Posted on 01/27/2017 6:23:39 AM PST by maggief
“He was relaxed but straightforward “
I Said the same thing about him to my husband last night after watching the Hannity interview.
He seems so relaxed and comfortable with his answers. Not so worried about campaign and making gaffes. He’s in control now and has settled into the Presidency very quickly and nicely.
Good point about Volcker. Thanks.
Anyway, on the media over here after the press conference with Theresa May, the negative reaction to DJT was predicatable. One “expert” decided he doesn't know much about the history of British-American relationships. How did he figure that out? Just more bluster, after all, Donald Trump's mother was Scottish!
During a phone in, a leftie caller was scaremongering with predictions of a war with China, a Putin-Trump “Axis” and so on. A load of nonsense that was thankfully rebutted by a pro-Trump caller. The stream of negativity towards Trump is constant over here!
I’m curious to know what British people in the 21st century think about late 18th century English King George III. While growing up in the USA in elementary school I learned that he was a power hungry King because he (and Parliament) were taxing us Americans without representation. I’m curious to know the point of view of the British today.
Here was a speech (modern actors) from that era by an American politician named Patrick Henry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbghWFMLyiA
I’m a history teacher in Australia. I’m also a dual Australian/British citizen, an Anglophile, and a monarchist. I’ll try and give you what I would see as the general British - more specifically English - view of George III.
The most significant fact taught about George III in Britain, and the thing most people would know about him, is that he was mad. In modern day terms, he was mentally ill, and that has an impact on almost all thinking about him. His failures are often attributed to his ‘madness’ even in cases where there is little reason to consider that the case.
The length of his reign (1760-1820) means that from the British perspective, a lot of the view of him depends on what part of his reign you look at. Most regard him as something of a failure at the time of the American War of Independence - and have some sympathy for the idea that that part of his reign was tyrannical (I’ll come back to that in a moment though). On the other hand, during the Napoleonic Wars, he was a significant figure of national unity.
Overall, the view of George III in Britain is reasonably positive - losing the American colonies is seen as a failure, but that was a brief period in his overall reign. Was he a tyrant? From a British perspective, it’s hard to argue that. He basically let Parliament do what it wanted when it came to the American colonies - and he was supposed to let Parliament do what it wanted. The King of the 18th century did have more power and influence than the monarch does today - but the shift towards Parliament being more powerful than the King had already begun. You can argue that the War of Independence was serious enough that the King could have intervened more than he did - but he was supposed to intervene only in extreme circumstances. From the British perspective, rather than being a tyrant over the War of Independence, it’s more accurate to say that any criticism is that the King wasn’t tyrannical enough - he didn’t act to overrule Lord North even when it was clear that North was failing, even when the colonies made representations asking for his help in asserting the rights of British subjects he was supposed to guarantee. He followed the constitutional conventions of his day - even when a crisis might have justified him being more interventionist.
But overall, he’s seen as a decent King - he may have failed on that occasion, but he succeeded far more than he failed. And compared to his son (who became Prince Regent in 1811 and King George IV in 1820) he was seen as restrained and careful. He lost Britain’s first empire - but kept in intact during the Napoleonic period and laid the groundwork for its second greater empire.
A good summary but I would suggest you left out one of his biggest failures, Ireland.
Following the 1798 rebellion there was perhaps the greatest chance in history for Great Britain and Ireland to be reconciled for a fresh start and to allow Ireland to become a happy partner in the British Union in the same way that Scotland had become.
The disaster of 1798 in the middle of the Napoleonic war showed how shockingly badly Ireland was being governed. A small cabal of reactionary protestant bigots in Dublin controlled with an iron fist a desperately poor and oppressed majority-Catholic Irish population (no I am not a whingeing Irishman with a chip on my shoulder, these are simple historical facts). It was a time for London to march in and clean house and it almost did so.
Pushing through the Act of Union was achieved through bribing the Irish House of Commons (as well as being bigoted know-nothings they were also extremely corrupt) and at this point Ireland could have been admitted to the newly created United Kingdom as a sister nation with dignity and equality.
The Irish Catholic church was completely behind the Union as they recognised they could get a fairer deal from London than the bigoted minority in Dublin (it is one of the great ironies of history that the Catholic church supported Union while the Orange Order, the now loudest proclaimers of their Unionist loyalty, opposed it). Irish Liberals (in the old proper sense of the word) of all stripes also recognised the time for change had come, and even some of the protestant gentry, scared sh!tless by how close they had come to being massacred in the rebellion came around to Union, it was the last golden opportunity to put right the terrible wrongs that Ireland had suffered under British rule and start again with a clean slate.
George III blew it.
