April 21, 2023 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, American history hasn't been kind to our last king. He's viewed as a tyrant, the Declaration of Independence claims that he was unfit to lead a free people, and the musical Hamilton paints him as a brute. The truth is anything but this. English historian Andrew Roberts tells the story of King George III, and why he isn't the man he's often portrayed to be.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories, and up next
a story from British historian Andrew Roberts, who's written the
book Churchill Walking with Destiny and also for this feature
story the Last King of America, The Misunderstood Reign of
King George the Third. Today Andrew shares with us that
story and the misconceptions about the last English ruler of
(00:34):
this country. Take it away, Andrew.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
The thing that Americans assume about King George the Third
was that he was a tyrant. And we know that
because he was mentioned as being unfit to be the
ruler of a free people in the Declaration of Independence.
The Common Sense Pamphlets that was written by Tom Payne
(01:00):
describes him as.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
The royal brute of Britain.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
And of course we also know that he was an
absurd sort of camp but sinister and sadistic figure from
lin Manuel Miranda's hit musical Hamilton, the American Musical. This
is none of this is right, none of this is true.
He was not a tyrant.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
He was, in fact a constitutional monarch.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
He believed in limited government, a limited monarchy, never believed
in the divine right of kings and so on, and
never vetoed an Act of Parliament in his life. George
the Third was born in June seventeen thirty eight, the
son of the Prince of Wales, Prince Frederick, and his mother,
(01:46):
Princess Augusta. It was a very rural society. About eighty
percent of people took their livings from agriculture. It was
a very hierarchic society, with a small aristocracy at the
top and an awful lot of working people at the
bottom of society.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
It was an old fashioned in a sense.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Society because this was before the Industrial Revolution and it
was a country at war for much of its time
for the next one hundred years, primarily with France. Georgia
third had a very wide education for the day. He
had tutors who taught him much more widely and indeed
(02:31):
deeply than the schoolboys of the day, even at the
best public schools in Britain. One of the things that
he was required to do by his tutor, the Earl
of Butte, was to write essays about historical and constitutional issues.
And it was a very wide ranging education and we
(02:52):
can tell from these essays that he had a true
belief in limited constitutional monarchy. He was totally opposed to
the slave trade and to slavery. It was very remarkable
that in the seventeen fifties, when no country in the
world had out lord slavery, and which an awful lot
(03:13):
of them were practicing slavery right the way across the globe,
that the Prince of Wales should be writing essays really
holding the concept of slavery and execration. As he put it,
he said that it was the arguments for it was absurd,
and this had a major effect on him later on
because he didn't buy or sell a slave in his life,
(03:35):
he never invested in the companies that did that, and
ultimately he signed the legislation that abolished the slave trade.
George the Third was a good natured, charming, intelligent person.
He was very much in love with his wife, which
was extremely unusual in the Hanoverian family, which was otherwise
(03:56):
extremely dysfunctional group of kings. And daughter third was a believing, pious,
practicing Anglican. He did believe that the Christian faith was
something that needed to permeate every aspect of his life,
and it did, and he felt that he had a
(04:17):
close connection to the Almighty. He much preferred talking to
bishops than talking to politicians. That he went to church
every Sunday and enjoyed it. The Seven Years War, which
started actually here in America before the official outbreak in
(04:40):
seventeen fifty six, continued until seventeen sixty three and was
fought by Britain and Prussia and the American colonies on
one side versus pretty much the whole of the rest
of Europe, Russia, Austria, France primarily. So it was a
world war, it's sometimes called by his store into the
(05:00):
First World War, because it continued on several continents right
the way through to the East Indies, and it was
a tremendous victory for the British led coalition, to the
point that in the Treaty of Paris in seventeen sixty three,
the French were flung off the North American continent Altogether.
