George III, Part I

See this man? This is King George III of England, of the House of Hanover.

You may have heard of him. He was king during the American Revolution, that "tyrannical" King George we Americans hear about so much when studying the war. Well, of course, the American revolutionaries looked at Parliament as tyrannical before they started calling the King tyrannical-- Olive Branch Petition, anyone?-- but you get the idea. He's the one who ruled Great Britain while we over here decided to become our own nation.

The thing is, a lot of Britons weren't huge fans of him during that time, either. Whigs called him tyrannical, too. And they had reason. Or did they?

When I studied abroad, I took a tutorial called "Georgian Politics and Society in the Long Eighteenth-Century" (or something like that) at University College, Oxford, with the remarkable Leslie Mitchell. Each week I had to read quite a bit of assigned reading, then write a paper on the given topic, such as "Crime" or "National Identity" or "Parliamentary Reform and the Great Reform Bill" or "The Whigs and George III." The first few papers I wrote I tried to cover everything I had read, making it a very objective affair with facts and no heart. Leslie told me to try again, to put some life into these papers. Then, for the George III paper, I thought I had it. From everything Leslie had assigned us to read I knew, I knew, that the Whigs and the Americans had been right about the tyranny of George III.

Let me explain why (from the Whig point of view): The man acts like an absolute monarch! He's out to destroy the Parliamentary system, let me tell you! Fact: in 1760-62 he removed the Newcastle Whigs and the Chatham Whigs from office-- shocking, I know-- but worse, he replaced them with the reviled Lord Bute. A Scotsman, with basically no property, whose family had been at the Jacobite uprising in 1745!!! The Jacobite cause wanted to remove the Hanoverians from the throne and restore the Stuarts, but now a member of the house of Hanover was making a man with Jacobite connections the Prime Minister? All of this is Bute's fault, Bute must have told George that his father had had his hands tied by evil Whig counsel. So, in an effort to take more power, George had removed them. Clearly, this man is both an idiot and an absolutist.

Then things get worse. His government was more unstable than any government had been since 1720, with ministers going in and out and coalitions left and right. Was not this his fault for dismissing the Whigs? Then, in 1763, there's the "General Warrants" affair. On April 23rd, George arrested a Member of Parliament, John Wilkes, for "seditious libel" when Wilkes attacked a speech given by the King (but written by Lord Bute) in issue number 45 of The North Briton, Wilkes' anti-Bute weekly newspaper. The King, feeling insulted, issued a general warrant for Wilkes' arrest, along with everyone else who worked on the newspaper. Wilkes, however, asserted the unconstitutionality of general warrants and gained much support-- Leslie told me that one colonial American assembly even sent Wilkes a tureen of turtle soup to be delivered to him in jail. Do you think they made it in America and shipped it, or just sent the money for it to be made in England? :)

It doesn't stop there. The War of American Independence starts, and by the end only George III is left wanting to fight it. The rest of the nation is resigned to losing the colonies, but George refuses to let go until the last bitter second. And, during all of this, he comes to detest the Whigs even more, since they sympathize with the American patriots and agree that George is being tyrannical!!!

Next, in 1782-1783, several things happened: George split the opposition to upset Parliament and take more power for himself. Then the Fox-North Coalition, a Whig government, was finally in power after years of being in opposition. George III didn't like this, as he and Charles James Fox were bitter enemies. George also didn't want the East India Bill passed. After it made it through the House of Commons, he made known that he would consider a personal enemy anyone in the House of Lords who voted for the bill. The bill was defeated by 8 votes-- and vote was taken at 2:00 AM, when many Lords didn't even know it was happening. As soon as it had passed he dismissed the Coalition-- and I mean AS SOON. At 3:00 AM he sent messengers out to tell Fox and North they had been dismissed. Leslie said they found Fox drunk and playing whist at Brook's Club, and North had been soundly asleep in bed.

Doesn't this seem tyrannical? Don't you agree that George has no redeeming qualities and that he was out to destroy the Parliamentary system and English liberty as we know it (or, er, as they knew it)???

But what if that's just one side to the King? Let's find out in the next Why History!