The House of Hanover, from which Frederick was descended, had come to rule Britain in 1714, having previously only ruled as Dukes and Prince-electors of Brunswick-Lüneburg, also known as the Electorate of Hanover, in northern Germany. George was then effectively a member of a German family which had fairly recently come to rule Britain.
At the time of his son’s birth, Frederick was the sitting Prince of Wales and heir apparent to the Kingdom. George’s mother was Augusta of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. She was also descended from a prominent German noble family and had married Frederick in a dynastic union in 1736. The marriage had immediately resulted in children.
A girl, named Augusta after her mother, was born in 1737 and a year later George appeared, immediately becoming second in line to the throne of Great Britain. Young George was the first member of the House of Hanover who would go on to become king, who was actually born in England.
Both George I and George II, the first two Hanoverian monarchs, were born in Hanover itself, as was George’s own father. Both his parents spoke German as their native tongue. The family was part of a German royal dynasty which had inherited the British throne after
Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs died with no children in 1714. An Act of Settlement in 1701, seeking to ensure a Protestant succession, selected the Hanoverians, who could trace their family back to the daughter of King James I, the first monarch of both
England and Scotland, who reigned between 1603 and 1625. As such George would be the first member of the family to have a strong English background, having been both born in London and raised in England. George was brought up speaking both German and English, however there are mixed reports about his schooling.
Some were worried that he was intellectually limited, but as time went by George also learned to speak French, became a keen musician and developed interests in astronomy, clocks, painting, reading and playing chess. Perhaps he would not become a good fit for the type of philosopher king which the great
Greek thinker Plato had defined as the ideal ruler of a state, but George would nevertheless prove to be a relatively astute and cultivated king one day. Little did anyone know at the time of his birth, but young George’s accession to the throne of Great Britain would occur far more quickly than expected.
In March of 1751 George’s father, Frederick, died at Leicester House in London at just 44 years of age. At the time it was believed that the Prince, who was a keen cricketer, had died from a burst lung abscess which had occurred as a result of
A blow from a cricket ball, however the cause of death is now believed to have been a pulmonary embolism, a blockage of one of the arteries in his lungs. Whatever the cause of death, the implications were now clear.
Suddenly his twelve year old son had become the heir apparent to George II, who in 1751 was already 67, a ripe old age for a British monarch at that time. Nevertheless, the aging king continued to live long enough for young Prince George to
Pass through his teenage years and reach young manhood before he became king. It was not until October 1760, by which time he was blind in one eye and partially deaf, that old King George died. He was succeeded by his 22 year old grandson, who became King George III.
And he would rule as king of Great Britain for the next sixty years, during the course of which time, Europe and the world would experience changes unlike anything that had preceded them in human history. George faced a number of initial challenges. The first was on the international scene.
When he became king, Britain was mired in a major war against France, with its combatants fighting in Europe and as far afield as North America, the Caribbean and India, where the two powers were rivals for colonial supremacy.
This Seven Years War had broken out in 1756 and had soon resulted in Britain allying with powers such as Prussia and Portugal, while France found allies in Austria and Spain, lending an international dimension to the conflict. However, by the time of George’s accession in late 1760, British fortunes were on the
Ascendant and peace was quickly secured in 1763 on favourable terms for Britain which acquired New France, the future Canada, and France’s trading posts along the Indian coastline. However, France would remain Britain’s foremost rival for European hegemony throughout George’s long life. In tandem to the war, the second issue confronting George was more personal.
He needed a wife to secure the succession. George had been smitten by Lady Sarah Lennox in the late 1750s, but the marriage was not suitable from a dynastic perspective and George was convinced by his family to marry Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in September 1761.
The couple met for the first time on their wedding day, but despite the inauspicious beginnings the marriage proved very happy. George and Charlotte had 15 children during their long lives together, and he was never unfaithful. Beyond these initial concerns as king, George’s position as ruler of Britain was strong at
The time of his accession. In the mid-eighteenth century the country was beginning to benefit enormously from a range of developments which would catapult the country to become the world’s foremost military, economic and political power by the nineteenth century. During the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England had subsumed Scotland and
Ireland, although religious divisions in Ireland remained a problem. Moreover, following a series of civil wars in the seventeenth century England had emerged with a very strong political system where power was held between the monarchy, parliament and nobility, unlike in countries such as France and Russia where absolutist monarchs
Still held all the power, and where a weak king or queen could result in prolonged periods of instability. Additionally, the British navy had emerged as the foremost in the world during the eighteenth century. Finally, modern capitalism and proto-industry had emerged in England and the Low Countries
During the seventeenth century and London was emerging as a global capital of finance and trade, at the heart of a growing British Empire, which held possessions in North America, the Caribbean and India. And so, one thing was clear, George would not rule over a weak nation.
What Britain did have, however, was a divided parliament. Unlike in most European countries at the time where domestic political tensions generally existed between the monarchy and aristocracy on one side, and the gentry and the bourgeois merchant and professional classes on the other, wanting more political power, in England the
Power of the monarchy and nobility had already been considerably reduced during the civil wars of the seventeenth century. As a result, parliament had emerged as the main organ of government in England, although the king and nobility were still very influential.