(05:24):
The war was tremendously expensive. It doubled the national debt
in Britain. George the Third he had a very conservative
with a small sea view of the national debt. He
thought it was the moral duty of the government to
try to pay it down as much as he could,
and so in an attempt two years after the war
(05:44):
to try to get the Americans to help defray the
expenses of it, or at least defray the expenses of
troops that were stationed in North America. Because every penny
of the Stamp Act was going to be spent in
North America, they tried to bring in this Act of
(06:06):
Parliament which would raise taxes on printed paper. The Stamp
Act was intended to only need to raise a very
small amount of money, between forty and fifty thousand pounds,
which worked out as between the two point five million
Americans is only about two shillings and sixpence per American
per year. But it wasn't really the level of the
(06:27):
Stampact so much as the principle of it, because for
the last one hundred years or so the British had
not imposed internal duties. There had been trading dues, of course,
and they had been around since the time of Oliver Cromwell,
but this was a departure and one that the Americans
were not going to put up with. It was also
(06:47):
quite unfortunate that the people who were most hit, most
heavily hit by the Stamp Act, namely solicitors, lawyers, journalists,
were also and always have been and indeed are today
the most vocal people in society. America deserved independence. By
(07:11):
the seventeen sixties and early seventeen seventies, it was a
country of two point five million people. It had seven
percent year on year growth, really burgeoning economy. It had
more bookshops in Philadelphia than in any other city of
the Empire except for London. Also had no external French threat,
(07:31):
so the nearest French army was one thousand miles.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
Away in Haiti.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
So it was the right time for America to become
self governing. And at the same time, the British government
passed a proclamation.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Saying that the Thirteen Colonies could.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Not expand over the Allegheny Mountains westwards, and so it
essentially preserved the whole of the American continent west of
the Alleghenies as one gigantic Native American reservation essentially, And
this was something that a lot of the founding fathers
who had shares in speculative land deals, especially in the
(08:13):
Ohio River Valley, were not going to put up with.
So these things all coming together created by the mid
to late seventeen sixties an intellectual movement in America that
understood that the best thing for the country was to
become a country and a self governing one. The truly
(08:35):
important factor in the creation of the American Revolution was
not issues over taxation and representation. Frankly, both the South
Carolinian and the Virginian delegates to the Stampack Congress were
told not to accept representation if it were offered. But
it was about sovereignty. It was about who ultimately was
(08:56):
in control of the laws that were passed in America,
and when American local legislatures could be vetoed by the
London Parliament.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
That was something that.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Went to the heart of whether or not America was
going to become a sovereign nation.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
And you're listening to Andrew Roberts tell a story. Heck,
I know a lot about history and it was revealing
to me. And by the way, we're still having the
same arguments about sovereignty, about who decides and who pays,
even here in this country with a distant power at
least as many people see it called Washington, DC. When
we come back more of this remarkable storytelling, Andrew Roberts
(09:39):
telling the story of the last King of America, King
George the Third. Here on our American stories. And we're
(10:09):
back with our American stories and our story on the
last King of America, King George the Third. And by
the way, pick up this book on Amazon. You won't
put it down. It's terrific writing and a real suspense
yon in some ways. When we last left off, Andrew
Roberts was telling us about what kind of man King
George was. He hated slavery, he was a constitutional monarch,
(10:33):
and unlike popular perception, he wasn't a tyrant. But in
order for us to gain our independence, he had to
be painted as one. Let's continue with the story.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Although the American founding fathers quite rightly wanted to clothe
themselves in the man of the Great Revolutions of sixteen
forty two against Charles the First and sixteen eighty eight
against James the Second, that required trying to straight jacket
George the Third into being a Stuart absolutist monarch, which
(11:13):
he absolutely was not, and so instead they needed to
try to turn him into a tyrant, which he also
was not.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
We know what tyrants did.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
In the late eighteenth century, when only had to look
at Russia or Austria or Prussia. What the Spanish were
doing in New Orleans what the French were doing in
the Corsica, to see what despotism looked like in the
eighteenth century, and George I was doing none of that.
He never arrested an American editor closed in an American newspaper.
