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.
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.
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.