But England had also been one of the first countries in the world where political parties representing differing societal viewpoints emerged and this created considerable political problems at times during George’s reign. In eighteenth-century Britain, these included the Whigs, the forerunners of the modern-day Liberals, and the Tories, the predecessors of the British Conservative Party.
Generally the Whigs tended to seek a stronger parliament which benefited the merchant class in Britain, while the Tories were a more conservative party, comprised of many nobles, and was generally, though not always, the party more favourable to the monarchy.
This duel between the Whigs and the Tories would shape how George III involved himself in Britain’s politics. As early the 1760s George’s role in parliament was clearly felt. In 1762 a new Tory government came to power headed by John Stuart, third earl of Bute,
A prominent Scottish lord and family friend of the royals. It was even rumoured that Bute was in a relationship with George’s widowed mother and there was consternation within the Whig establishment that this early sign of George’s willingness to intervene in parliamentary affairs might signal that the new king wished to exercise
Greater power than his grandfather. As such, much of Britain’s domestic politics in the 1760s was unstable, as the Whigs won a majority in parliament in the 1760s but a government cabinet could not be found which would last for long, until such time as William Pitt the Elder agreed to form a cabinet in
1766. Pitt was one of a handful of politicians who were central to running British state affairs during George’s reign and who must be mentioned in any consideration of the era. He dominated state affairs for much of the 1760s, before the Tory peer, Lord North, served as prime minister between 1770 and 1782.
Finally, Pitt the Elder’s son and namesake, William Pitt the Younger, dominated British politics in the 1780s and 1790s. These three men are critical to the assessment of George’s long kingship. Pitt’s heyday, however, it must be said, had passed by the late 1760s.
His career had peaked during the late 1750s in the final years of George II’s reign and the early 1760s, just as George III was settling into being addressed as the king. It was Pitt’s passionate belief in Britain’s imperial destiny which had led him to invest
So much in the Seven Years War against France, during which he served as Prime Minister of Great Britain. The instability of the 1760s was less grand and Pitt suffered from increasingly poor health himself. Thus, in 1768 he tendered his resignation, citing the continued influence of the Earl
Of Bute and the king’s meddling in parliament as his motives for walking away. Consequently, George, who was having family problems at the time relating to what he perceived as improper conduct amongst his siblings, settled on a more pliable candidate in the shape of Frederick North, Lord North.
It would be a fateful appointment and North’s tenure of the office of Prime Minister over the next twelve years, and George’s steady backing of him, have been controversial ever since. This is above all because North’s ascendancy occurred at the same time as the outbreak
Of major unrest within Britain’s colonies in North America and the eventual outbreak of a War of Independence there. Ultimately, although he ruled as king for sixty years, George III has become most famous for the rebellion which began in the British colonies on the eastern seaboard of North
America during the 1770s and which eventually resulted in the United States declaring their independence from Britain. British involvement in the region can be traced all the way back to the early seventeenth century. In 1607 the first permanent colony was settled at Jamestown in Virginia.
After a stuttering start by the 1620s it became a secure plantation based on tobacco and cotton farming. Further to the north the first British settlers arrived in New England in 1620 and ten years later new arrivals fleeing religious persecution in England began settling the town of Boston.
In the decades that followed these two colonies expanded outwards into new settlements at Rhode Island and Connecticut in the case of New England, and the Carolinas in the case of Virginia. Additional colonies were settled at Baltimore in what became the state of Maryland, and
A Quaker colony under their leader, William Penn, was set up in what became Pennsylvania. With the conquest of the Dutch colony of New Holland and the renaming of New Amsterdam as New York, the British had secured virtually all the land from New England south to Georgia by the end of the seventeenth century.
Yet the Thirteen Colonies, as they were increasingly referred to by the time of George III’s reign, were also increasingly difficult to rule over. At the heart of the matter was the lack of representation afforded to the American colonies in British political affairs.
The Thirteen Colonies had been settled by British people who believed that if they paid taxes to the crown and to the British government, just as people in London, Bristol and Manchester in England did, then they should have representation in parliament commensurate with paying their taxes.
To compound the problem the American colonies had become more and more wealthy in the course of the eighteenth century as proto-industry flourished in cities like Philadelphia and Boston and large taxes were generated by the slave plantations of sugar, cotton and tobacco in the southern colonies.
As the government in London sought to acquire greater control over these rich economies, local powers were stripped away from the colonies and large taxes such as the Stamp Act of 1765 were imposed. The latter tax saw resistance movements being organised within the colonies against what was deemed to be British overreach.
Trouble was brewing and it would soon boil over and lead to war. The 1770s would eventually see the colonial communities of the American colonies rebel against British rule. By this time there were approximately 2.5 million people living in the Thirteen Colonies, as opposed to 8 million in England.
This gives a sense of how large the tax base of the colonies was to the British exchequer. The Stamp Act had already seen outbreaks of violence against government officials in the late 1760s, but these were eclipsed in 1773 when North’s government in Britain passed the Tea Act.