A simple, literal-minded man, with much sympathy with the backwoodsmen of the Irish ruling class rather than the sensible advice of William Pitt, he could not accept the right of Catholics to be elected to the House of Commons, thereby disenfranchising the vast majority of the Irish people. Ireland came into the Union as a second-class partner, her wrongs were not to righted, her people would not be equal, the resentment against British rule would bubble and simmer on after all.
The Act of Union failed, it failed because of George III. And I suggest that was a much greater failure than losing the American colonies, which was after all ultimately to Britain’s great benefit.
You’re quite correct - for various reasons, I don’t feel able to discuss the Irish issues in detail - I was taught a very warped version of history myself when it came to Ireland and I know it.
But the question was largely about how George III is perceived in Britain and while I agree that his actions towards Ireland should be regarded as a failure, I don’t think they have much impact on how he is perceived in modern Britain as a whole. England - and then Britain - failed time and time again to properly address the issues of Ireland and when modern Britons see the failures at all, they all tend to roll together in their minds.
Second thoughts on George III. Online project could alter view of king.
I don't claim any expertise in the period, but one thing which often strikes me about the conventional American view of the events of the 1770s is the tendency to attribute to George III much greater personal responsibility for British errors than was actually the case.
Yes, I saw a little about that earlier and bookmarked it to read later - apparently they have a document he wrote in preparing to abdicate.
The trouble is, he took his coronation oath to preserve and uphold the Protestant church very seriously, and be viewed catholic emancipation as a violation of that oath. It would have been wiser to grant it in 1801 but what a lot of Americans don’t understand about George III is that he wasn’t some arbitrary tyrant, he was a man of principle (he was a virgin until he married and never took a mistress unlike most powerful and influential men of the day) and he took what he saw as his constitutional duty very seriously. He was also a very kind and compassionate man who once stopped a job tearing to pieces an insane woman who had tried to stab him, saying ‘leave’ her alone, she is mad, poor thing!’ and she ended up in an asylum instead of being gruesomely executed.
“You’re quite correct - for various reasons, I don’t feel able to discuss the Irish issues in detail - I was taught a very warped version of history myself when it came to Ireland and I know it.”
It is quite lamentable how poorly Ireland is covered in British history where it is often sidelined, or a mere footnote, with writers seemingly perplexed and treating it as an abstruse issue of no real relevance to wider history, despite Ireland often playing a central role in the history of British events.
You will see this frequently in historical fiction or drama, a case in point being anything set in pre-WWI history, the end of the long Edwardian summer as war approaches and invariably when politics is mentioned it will focus of some young flapper suffragette. Thus ignoring the fact that at that time the UK was literally on the point of civil war for the first time in 300 years, with the army on the point of mutiny and private armies being formed and funded by members of the British establishment over the question of Home Rule and Ulster. It is simply erased from the historical memory because it is about Ireland and Ireland is such a troublesome and unpleasant issue.
I grew up in Northern Ireland and devoured Irish and British history (I was living through an interesting chunk of it) but even I was affected by this blindness toward Ireland in the mainstream British textbooks we used in school. A case in point, I spent my summers on the coast, out to sea the magnificent profile of Rathlin Island could be clearly seen on the horizon, it was part of my childhood and yet I had no idea that Sir Walter Raleigh had massacred hundreds of men, women and children on Rathlin.
We were taught about Raleigh, about his swashbuckling adventures, tobacco, laying his cloak on the ground for his queen, all that stuff but apparently none of our teachers thought to inform us (did they even know?) about Raleigh’s murderous behaviour on an island not fifty miles from where we sat. I can’t help thinking if Horatio Nelson, for example, had massacred hundreds of men, women and children on the Isle of Wight, this fact might have been mentioned somewhere in the histories of the great admiral.
But Rathlin was in Ireland, and Ireland was simply whitewashed out of British textbooks, so that every generation when trouble erupted again in Ireland the British people were again left in bewilderment as to what on earth the problem was over there in that God’s cursed island.
“The trouble is, he took his coronation oath to preserve and uphold the Protestant church very seriously, and be viewed catholic emancipation as a violation of that oath.”
Yes that’s what I mean when I say he was a simple, literal-minded man, but of course he was wrong. Catholic emancipation was eventually passed and the British Empire entered its greatest ever period of expansion, hindered not one bit by having a few dozen papists in the Commons. But the process of granting this minor concession was so painful that it ruined the early formative years of the United Kingdom, poisoning Anglo-Irish relations for the remainder of the Union.
The British Empire is pretty much seen as colonial oppressors in modern History programs here. George III is more portrayed as someone with mental illness (see film “Madness of King George”), but the rapacious spending binges of the Georgians was a scandal. There was of course some good during the Pax Britannica, railways, infrastructure, industry and science and the spread of christianity, but clearly a lot went wrong too.
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