Posted on 09/30/2003 11:36:53 AM PDT by Theodore R.
September 16, 2003
When I was a schoolboy we were taught that the American Revolution had occurred because our ancestors were fed up with the tyranny of King George III. They particularly resented being taxed by a government in which they had no vote, and they adopted the slogan “No taxation without representation.” The slightest tax increase drove them to fury.
King George was pretty unpopular in England too. What galled the English was that they were taxed to pay for the French and Indian War in America, which was fought to protect the Americans. In A History of the American People, a marvelously readable book, Paul Johnson notes that in 1764, the costs of the recent war actually fell 50 times as heavily on the English as on the American colonists. The average Englishman was paying 25 shillings a year in taxes to the Crown; the average American, a mere sixpence.
Our ancestors fought a war to throw off the tyrannous yoke of a king who was taxing them in pennies. Times have certainly changed. Actually, it’s Americans who have changed. Of course sixpence in those days was equivalent to several dollars today, but that is only evidence of the way our own government has debased the currency over time.
By modern standards, George III wasn’t much of a tyrant. A rather pitiful excuse for a tyrant, really. He falls far short not only of Saddam Hussein, but of our own recent presidents.
In person, George III seems to have been a cheerful, affable gentleman. There is the famous story of how he teased the historian Edward Gibbon about his monumental history of Rome’s decline and fall: “Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?”
George actually had a deep respect for learning. He gave scholars access to his vast royal library and liked to chat with them. One of these was Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer.
On one occasion, the king told his librarian to notify him the next time Dr. Johnson came to the library, so that he could meet him. This was done, and the resulting interview is recorded by Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell.
Told that the king was coming, Johnson stood respectfully. “His Majesty approached him, and at once was courteously easy.” The king asked Johnson’s opinions about various other libraries, and they conversed on this subject for a while. Boswell writes,
His Majesty enquired if he was then writing any thing. He answered, he was not, for he had pretty well told the world what he knew, and must now read to acquire more knowledge. The King, as it should seem with a view to urge him to rely on his own stores as an original writer, and to continue his labours, then said “I do not think you borrow much from any body.” Johnson said, he thought he had already done his part as a writer. “I should have thought so too, (said the King,) if you had not written so well.” — Johnson observed to me, upon this, that “No man could have paid a handsomer compliment; and it was fit for a King to pay. It was decisive.” When asked by another friend, at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s, whether he made any reply to this high compliment, he answered, “No, Sir. When the King had said it, it was to be so. It was not for me to bandy civilities with my Sovereign.” Perhaps no man who had spent his whole life in courts could have shewn a more nice and dignified sense of true politeness, than Johnson did in this instance. Johnson later added that “they may talk of the King as they will; but he is the finest gentleman I have ever seen.”
If we hadn’t learned long ago that George III was a dreadful ogre, we might get the mistaken impression that he was a man of qualities — gracious, tactful, considerate, and quick-witted. Not that his personal demeanor can excuse wrongs he did in his capacity as ruler, but a glimpse of his human side is bound to make you wonder if American revolutionary propaganda is entirely just to him. Are we really so much better off under the sort of men who rule America today?
Joseph Sobran
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
Just one mention of taxes, and it was only a complaint that they had no say in tax policy. The rest are about far more important things than money.
Sobran once again shows he is ignorant.
King George III of England suffered from intermittent bouts of madness, now thought by some to be secondary to porphyria. He developed his first episode when he was in his twenties. They were classic: abdominal pain with severe constipation and delirium. His doctors were baffled both by his symptoms and by the results of one of the few tests they could do: a detailed inspection of the king's urine. In times of madness, they wrote, his urine was "sometimes wine dark and sometimes deep blue." We now know this was the shimmery blue of dissolved porphyrins.
The king went mad, recovered, lost an empire, went mad again, recovered, and finally died mad, leaving behind the mystery of his blue urine.
http://www.discover.com/apr_02/featvital.html
Actually, it was my understanding that it was the Colonial Office bureaucrats who were primarily responsible for the atrocities, not the king. One (admittedly loose) parallel would be 20th-century Japan, with the military claiming to speak for the emperor. The British monarchs, though influential, did not set the agenda by the late 18th century.
What Sobran hasn't yet revealed is that George III was actually George Beauclerk, the 3rd Duke of St. Albans, the great-grandson of Aubrey de Vere, the last Earl of Oxford, and also of King Charles II.
;o)
And we would have had socialized medicine that much sooner.
Mel Gibson in Patriot: "Why should I trade a tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away?"
Probably true but there would still be trouble. There was a lot of agitation through the first half of the 19th century, including armed uprisings in Toronto and Montréal, over the behaviour of the governors and their cronies (such as changing the homestead rules to seize land from settlers after they had cleared most of it). It does reinforce my view that George was not responsible for the loss of the American colonies, it was the Colonial Office. To claim that George III was responsible for the revolution is like claiming that Queen Victoria provoked the Rebellions of 1837.
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