This was intended to facilitate the British East India Company, which had huge stockpiles of tea in its warehouses in London, in selling its products in the American colonies, where the market was generally dominated by smuggled tea, rather than tea which was imported through
Legal channels and on which taxes would have to be paid following the legislation of the 1760s. The colonial community perceived this as a further act of provocation. Tensions flared, most famously in the city of Boston where on the 16th of December 1773
Political protestors attacked ships of the British East India Company and dumped large consignments of tea into Boston Harbour. A British customs’ officer was also tarred and feathered by the rioters. It was a sign of how severe tensions had become.
As news reached England of what had become known as the Boston Tea Party, George and the government of Lord North responded by passing the Boston Port Act in March 1774 which closed the port of Boston to all ships, even those operating legally, thus punishing the inhabitants of the town financially for their transgressions.
But the incident had initiated a sequence of events which could not now easily be stopped. In reaction to the government’s response, in North America the Colonies now sent representatives to a newly formed parliament of their own. The First Continental Congress met at Philadelphia in the autumn of 1774 and sent a petition
To George directly calling for a repeal of the acts which had been issued by North’s government in London in response to events in Boston. But this message had barely arrived in England and a response formulated and returned before tensions were spilling over into direct military conflict between supporters of the Continental
Congress and British troops stationed in North America. The first acts of the American Revolutionary War or the American War of Independence are typically understood to have played out at the Battles of Lexington and Concord on the 19th of April 1775 near Massachusetts Bay. Eight further years of war would follow.
George’s role in fomenting the political crisis which led to the unrest in the Colonies and then deepening it in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party has been a subject of immense debate over the years. His reputation has generally fared poorly as a result, but the issue is very much a
Partisan one of the time. In America, the king was derided from the very inception of the war by individuals who wanted to drum up support for the revolutionary struggle. In a pamphlet which the political theorist, Thomas Paine, wrote in 1775 and published
In the first days of 1776, entitled Common Sense, he argued in favour of the Colonies acquiring independence from Great Britain. In it Paine referred to George as ‘the royal brute’. The Declaration of Independence which followed later in 1776, largely from the pen of Thomas
Jefferson, conspiratorially and baselessly suggested that George had a plan to enslave his American subjects. Both documents are not exactly obscure. If the sales of Common Sense are measured proportionate to the actual population of the Thirteen Colonies in 1776 then Paine’s pamphlet is the best-selling book in American
History, while the Declaration of Independence is one of the most significant and widely cited political statements ever written. It is hard to imagine how any one individual’s reputation could suffer more than by being impugned in these documents. The reality, though, of George III’s role in initiating the revolutionary war in America
Is more complex. When he ascended to the throne in 1760 he inherited an already declining situation there, where the colonial community was disgruntled with the cost in manpower and resources which they had to pay for the Seven Years War against France. Conversely, George maintained a temperate stance throughout much of the mid-1770s while
The crisis was escalating. In a speech to parliament in England in October 1775 he stated his belief that much of the colonial community might have wished to remain loyal to the British government and that he believed the unrest to be the actions of a violent minority.
Living in a time when governments did not have the information available to them which modern-day administrations do, this was a reasonable belief, one which was added to by the fact that it took weeks to communicate accurate information back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean.
More strikingly, in September 1775 George claimed of his own response to the outbreak of the war that he had been quote: “anxious to prevent, if it had been possible, the effusion of the blood of my subjects”. George would make mistakes in relation to managing the American crisis, but he was no
Simple tyrant acting to augment his own royal power. Whatever George’s role in creating the conflict, the result was inevitable by 1776. By that time the Second Continental Congress had ordered one of its leading members, George Washington, a veteran of the British war in the 1750s, to form a new Continental Army
To fight an all-out war of independence against British rule. Then on the 4th of July 1776 the Congress in Philadelphia issued the Declaration of Independence in which British rule of the Thirteen Colonies was renounced. Even so, at this early stage there were hopes in England that a quick settlement could be
Reached by appealing to more moderate elements amongst the colonial community, however such beliefs were undermined quickly when the Continental Army succeeded in taking Boston, before a British counter-attack led to the seizure of New York City in 1777. These exchanges in New England and south towards New York culminated in October 1777 when a
Numerically superior revolutionary army led by Benedict Arnold overcame a smaller force of British, Canadian and German troops led by General John Burgoyne at the Battle of Saratoga in New York State. Thousands of British troops were captured and as the war now expanded France allied with the Continental Congress against Britain early in 1778.
The war which followed dragged on for another three years. Like the Seven Years War which had preceded it nearly twenty years earlier, it took on an international dimension with French and then Spanish entry on the side of the American revolutionaries and fighting occurring as far west as Louisiana and north into Canada.
However, the main theatre remained the Thirteen Colonies. By the early 1780s much of this focused on the Chesapeake region where Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis had been entrusted by the king and Lord North’s government with overseeing military activities in the Carolinas and Virginia, where it was believed the general population
Was more inclined to loyalty to the British crown and government. This tactic ultimately failed and after Cornwallis made his last stand at the Siege of Yorktown in October 1781 the British military campaign in the Colonies and the war was effectively over.
Two years later, in 1783, members of the Continental Congress and George III’s government agreed the Treaty of Paris in the French capital, whereby Great Britain acknowledged the existence of an independent United States of America and the border between the new nation and Britain’s territories in what would one day become Canada were established.