(11:43):
He didn't station armies in the American cities except for
Boston after seventeen sixty eight. He was not a tyrant
in the eighteenth century meaning of the phrase, which was
cruel or despotic. The Boston Tea Party was an attempt
(12:06):
in December seventeen seventy three to keep the price of
tea high for those Bostonian merchants, many of whom were
also smugglers to profit from, and the British government wanted
to allow the dumping essentially of huge amounts of tea
from the East India Company, which was going bankrupt at
(12:27):
the time.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
This would have been very good for American.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Consumers of tea because they would pay much less for
their tea, but this wasn't good at all for the
Bostonian merchants, who had their men attack the ships that
were bringing the tea into the harbor and through nine
thousand pounds in weight of tea, tons and tons of
tea into the harbor. So this encouraged the Lord North
(12:53):
government back in London to passed various tough acts called
the Intolerable Acts in America, the coercive Acts in Britain
against the Port of Boston and the province of Massachusetts Bay.
And the King was told that by the Royal governors
that the other provinces would not stand by Massachusetts. And
(13:16):
it was one of many, many appallingly bad pieces of
advice that he got from his men on the ground.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
It was always disastrous.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
When the royal governors and other important peoples, just like
General Sir Thomas Gage, the commander in chief of the
British Army in America, told the King that the Americans
would react meekly to the coercive acts, he couldn't have
got it more wrong. In fact, they reacted with fury
and also in a unified way. Once the Declaration of
(13:48):
Independence was published famously on the fourth of July seventeen
seventy six, the reaction across the thirteen colonies was immediate,
and on the ninth of July, the King's statue in
the Bowling Green in southern Manhattan was pulled down, melted
down to create forty four thousand LED bullets for the
(14:10):
Continental Army, and right the way across the colonies, his
role insignia was taken down and burnt. He was burnt
in effigy. The names of various colleges and streets and
even cities was changed to get rid of British monarchical nomenclature.
So it was a really very powerful and immediate response.
(14:41):
The British people split on a number of different lines.
On religious lines, the Anglicans being more in favor of
the war, the Dissenters against it. On class lines, it
tended to be a much more middle class thing to
be in favor of the war, the working classes didn't
much like the idea, and also actually interestingly, regional lines.
(15:04):
Some counties supported it, other counties didn't. In America, some
one third of the population were loyalists. They didn't want
the war to break out at all. Quite a lot
of them actually raised arms against the Patriot Cause and
the Continental Army. So it was an element of civil
war as well, which explains the atrocities. In all civil
(15:28):
wars you get much worse atrocities than in normal state
on state wars. In order to try to subdue the
Thirteen Colonies, the British had to send an army which
never exceeded fifty thousand men, and for most of the
war was between thirty and thirty five thousand men, which
was nothing like enough for an enormous country of eighteen
(15:50):
hundred miles from top to toe. It was a force
that had to be given one third of a ton
of supplies per man, and so that also was a
tremendously difficult logistical problem to get that across the Atlantic,
three thousand miles of the Atlantic with the Royal Navy,
(16:10):
especially when later on in the war these ships were
being attacked. And it's always very dangerous to fight against
people who actually used their marksmanship to put food in
their children's mouths, and that was true of an awful
lot of Americans. The actual marksmanship was something that the
(16:31):
British Army was not prepared for.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
They were the.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
American militiaman, minutman and later Continental Army soldiers were an
awful lot better than the British were expecting them to be.
The British had a strategic plan, really the only workable
strategic plan of the war from the British side, which
(16:56):
was to send Sir William Howe up the Hudson Valley.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
From New York with one force.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
At the same time, Sir John Burgoyne came down from
Canada to Albany with another and they were going to
meet and thereby secure the Hudson Valley and cut off
the New England Colonies from the rest of the Thirteen Colonies,
and that, if it had come off, might have won
the war. But Sir William Howe veered off Eastwoods and
(17:23):
captured Philadelphia, and that led to Sir John Burgoyne being
captured at Saratoga in October seventeen seventy seven. At the
time of the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga, the public opinion,
which hitherto hadn't really mattered very much in British politics,
suddenly became an extremely important aspect, and it turned against
(17:47):
the war. The Radical Whigs in Parliament openly sided with
the Americans.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
They wore blue and.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Buff clothes, which was the color of the Continental Army officers,
and was a highly difficult moment for the whole of
the British political set up. The government essentially was in
very great danger of falling.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
And you're listening to Andrew Roberts tell a heck of
a story. And it's true. It was our first civil war.
