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.
“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.