While the outcome of the American Revolutionary War was a bitter blow to George, one which he frequently mentioned in later years, his reign was otherwise one of profound growth and expansion of the British Empire. British victory over France in the Seven Years War in 1763 left Britain as the dominant colonial
Power in New France and in India. Thus, even before the United States was lost, Canada had been acquired. In India only small pockets of land were held on the coastline by the early 1760s, but in a series of incredible conquests over the next three decades much of the sub-continent
Around Bengal and Calicut and then further inland towards Delhi was brought under British rule by colonial adventurers such as Sir Robert Clive. Elsewhere, the British Royal Navy became the major power on the world’s seas. By the 1770s this extended to being able to defend British settlements as far away as
The Falklands Islands in the South Atlantic. Then, in a series of voyages which he made in the 1760s and 1770s, Captain James Cook discovered many of the Pacific Islands such as Hawaii, before charting the coast of much of Australia.
As a result, beginning with the First Fleet in 1787, Britain began sending settlers to New South Wales in the first acts of what would become British colonisation of Australia and New Zealand. Thus, George’s reign was the first during which the maxim that the sun never set on the British Empire became substantially true.
While the expansion of Britain’s empire and its increasing dominance of the world’s seas might have reflected well on George’s reign, there was nevertheless a growing problem at home, and more specifically with the king himself. George was a deeply religious person and a devoted family man, who also had a healthy
Lifestyle, being abstemious in his diet and exercising regularly. Yet as early as the 1760s there were reports of him acting in a slightly peculiar fashion at times, often becoming highly agitated and talking in an incessant fashion in ways which
Seemed out of character to those who knew him in a personal or professional capacity. Now the mid-1780s would see him act in ways which for the first time led both George himself and many individuals in government to question whether the king could actually be trusted to rule.
His malady, which has been euphemistically referred to as ‘The Madness of King George III’ might possibly have been brought about by porphyria, a disease of the liver which can lead to mental illnesses when toxins build up in the system. Reports that George had purple urine at times would seem to substantiate this diagnosis.
But others have suggested alternative psychological disorders, the most recent being that George had several bouts of increasingly severe and finally chronic mania. We will almost certainly never know for certain what caused George’s alleged ‘madness’. What is clear, though, is that in 1788 the king entered into a period of sustained ill
Health which for the first time resulted in a genuine crisis within the British state. This was a largely unprecedented situation in Britain at that time. George would often talk incessantly for hours, write sentences which ran to hundreds of words
And in his worst moments he was confused, unsteady on his feet, foamed at the mouth and was occasionally violent. A trip to Cheltenham Spa relieved his symptoms somewhat, but there were plans already being considered at this early stage for George’s son, namesake and heir, the future King George
IV, to head a regency government if his father remained incapacitated. In the end recourse to this drastic solution was not needed in the late 1780s, as George appeared to recover his health almost fully over the space of some months, but concerns
Remained and in the end George would enter a period of final illness in the early nineteenth century from which he would never recover. All of that, however, lay ahead, and in the late 1780s further war loomed. The end of the American Revolutionary War did not bring an end to periods of prolonged
Warfare for Britain during George’s long sixty year reign. In fact just a few short years after the end of the conflict with the Thirteen Colonies fresh political strife within the country which had proved the stalwart ally of the colonials, France, brought renewed upheaval.
In 1789 a popular revolt began in France against the absolutist rule of King Louis XVI. Within weeks of calling a parliament the king lost control of the situation and eventually the government was taken over by the French parliament in the summer of 1789.
By the end of that year the king and queen were effectively being detained in Paris. The French Revolution would soon become more radical and eventually a republic was declared in 1792 followed by the execution of Louis and his queen, Marie Antoinette, an act which George denounced as the work of savages.
Worried by these radical new developments in France, the European powers, led by Britain and Austria, were soon at war with France in what would become known as the French Revolutionary Wars. In one shape or another, the conflict would drag on between Britain and France for the next 23 years.
George’s government would be dominated on the political stage, throughout the period of the French Revolutionary Wars by William Pitt the Younger. Born in 1759, Pitt was the son of William Pitt the Elder who had played such a prominent
Role in the government of Great Britain during the last days of George II’s reign and the first decade of George III’s own reign. He steered a middle-of-the-road course in politics, often being described as being both an ‘independent Whig’ and then a ‘new Tory’.
Based on his abilities as an excellent administrator, and to some extent the reputation of his father preceding him, Pitt was asked to become Prime Minister in 1783 shortly after Lord North’s long government had ended. when he was just 24 years of age.
He would serve as head of George’s government for the next eighteen years. Throughout this period he remained stalwart in his opposition to the French in defence of British interests and worked to increase efficiencies within Great Britain and reform
The government in order to improve the taxation base to fund what eventually turned into nearly a quarter of a century of war with the French. Nearly all agreed that Pitt was a figure who did not act in his own interest, applied himself with quiet brilliance and was one of Britain’s greatest statesmen.
In placing his faith in him for nearly twenty years George made a wise decision after his questionable support for Lord North during the previous period. The initial struggles with France are known as the French Revolutionary Wars to distinguish them from the later wars with what would become the French Empire.