More from Andrew Roberts the book The Last King of America.
Go to Amazon or the usual suspects and buy it.
After these messages, and we continue with our American stories
(19:40):
and our final segment on the story of the Last
King of America, King George the Third. When we last
left off, Britain was in crisis as public perception on
the war began to turn and things were about to
get worse for Britain. Here again is Andrew Roberts with
the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
What happened then was that the French got involved in
the war in February seventeen seventy eight. The French were
always there when they need you, And in seventeen eighty
the Spaniards declared war, and in seventeen eighty also the Dutch.
So the British were suddenly fighting a world war against
(20:29):
these three major European powers, which turned the whole of
the American War of Independence into a colonial backwater.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Whilst we fought for our very existence.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
There was one point in seventeen seventy nine, when Nefranco
Spanish fleet with thirty thousand men was about to land
in Britain and invade Britain.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
So instead of having fifty.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Thousand men in America, we had to drop that down
to thirty five thousand and just stay in the eastern
seaboard cities that we'd already held by that stage. We
were to capture Charleston in seventeen eighty, which in many
ways was the greatest British victory of the war, but
it didn't change the overall balance of forces because the
(21:14):
war was being fought in Gibraltar and in the East
Indies and the West Indies, Africa and so on. There
were any number of reasons why the American War of
Independence was.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Lost by the British.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Some military historians, including me, in fact, think that it
couldn't have ever been won after the escape of George
Washington from Manhattan, if the Battle of Bunker Hill hadn't
been such an extremely expensive pyrrhic victory for the British,
if Valley Forge had gone differently and there were more desertions,
(21:49):
and the sublime charismatic leadership of George Washington had either
not been there or not been so impressive, then there
was a chance of that rebellion being being smothered in
its cradle. However, by the time that he had got
through the Valley Forge months it was pretty much and
especially when the French turned the whole thing into a
(22:12):
world war, it's so much more difficult to fight on more.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Than one front.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
There were also lots of other problems in that the
British War Office hated the Admiralty and vice versa. Lots
of the generals all hated each other. The generals often
hated the admirals and vice versa. I mean, it was
quite extraordinary the amount of internal bickering that went on,
especially of course when it looked like it was going
to be a losing war. Once the British were fighting
(22:41):
a war not just on two fronts, but on five
or six fronts, the torrent was just too strong, and
George the third took a long time to recognize that
actually we were going to lose the thirteen colonies, that
they were going to become independent, and that the sooner
the war ended, the more likely it was that we
weren't going to lose.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Any more colonies. As it was.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
We did lose some, but it was a question of
drawing a line before the situation got even worse. The
defeat was the most catastrophic strategic reverse for Britain between
the loss of the Ajovan lands in the fifteenth century
and the fall of France in nineteen forty. It was
(23:26):
deeply humiliating for the king. It brought down the Lord
North government. It was expensive both in blood and treasure,
and of course the loyalists, over eighty thousand of them,
had to flee the United States, and they got out
with their lives, many of them and escaped to Canada,
from where they helped build the Second British Empire in
(23:51):
India and Africa and elsewhere. It was also very fortunate
that the slaves who had escaped from their masters, including
those actually who that belonged to George Washington, a couple
of them, were also allowed off in the British ships
from New York to Canada, and so we're not forced
to return to their servitude. But actually, when one looks
(24:13):
at the Germaine clan, at the low level of recruitment,
at the hatred's mutual jealousies and bickering between the departments
and so on, and indeed the just sheer width of
the Atlantic. None of these were George the Third's fault.
