The Hoover Institution hosted The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III on Wednesday, December 1, 2021 from 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM PT in Hauck Auditorium, at the Hoover Institution.
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RECAP
The verdict of history has been grossly unfair to George III, the reigning king of England during America’s War of Independence, argued Andrew Roberts, renowned British historian and Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow, during a lecture in the Hoover Institution’s Hauck Auditorium on Tuesday, December 1.
Roberts is the author of best-selling and award-winning historical biographies including Churchill: Walking with Destiny and Napoleon: A Life. In his latest book, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, Roberts prompts readers to reassess the legacy of Great Britain’s longest-serving king.
Introduced by Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson, Roberts told his Hoover audience that there are three general assumptions about George III that are “completely false”: that he suffered from a blood disorder called porphyria; that because of this ailment and his stubborn behavior he caused the American Revolution and ultimately lost Great Britain’s control over the colonies; and that he was a tyrant unfit for rule as stated in the US Declaration of Independence.
Roberts explained that the book, based on one hundred thousand pages of archival documents made available by the royal family, dismantles such arguments. The record shows that George III suffered not from porphyria but from fits related to bipolar disorder and manic depression. Roberts said that his study accounts for the first instance in which the documentary evidence of George III’s symptoms was analyzed by modern medical and psychiatric professionals.
Nevertheless, Roberts argued, George III’s sufferings were not a factor in the War of Independence, nor was he a tyrant. By and large, he was an enlightened despot, who revered the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. In this bloodless coup against James II, his daughter Mary II and son-in-law William III of Orange ascended to the throne, and significant ruling power shifted from the monarchy to the newly established Parliament.
“I noticed that from the Harvard Law Review last April, the present American imperial presidency actually has more powers than George III,” Roberts quipped to an amused crowd.
Roberts recognized that the US Declaration of Independence is extraordinary in its universal message of individual freedom, but he said that this is only true for the first one-third of the document. He argued that in the founding document’s next two-thirds its principal author Thomas Jefferson pens a scathing twenty-eight-count indictment against George III, in which only two charges withstand legal scrutiny: count seventeen, which alleged that taxes were being imposed on the colonists without their consent; and the twenty-second, which accused the king and Parliament of suppressing the power vested in colonial legislatures.
Roberts asserted that the two charges alone justify a revolution, given that historical developments necessitated that the thirteen American colonies should assume total political autonomy. An independent state was needed to serve its population of 2.5 million people and manage a burgeoning economy that was enjoying a growth rate of 7 percent. Furthermore, it was an opportune time for the Founders to declare independence, since there was no external threat (aside from Great Britain) posed by France or any other major power.
“Quite understandably, and rightly, the Founding Fathers, took [America] to be an independent and self-governing entity. But that does not make the king that they were rebelling against a tyrant,” Roberts said.
Roberts maintained that George III never tried to arrest newspaper editors, to stop the Continental Congress from forming, or to deploy the British military to large population centers in North America (except for Boston in 1768). Roberts underlined that the single charge of tyranny that George III and the Parliament stood most accused of was the imposition of the Stamp Act of 1765—which aimed to raise sixty thousand pounds through the direct taxation of commercial and legal papers, newspapers, and other publications. Roberts argued that through careful analysis of the legislation, one would find that it wasn’t as egregious as its critics charge. On a per capita basis, each American would be assessed only two shillings and six pence per year. Furthermore, all the money was going to be spent in North America on the stationing of troops, not to fill the coffers of the British treasury.
Roberts also pointed out that George III was an ardent opponent of slavery. The English king never bought, sold, or owned any slaves. Neither did he invest in any company that profited from the slave trade. In fact, in 1807, he signed into law a bill that abolished British participation in this abominable institution.
“Yet, he has been held for two hundred years by weak historians as being somehow morally inferior to the forty-one of the fity-six signatories of the Declaration of Independence who did own slaves,” Roberts remarked.
And while Great Britain lost the American War of Independence (which Roberts says should be blamed on bad tactics employed by British generals), George III was a gracious host to John Adams when he became the first US ambassador to the Court of Saint James, in 1785. The king told the American Founding Father, “I was the last to consent to the separation, but the separation having been made and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.”
Roberts asserted that Americans during their fight for independence were unlike any other people in human history who rebelled against their rulers. In every other case, he explained— whether it was the Israelites against the Egyptians in the years surrounding 1,300 BCE, the Dutch against the Spanish (1568–1648), or the Greeks against the Turks (1821–29)—it was always the oppressed trying to overthrow their oppressors.
“[America demanded] its independence and sovereignty against a king who was not oppressive,” Roberts concluded. “That is what strikes me as extraordinarily exceptional.”
Andrew Roberts’s lecture about The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of King George will soon air on C-SPAN’s Book TV series. Please check your local listings.
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About the Author
Andrew Roberts is the bestselling author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny; Leadership in War The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War; Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945; Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Gamble; and Napoleon: A Life, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography and a finalist for the Plutarch Award. He has won many other prizes, including the Wolfson History Prize and the British Army Military Book of the Year. He is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Fellow at the New-York Historical Society, and a visiting professor in the Department of War Studies at King's College, London.
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Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution; his focus is classics and military history. Hanson was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California (1992–93), a visiting professor of classics at Stanford University (1991–92), the annual Wayne and Marcia Buske Distinguished Visiting Fellow in History at Hillsdale College (2004–), the Visiting Shifron Professor of Military History at the US Naval Academy (2002–3),and the William Simon Visiting Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University (2010).