There were two major parts to this early conflict. The War of the First Coalition broke out in 1792 when France went to war with an alliance of Austria and Prussia, who were then joined by Great Britain and the Dutch Republic and then a number of smaller powers such as Spain, Portugal and Naples.
This war would last for five years, during which time, France’s internal politics were highly turbulent, but during which it also won immense victories on the battlefield owing to the use of the levée en masse, a form of national military conscription which drastically increased the Republic’s fighting abilities.
When the war largely ended in 1797 the French had conquered the Low Countries from Austria and the Dutch Republic, the rump of which was formed into what was known as the Batavian Republic. The French had also conquered much of western Germany, leaving them in possession of everything
On the west bank of the River Rhine. Advances had also been made in northern Italy where a brilliant young general from the island of Corsica named Napoleon Bonaparte had won several major victories against the Austrians. The War of the First Coalition was considered to have ended in 1797 when most of France’s
Major enemies, including Austria and Prussia, had made separate peace agreements with the French. However, the British did not and fought on, while for his part George would never consider any peace with France as anything other than a temporary measure until the Republic and what followed it was defeated.
Thus, Britain was the driving force behind the formation of a new coalition in 1798 and the outbreak of the War of the Second Coalition that year. They were joined in this by Austria, the Ottoman Empire, Naples and Portugal and briefly other powers such as Russia and the United States.
It began with a spectacular, but ultimately unsuccessful invasion of Egypt by a French army led by Bonaparte. Several years of fighting followed thereafter until 1802, during which France’s internal politics was again shifting dramatically, with the Republic drifting increasingly to a military dictatorship, one where power was gradually centralised in Bonaparte’s hands
As First Consul of the country. When the war ended in 1802 France was not only confirmed in its possession of western Germany, but it had increased its hold on Italy with the conquest of Tuscany. Europe now enjoyed a period of peace for just over one year.
As a result of his ascendancy and having confirmed France as the new predominant power on the continent Bonaparte was able to move to bring the French Republic to an end in 1804 and had himself proclaimed as Emperor Napoleon I of France.
Henceforth he, rather than the French Republic, was perceived as the enemy by George and the British. It was in the midst of the French Revolutionary Wars that George as king and Pitt as prime minister had to deal with the greatest internal threat to Britain and Ireland that had been
Seen since the Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland of 1745 and that would be seen again until the outbreak of the Irish War of Independence in 1919. It occurred in Ireland. While Scotland and Wales had been generally reconciled to English-political dominance of Britain between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, Ireland had remained a problem,
One which was largely, though not exclusively, manifested in the continuing adherence of the majority of the population there to Roman Catholicism. Several rebellions there between the 1590s and 1690s had seen the island nearly lost, but a series of brutally repressive Penal Laws issued by the Protestant dominated Irish
Parliament, aimed against Catholics and Scottish Presbyterians there had crushed political opposition for much of the eighteenth century, though agrarian violence and unrest was rife at times between the 1760s and the 1780s. The war with France now provided an opportunity for a more concerted revolt there.
And in 1798 such a rebellion was launched by the Society of United Irishmen, a republican revolutionary group which had support from France. The rebellion of 1798 saw risings from within Ireland at Wexford in the south-east as well as other sites.
A French expeditionary force then landed in the west, in county Mayo, however a larger second French force was prevented from landing in Ulster in the north by the Royal Navy. This proved crucial and in the two weeks that followed some 30,000 British troops and thousands
More irregular militia troops succeeded in suppressing the rebellion before Ireland could be turned into a launching pad for the French to attack Britain. It was a close shave and one which the British government was determined not to repeat. Thus, a resolution was quickly made in the aftermath of the rebellion that Irish discontent
Would be appeased by repealing the Penal laws there, including the right of Catholics to sit in parliament. However, in tandem it was determined that in order to avoid Irish Catholics forming a majority in the Irish parliament, it would be dispensed with entirely.
In January 1801 an Act of Union was passed whereby the Irish parliament was ended. Henceforth MPs from Ireland would sit at Westminster where the Catholic vote would be rendered powerless. George was granted the new title of King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland,
Having declined an offer to be thereafter known as the Emperor of the British Isles. An Irish parliament would not be convened again for over a century. Thus, the 1798 rebellion and the Act of Union which followed it quietened the Irish Question for several generations.
George and the British Parliament needed the Irish Question at least temporarily solved in order to shore the country up against further French encroachments. After a brief period of peace in 1802 and early 1803 the War of the Third Coalition began when Britain declared war on France in May 1803.
They were soon allied with Austria, Russia, Naples, Sicily and Sweden in what was the strongest coalition France had yet faced, but even so Napoleon carried all before him, culminating in a crushing victory against Austria and Russia at the Battle of Austerlitz in December 1805.