He can indeed slightly be faulted over the low recruitment
(24:33):
actually because of some decisions that he supported, But this
was the Lord North ministry getting things wrong constantly, and
also the generals not even supporting the plan that they
put their names to. So you know, it's very often
that King George the Third is blamed for losing the
American War of Independence, But of the ten or so
(24:53):
factors that did lose Britain that war, he was only
really marginally involved in one of them. I think that
the real genius of the American Founding was that the
founding fathers did something totally exceptional in history, because there
are any number of other countries and peoples throughout history
(25:17):
who have escaped depression and set up their own country
and founded their own sovereignty. One thinks of the Israelites
escaping from the Egyptians, the Spanish fighting the Dutch, the
Austrians and the Italians, the Turks and the Greeks. You know,
in each case these were oppressive forces and the other
(25:37):
people escaped from oppression. What America did was to demand
its own freedom and independence and sovereignty from a power
that was not oppressing it, from a king who was
not a tyrant in any way that you can use
the term. You know, he was not cruel, he was
not despotic, but he was somebody who had to go
(25:59):
because America was ready for its own independence.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
And that was proved to have been absolutely the right.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Decision for America, because a century later you were the
most powerful nation in the world. I think that the
sort of takeaway message is that America's demand for autonomy
was more important and more powerful than anything else, and
certainly that George the Third's so called tyranny.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
Has to be seen in that light. He was not
a tyrant.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
The declaration was wrong when it said that he was
unfit to be the ruler of free people, because he
was the ruler of Britain and we were a free
people at the time. Article two of your Constitution invests
huge amounts of power in your president, and I noticed
last April the Harvard Law Review argued very convincingly that
(26:53):
in fact, the present American president, the imperial presidency as
it has grown to become, is in fact much more
powerful than George of the third was as King of England.
So unless you believe that the imperial presidency of today
is a tyranny, then I don't think that you can
continue to believe that George the third was one and
(27:17):
the king had learnt a lot of the lessons really
of the American War of Independence. So in the French
Revolutionary and subsequently Napoleonic Wars, Britain was in a much
better state military, in fact nothing There's nothing better for
an army than to lose a war in time for
the next one, because people learn from the necessity of
(27:40):
defeat far better than from anything else.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
So by Napoleonic Wars, you know, we had.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
People who were officers who were able to be chosen
on their talents rather than how rich they were or
where they came from in society. And we had one
thing that George learned was how important it was to
stick to the war. We didn't trust the French royalists,
who liked the loyalists in America never really amounted to
(28:08):
as much as was hoped for, and so overall it
was a better war for Britain to fight, and not
least of course it was against the French. The king
was on the throne for longer than any other king
of England. He was on the throne for nearly sixty years,
but the last ten years of which was a regency,
because he had gone blind and deaf, and he was
(28:31):
also senile, and he was mad. So the last decade
of his life, from eighteen ten to eighteen twenty is
a very sad and pathos ridden one, where he was
in Windsor Castle and no one came to visit him.
He played the harpsichord to himself and couldn't even hear
the music.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Writing of Great Britain.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
In the king's obituary in The Times, it said, under
the guidance of George of the third, she held fast
by the laws and religion of her our ancestors, and
escaped the vortex of the French Revolution on the edge
of which she stood. And in December seventeen sixty eight,
John Wesley wrote his whole conduct, both in private and
(29:13):
in public, ever since he began his reign, the uniform
tenor of his behavior, the general course, both of his
words and actions, has been worthy of an Englishman, worthy
of a Christian, and worthy of a king.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
And a special thanks on the production to Monty Montgomery
and a special thanks to Andrew Roberts. The book The
Last King of America. Go to Amazon and the usual
suspects and pick up a copy, and my goodness, what
a story about what we were really fighting about and
for which was our autonomy. It wasn't about money. It
was about us deciding for ourselves who we were and
(29:52):
who we would become in the end, the story of America.
