideas were unwelcome to him, he contented himself with criticism and a few grumbles. Pitt could not survive without the king, and the king, if he lost Pitt, would have been at the mercy of Fox. They compromised, but the compromise left most power, with the king's willing assent, in Pitt's capable young hands.

      George loved his children possessively and with that hysterical force that he had always shown in relations with those close to him. He was depressed by the prince of Wales's coming of age in 1783 as it meant emancipation from the family. The king's ruefulness was soon converted into rage. The prince associated politically with Fox's Whigs and socially with Fox's gaming friends. In contrast to George III's rather straitlaced court, the prince's circle was lively and dissolute. As his sons escaped him, one by one, George oscillated between excitement and despair. In the crises of his reign he frequently talked of abdication; but in 1788 it was announced that it was his reason that had fled its throne.

      The stresses endured by this hard-working man seemed sufficient to account for his violent breakdown. Twentieth-century medical investigation, in fact, suggested that the king had an inherited defect in his metabolism known as porphyria. An excess in purple-red pigments in the blood intoxicated all parts of the nervous system, producing the agonizing pain, excited overactivity, paralysis, and delirium that the king suffered in an acute form at least four times during his reign. The porphyria diagnosis, however, is not universally accepted by medical opinion.

      The king's incapacity produced a political storm. But while Pitt and Fox battled over the powers that the prince of Wales should enjoy as regent, the king suddenly recovered in 1789. He was left with the fear that he might again collapse into the nightmare of madness. For the last decade of the 18th century, he was bothered more about the details than about the main lines of policy. Pitt, whose policies contented him more and more, gradually absorbed in his own following most of North's old following and even some of Fox's. After the outbreak of war with Revolutionary France in 1793, all but the most radical Whigs joined the government, leaving Fox in hopeless, if eloquent, opposition.

      The war with France seemed to most of the aristocracy and the upper middle class to be waged for national survival. The old king, an object of compassion in his collapse and obviously a well-meaning man, was soon a symbol of the old English order for which the country was fighting. Although his potential power in politics was greatly increased, his will to wield it was enfeebled. George enjoyed himself in encouraging farmers to grow more food; or he talked for hours (ending his sentences rhetorically and fussily with the repeated words “what, what, what?”) about past conflicts, or military tactics, or even of the shortcomings of Shakespeare; or he played to himself on his harpsichord; or he regulated the lives of his daughters, who found it so much less easy to escape than did his sons. From such quiet occupations he was aroused to activity by Pitt's Irish policy at the turn of the century.

      The French war had made the issue of Roman Catholic (Catholic Emancipation) emancipation urgent. Rebellion in Ireland, in Pitt's view, could not be cured simply by the union of the British and Irish Parliaments. Conciliation, by the political emancipation of the Roman Catholics, was a necessary concomitant of union. George III believed this proposal to be radical ruin and used all his personal prestige to have emancipation defeated. Pitt resigned (1801), and George persuaded Henry Addington (later 1st Viscount Sidmouth) to form a less adventurous cabinet. The collapse of Addington's administration in 1804, after the short Peace of Amiens (1802–03), brought Pitt back into office (1804–06), but he returned at the cost of giving up his emancipation proposals. The king was decisive in this crisis only because it was an issue upon which he felt most deeply and upon which he instinctively expressed the feelings of the majority of the backbenchers in the House of Commons, though Pitt never pushed the matter to a real trial of strength.

Last years, 1806–20

      On the death of Pitt (January 1806), the king accepted Fox as foreign secretary in a coalition “ministry of all the talents” (1806–07). He even came to feel affection for Fox and sincerely to lament his death in 1806. During this short period of Whig administration, the king allowed his ministers to discuss (abortively) peace with Napoleon and to abolish the slave trade; he asserted himself and forced their resignation only when they dared to propose some amelioration of the laws against Roman Catholics. This second break on the Roman Catholic issue came about in circumstances which witnessed to George's declining abilities. Still strong in body, he had become almost blind. He needed the help of a secretary in the task, which he would not reduce, of reading all the official papers. Lord Grenville thought the king had agreed to a paper that proposed the grant of higher rank in the army for papists. The king thought that his ministers were trying to trick him and that Sidmouth alone had explained to him the significance of the paper. He demanded from his ministers a promise not to bring up the subject again, for he feared he might be deceived into betraying his sworn duty to the Church of England. The perfectly proper refusal of ministers to pledge themselves for the future led to their supersession by the Tories, under Lord Portland (1807–09), Spencer Perceval (1809–12), and Lord Liverpool (1812–27), successively.

      Much of the remainder of the king's lifetime was a living death. The death of his youngest child and frequent companion, Princess Amelia, in 1810, was a bitter blow; she had, in part, consoled him for his disappointment about his sons. Worse still was the return of the king's illness. In 1811 it was acknowledged that he was violently insane. The doctors continued to hope for recovery, but Parliament enacted the regency of the prince of Wales (the future George IV) and decreed that the queen should have the custody of her husband. He remained insane, with intervals of senile lucidity, until his death at Windsor Castle. George III's reign, on its personal side, was the tragedy of a well-intentioned man who was faced with problems too great for him to solve but from which his conscience prevented any attempt at escape.

John Steven Watson

Additional Reading

The best account of George III's character is John Brooke, King George III (1972). Romney Sedgwick's introduction to his edition of The Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1757–1766 (1939), vividly relates the character to the political situation. Two quite wide surveys are Richard Pares, King George III and the Politicians (1953); and J. Steven Watson, The Reign of George III (1960). There has been a great deal of scholarly controversy about the nature of politics in the early years of George III's reign, in which the work of Lewis B. Namier has been outstanding. The major works are The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 2nd ed. (1957), and England in the Age of the American Revolution, 2nd ed. (1961). This approach to the political history of George III's reign has been sharply and pertinently criticized by Herbert Butterfield in George III and the Historians (1957). Less interest has been displayed in the latter part of George III's reign, but John Ehrmann, The Younger Pitt, 2 vol. (1969), deals very thoroughly with the relations of George III with his most successful prime minister, William Pitt, the Younger. The question of the nature of George III's illness has been raised by Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad Business (1969), but their arguments for porphyria as against insanity are not fully accepted by medical opinion.

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