As the third coalition broke up in 1806 France had now added Naples to its possessions and effectively broken Austrian control over much of Germany. A further swift war followed within months, during which Napoleon resoundingly defeated Prussia and seized half of its territory, out of much of which the Duchy of Warsaw,
A Polish client-state of France, was formed. Finally, with Napoleon’s decision in 1808 to install his brother Joseph as King of Spain, a country which had been allied with France, but which at times had shown wavering loyalty, Napoleon Bonaparte was effectively ruler of an empire which stretched across Western Europe
East through Central Europe as far as the borders with Tsarist Russia. In 1809 Bonaparte’s iron tight control over Europe was made clear when an Austrian attempt to resist French control of Central Europe was quickly defeated. His only perennial enemy remained George’s Great Britain. However, there were cracks in Napoleon’s dominance of the continent.
Britain was unquestionably the foremost naval power in the world and the destruction of much of France’s fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar off the coast of Spain in 1805 had ensured that a land invasion of Britain could not now be undertaken by the French.
Moreover, efforts by Napoleon from late 1806 to bring the British to their knees by imposing a massive blockade on trade between Great Britain and continental Europe proved largely ineffective. Indeed the so-called ‘Continental System’ succeeded only in souring relations between Napoleon and Emperor Alexander I of Russia, as Russia remained the backdoor for British
Trade with the continent. These developments, combined with a front being opened by the British against France in Spain in 1807, one which would cost Napoleon dearly in troops and resources in the years that followed, ensured that Britain kept the fight against the French alive in what would
Ultimately prove to be the last years that George was lucid enough to rule as king in his own right. It would be unfair to suggest that George’s reign was characterised simply by the wars which Britain fought during it. While it is understandable to take that view, given that during the four decades between
1776 and 1815 Britain was nearly constantly involved in major conflicts with the United States and France, George’s reign and his kingship must be viewed as having contributed much more besides. For instance, this was the period in which the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, eventually changing the face of the entire world beyond recognition.
Just four years after George’s accession the ‘Spinning Jenny’, a multi-spindle spinning machine, was invented in Blackburn. Soon textile factories containing these new mass production devices were appearing across northern England and they were soon to be powered by engines. Additionally, while coal and other fuels such as charcoal had been used in increasing amounts
In England since the sixteenth century to power proto-industrial activities such as iron production, from the 1780s they were being used to power steam engines which had been refined in a design James Watt introduced in 1781. Meanwhile, new, more efficient ploughs and land drainage methods, as well as better farming
Practices such as crop and field rotation and selective breeding of livestock saw agricultural output expand considerably across Britain and because of his strong interest in agricultural innovation, George gained the nickname ‘Farmer George.’ It was not simply that Britain was becoming a centre of economic activity at this time.
The innovation which was being seen in the textile industry, agriculture and smelting practices extended to all manner of things including medicine, mechanics and engineering. For George, who had an interest in astronomy and clocks, things like this were of personal value and ones which the royal family actively patronised throughout his reign.
An instructive example of this was seen in the case of vaccines. In the 1790s a British physician by the name of Edward Jenner began working on ways to inoculate people against smallpox, an appalling virus which killed and disfigured its many victims, of which there were 400,000 every year in eighteenth-century Europe.
Jenner pioneered a method of preventing the worst effects of it by purposefully infecting people with a small amount of cowpox, a related though much weaker virus from which people quickly recovered, with the advantage of immunity from the more deadly smallpox.
His innovation was the first effective European vaccine against a major disease such as smallpox. Jenner was soon being supported by the king and in particular his wife, Queen Charlotte, and several of the royal children were inoculated using Jenner’s methods. George also provided financial and political support for Jenner to popularise and spread
His ideas in the months that followed. In this way George was a great supporter of the medical revolution of modern times. The years of war with France also saw increasing calls for an abolition of the slave trade in Britain. During the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over ten million Africans were forced
Onto boats in western Africa and transported to the Americas where they were used as slave labour, primarily in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and in Portuguese and Spanish controlled South America. Several hundred thousand of them had been brought to the American colonies to work the
Tobacco and cotton plantations in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia in particular, while the British had also transported large numbers of slaves to their sugar colonies in Barbados and other British-held colonies in the Caribbean. But the slave trade had always had a considerable number of opponents in America and Britain,
Even as it enriched port towns such as Liverpool. Many of these abolitionists originated from within religious groups such as the Quakers, who subsequently led efforts to abolish the slave trade in the eighteenth century. As a pious Christian, George favoured abolitionism and in the 1750s he is on record as saying
That slavery was indefensible and entirely unethical. He would often support moves towards abolishing the slave trade during his reign. The Abolitionist movement gained momentum throughout George’s reign. In 1772, what was known as Somersett’s Case was heard before the King’s Bench in London
To adjudicate on the case of a fugitive slave in Jamaica who had previously lived in England. The trial concluded that there was no legal basis for slavery under English common law. With this legal precedent established Abolitionist groups led by figures such as William Wilberforce,
Granville Sharp and Hannah More began building public pressure to bring about an end to the slave trade. This was compounded in 1777 when Vermont, a state which had opted not to join the United States in the first years following independence, abolished slavery, while in 1794 the French
Revolutionary government abolished slavery throughout its overseas territories, following which, the French colony of Saint Dominique in the Caribbean emerged as the first former colony ruled by former slaves. When the northern states in the US, such as Massachusetts and New York, abolished slavery
In their jurisdictions in the 1800s the argument in favour of abolishing the slave trade in Britain became overwhelming and finally in 1807 the Slave Trade Act was signed into law by George. It was a victory for a monarch who had called the institution ‘repugnant’, however the
1807 Act only prohibited the transport of slaves from Africa on British ships. The Abolitionists would have to wait until 1833 for the Slavery Abolition Act to effectively prohibit the entire institution of slavery throughout the British Empire. George III also made a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual life of Great
Britain and England in particular. The British Museum had been created in 1753 during the later years of his grandfather’s reign and George was committed to adding to the library which is the forerunner of the British Library of today.