Here on, our American stories
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Into
And we returned to our American stories, and up next
a story from British historian Andrew Roberts, who's written the
book Churchill Walking with Destiny and also for this feature
story the Last King of America, The Misunderstood Reign of
King George the Third. Today Andrew shares with us that
story and the misconceptions about the last English ruler of
(00:34):
this country. Take it away, Andrew.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
The thing that Americans assume about King George the Third
was that he was a tyrant. And we know that
because he was mentioned as being unfit to be the
ruler of a free people in the Declaration of Independence.
The Common Sense Pamphlets that was written by Tom Payne
(01:00):
describes him as.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
The royal brute of Britain.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
And of course we also know that he was an
absurd sort of camp but sinister and sadistic figure from
lin Manuel Miranda's hit musical Hamilton, the American Musical. This
is none of this is right, none of this is true.
He was not a tyrant.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
He was, in fact a constitutional monarch.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
He believed in limited government, a limited monarchy, never believed
in the divine right of kings and so on, and
never vetoed an Act of Parliament in his life. George
the Third was born in June seventeen thirty eight, the
son of the Prince of Wales, Prince Frederick, and his mother,
(01:46):
Princess Augusta. It was a very rural society. About eighty
percent of people took their livings from agriculture. It was
a very hierarchic society, with a small aristocracy at the
top and an awful lot of working people at the
bottom of society.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
It was an old fashioned in a sense.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Society because this was before the Industrial Revolution and it
was a country at war for much of its time
for the next one hundred years, primarily with France. Georgia
third had a very wide education for the day. He
had tutors who taught him much more widely and indeed
(02:31):
deeply than the schoolboys of the day, even at the
best public schools in Britain. One of the things that
he was required to do by his tutor, the Earl
of Butte, was to write essays about historical and constitutional issues.
And it was a very wide ranging education and we
(02:52):
can tell from these essays that he had a true
belief in limited constitutional monarchy. He was totally opposed to
the slave trade and to slavery. It was very remarkable
that in the seventeen fifties, when no country in the
world had out lord slavery, and which an awful lot
(03:13):
of them were practicing slavery right the way across the globe,
that the Prince of Wales should be writing essays really
holding the concept of slavery and execration. As he put it,
he said that it was the arguments for it was absurd,
and this had a major effect on him later on
because he didn't buy or sell a slave in his life,
(03:35):
he never invested in the companies that did that, and
ultimately he signed the legislation that abolished the slave trade.
George the Third was a good natured, charming, intelligent person.
He was very much in love with his wife, which
was extremely unusual in the Hanoverian family, which was otherwise
(03:56):
extremely dysfunctional group of kings. And daughter third was a believing, pious,
practicing Anglican. He did believe that the Christian faith was
something that needed to permeate every aspect of his life,
and it did, and he felt that he had a
(04:17):
close connection to the Almighty. He much preferred talking to
bishops than talking to politicians. That he went to church
every Sunday and enjoyed it. The Seven Years War, which
started actually here in America before the official outbreak in
(04:40):
seventeen fifty six, continued until seventeen sixty three and was
fought by Britain and Prussia and the American colonies on
one side versus pretty much the whole of the rest
of Europe, Russia, Austria, France primarily. So it was a
world war, it's sometimes called by his store into the
(05:00):
First World War, because it continued on several continents right
the way through to the East Indies, and it was
a tremendous victory for the British led coalition, to the
point that in the Treaty of Paris in seventeen sixty three,
the French were flung off the North American continent Altogether.