Therefore George assembled what, by one estimation was deemed to be “one of the finest libraries ever created by one man.” He was advised in the process by such literary luminaries as Samuel Johnson. This personal collection consisted of 65,250 volumes, as well as approximately 19,000 tracts
And pamphlets, and the largest collection of British maps and charts ever assembled up to that point. The scope of the collections was vast, with a particular focus on history. Particularly noteworthy works included copies of William Caxton’s edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a Gutenberg Bible, and four copies of William Shakespeare’s
First Folio of collected works. Following his death, in honour of his earlier stated wishes, George’s incredible personal library was offered to the nation and was finally accepted into the British Museum as the King’s Library. Today the glass see-through tower which houses George’s vast collection makes up the central
Display which dominates the impressive foyer of the British Library in London. George was also a significant patron and collector of art, as well as being a competent architectural draughtsman himself. In 1762 he purchased a large collection of Italian works from Joseph Smith, the British
Consul in Venice at the time, and these works were brought to Buckingham House in London. George also commissioned portraits and other original works from some of the most famous artists of the day, notably by Thomas Gainsborough, regarded by some as the greatest British artist
Of the second half of the eighteenth century and one who painted several portraits of the royal family. Further artists whom he and the royal family patronised during his reign include Allan Ramsay and Sir Thomas Lawrence. George also played a significant role in ensuring that the Royal Academy of Arts was established
In 1768, providing it with vital initial funds and accommodation at Old Somerset House and other locations in its early days. Although he was often perceived as being interfering in the art world, there is no doubt that George was an enlightened and generous benefactor of both learning and artistic work in Great
Britain during the second half of the eighteenth century, and the British Enlightenment owed much to him. The war with France continued to trundle on through the late 18th Century. Napoleon remained firmly in control of much of Europe, but the British were beginning
To cause the French major trouble in the Iberian Peninsula where an invasion was launched in 1807. Under the command of Arthur Wellesley, who became the first Duke of Wellington, the Peninsular War became known as the Spanish Ulcer, such was its drain on French resources.
Then in 1812 Napoleon launched an ill-judged invasion of Tsarist Russia where his armies were largely destroyed in the harsh Russian winter. It was the beginning of the end and during the course of 1813 and 1814 the Russians and then the Prussians and Austrians began rolling back all of Bonaparte’s conquests of the
Previous fifteen years across Eastern and Central Europe. Yet George would not be in an appropriate state of mind by the mid-1810s to be able to celebrate the victory after over twenty years of war with the French. In the late 1700s his relationship with his son and heir, the Prince of Wales, the future
George IV, had deteriorated, compounded by rumours that the Princess of Wales had given birth to an illegitimate child several years earlier. A commission of investigation determined that the rumours were false, but did remark that Princess Caroline’s general conduct in recent years had encouraged such unfavourable allegations.
This, compounded by charges in parliament in 1809 that the king’s favourite son, the Duke of York, had been guilty of selling military commissions, along with a serious health development for his youngest and favourite daughter, the Princess Amelia, was the context in which George’s mental health yet again deteriorated.
Then in 1810, Amelia’s health worsened further and another son was involved in a scandal involving a valet of his being found dead. Just weeks later, George entered his final bout of madness. It would last ten years. His last public appearance was at Windsor Castle on the 25th of October 1810 where his
Golden jubilee was marked. Yet what should have been a celebration of George’s fiftieth year on the throne was overshadowed by the fact that Amelia was at death’s door, and would die only a week later, and the king was clearly not okay, appearing manic and flustered.
Rumours circulated that his former symptoms had returned at their most severe level, since the crisis of 1788, and now they were worse than ever. Living in an age when little was known about what caused such psychological illnesses and with virtually no effective treatments available, George was confined to a strait-jacket within days.
His care improved somewhat over time, but George clearly could not continue to act as king. The royal family and the political nation now needed to act in what was a relatively unprecedented crisis. When monarchs had become psychologically incapacitated in past times, such as had happened with King
Henry VI in the mid-fifteenth century, rivals usually used the opportunity to initiate a civil war to press their own claim. That was out of the question by the early nineteenth century. Instead, an act of parliament was passed on the 7th of February 1811 whereby a regency
Government was established, with George’s son and heir, the future George IV, acting as regent until such time as his father should either recover or die. And the king’s care was entrusted to his wife, Queen Charlotte, and a small council headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, to ensure that George’s person would not become
A political football for competing interests within the regency government. A speedy recovery was initially hoped for, as many attributed this latest bout of psychological ill health to the king’s concerns for Amelia, however as the weeks went by it was clear that George’s condition was actually deteriorating rather than improving.
Consequently, during the last ten years of his reign the king played no role in public life, such that the 1810s are typically referred to as the Regency Period. Though George III cannot be said to have been King of Great Britain during the Regency Period,
These years did bring closure to the political events which had dominated his reign in the 1790s and 1800s. Napoleon was finally defeated after his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812 by the Sixth Coalition which had been assembled in the spring of 1813.
When an army of nearly 200,000 men under his command were defeated by a largely Russian, Austrian and Prussian army of over 360,000 troops at Leipzig in Germany in mid-October 1813, it was clear that Napoleon Bonaparte’s days were numbered.
France was invaded in 1814 and he was forced to abdicate, and despite a brief re-seizure of power in France the following year, after defeat at the famous Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 Napoleon was exiled to the Atlantic island of St Helena where he died in 1821.
At the Congress of Vienna which brought the Napoleonic Wars to an end, the French monarchy was restored. Britain’s main allies on the continent, Austria, Prussia and Russia, gained lands in Italy, Germany and Poland, but Britain’s gains came in the form of colonies, notably
The Cape Colony in South Africa which the British had conquered from France’s Dutch ally during the war, Ceylon, now Sri Lanka off the coast of India, and Malta, which had also been occupied by the British during the course of the war.
Sadly, the last nine or so years of King George III’s life were spent in a twilight world, one in which he was almost completely unaware of what was happening around him. To compound matters the king, who was already approaching his mid-seventies at the onset
Of his final illness in 1810, suffered from deteriorating physical health as well. His eyesight declined until he eventually became blind and he was also very hard of hearing as the months and years went by. Those who loved him tried to provide him with good care, but no medical treatment was available
For his condition at the time, and it was believed that the best course of action was to try to reduce the stimuli that would exacerbate his conditions. This included restricting visitors, and George spent his last years largely alone, having conversations with individuals from his past who were long dead.
Ever a musician, he continued, despite his increasing deafness, to try to play some music on a harpsichord which had once been owned by the great composer George Frideric Handel, whom he had been a prominent patron of. George III died at Windsor on the 29th of January 1820 and was buried at St George’s
Chapel over two weeks later. At the time he was the longest serving monarch England or Great Britain had ever seen. Great Britain continued to flourish in the aftermath of George’s long reign. Following his father’s death in 1820 his son finally ascended as king in his own right
As George IV, though it was George III’s granddaughter, Victoria, who became synonymous with nineteenth century Britain and the empire at the height of its global power. Her reign would last longer even than that of her grandfather, beginning in 1837 and ending in 1901.
During the Victorian period the British Empire stretched from Australia and New Zealand, through India, much of Africa, Britain and Ireland and west to Canada and the Caribbean. The British economy was the largest in the world for much of the Victorian age and the
Country’s navy guaranteed the nation was the strongest military power globally as well. Before America became the policeman of the world in the twentieth century, Britain occupied that role in the nineteenth century, and presided over a period where the European powers avoided
An all-out conflict between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the outbreak of the First World War a century later. Much of the seeds of Britain’s status as a superpower and the Pax Britannica, the great peace which it oversaw were sewn during George III’s reign.
George III quickly became one of the most controversial monarchs in British history. Many of these interpretations were very negative. For liberals he was a monarch who interfered too much with parliament; for Catholics his actions in Ireland were deemed duplicitous; and for Americans, George soon became the tyrannous oppressor of the Colonies.
These views persisted for decades and several prominent Victorian historians suggested that George intruded too much into the politics of the country, while as late as 1937 it was even suggested that he had attempted “to foist a dictatorship on Britain.” All of these views are partisan and skewed.
The problems in the relationship with the American Colonies existed well before George became king and thereafter their conflict was largely with the British Parliament. The Irish Question dated in one form or another back to the Late Middle Ages and George can
Hardly be blamed for following the example which had been provided by Scotland a century earlier of abating some of Ireland’s problems by getting rid of its parliament. Finally, the suggestion that George III was an autocratic king in an age which included
King Louis XVI of France and Emperor Alexander I of Russia is fanciful. George was not a tyrant and his reputation has accordingly been revised in recent times to present him more favourably, most recently in a biography by Andrew Roberts.
Part of the reason why George’s reign is so striking and why he has been judged so differently by different people and generations was that his reign covered a period of such immense change. He succeeded in 1760 at a time when Watt’s steam-engine, Jenner’s vaccine and the telegraph
Were unheard of and the US Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution were political events which lay ahead. All of these things either happened or were invented during George’s time as king and it was just a few years after he passed away that slavery was fully abolished throughout
The British Empire and the first steam-powered commercial train-line began operating between Stockport and Darlington. So momentous was the period George III led Great Britain through, that historians generally concur that in 1760 the world was in a period called the ‘early modern’ era, but by
The time George died it had definitively crossed the threshold into full ‘modernity’. George III might not have been a perfect king, but in the face of a great degree of personal adversity he managed to act as Britain’s head of state with many substantial successes
During a period which by any stretch of the imagination presented considerable challenges. Perhaps he is best remembered as that; a man who did a decent job under trying circumstances. What do you think of King George III?
Was he really a tyrant, or has he been misinterpreted unfairly as being one, when in fact he led Britain through some of its most significant years? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