(05:24):
The war was tremendously expensive. It doubled the national debt
in Britain. George the Third he had a very conservative
with a small sea view of the national debt. He
thought it was the moral duty of the government to
try to pay it down as much as he could,
and so in an attempt two years after the war
(05:44):
to try to get the Americans to help defray the
expenses of it, or at least defray the expenses of
troops that were stationed in North America. Because every penny
of the Stamp Act was going to be spent in
North America, they tried to bring in this Act of
(06:06):
Parliament which would raise taxes on printed paper. The Stamp
Act was intended to only need to raise a very
small amount of money, between forty and fifty thousand pounds,
which worked out as between the two point five million
Americans is only about two shillings and sixpence per American
per year. But it wasn't really the level of the
(06:27):
Stampact so much as the principle of it, because for
the last one hundred years or so the British had
not imposed internal duties. There had been trading dues, of course,
and they had been around since the time of Oliver Cromwell,
but this was a departure and one that the Americans
were not going to put up with. It was also
(06:47):
quite unfortunate that the people who were most hit, most
heavily hit by the Stamp Act, namely solicitors, lawyers, journalists,
were also and always have been and indeed are today
the most vocal people in society. America deserved independence. By
(07:11):
the seventeen sixties and early seventeen seventies, it was a
country of two point five million people. It had seven
percent year on year growth, really burgeoning economy. It had
more bookshops in Philadelphia than in any other city of
the Empire except for London. Also had no external French threat,
(07:31):
so the nearest French army was one thousand miles.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
Away in Haiti.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
So it was the right time for America to become
self governing. And at the same time, the British government
passed a proclamation.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Saying that the Thirteen Colonies could.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Not expand over the Allegheny Mountains westwards, and so it
essentially preserved the whole of the American continent west of
the Alleghenies as one gigantic Native American reservation essentially, And
this was something that a lot of the founding fathers
who had shares in speculative land deals, especially in the
(08:13):
Ohio River Valley, were not going to put up with.
So these things all coming together created by the mid
to late seventeen sixties an intellectual movement in America that
understood that the best thing for the country was to
become a country and a self governing one. The truly
(08:35):
important factor in the creation of the American Revolution was
not issues over taxation and representation. Frankly, both the South
Carolinian and the Virginian delegates to the Stampack Congress were
told not to accept representation if it were offered. But
it was about sovereignty. It was about who ultimately was
(08:56):
in control of the laws that were passed in America,
and when American local legislatures could be vetoed by the
London Parliament.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
That was something that.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Went to the heart of whether or not America was
going to become a sovereign nation.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
And you're listening to Andrew Roberts tell a story. Heck,
I know a lot about history and it was revealing
to me. And by the way, we're still having the
same arguments about sovereignty, about who decides and who pays,
even here in this country with a distant power at
least as many people see it called Washington, DC. When
we come back more of this remarkable storytelling, Andrew Roberts
(09:39):
telling the story of the last King of America, King
George the Third. Here on our American stories. And we're
(10:09):
back with our American stories and our story on the
last King of America, King George the Third. And by
the way, pick up this book on Amazon. You won't
put it down. It's terrific writing and a real suspense
yon in some ways. When we last left off, Andrew
Roberts was telling us about what kind of man King
George was. He hated slavery, he was a constitutional monarch,
(10:33):
and unlike popular perception, he wasn't a tyrant. But in
order for us to gain our independence, he had to
be painted as one. Let's continue with the story.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Although the American founding fathers quite rightly wanted to clothe
themselves in the man of the Great Revolutions of sixteen
forty two against Charles the First and sixteen eighty eight
against James the Second, that required trying to straight jacket
George the Third into being a Stuart absolutist monarch, which
(11:13):
he absolutely was not, and so instead they needed to
try to turn him into a tyrant, which he also
was not.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
We know what tyrants did.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
In the late eighteenth century, when only had to look
at Russia or Austria or Prussia. What the Spanish were
doing in New Orleans what the French were doing in
the Corsica, to see what despotism looked like in the
eighteenth century, and George I was doing none of that.
He never arrested an American editor closed in an American newspaper.
(11:43):
He didn't station armies in the American cities except for
Boston after seventeen sixty eight. He was not a tyrant
in the eighteenth century meaning of the phrase, which was
cruel or despotic. The Boston Tea Party was an attempt
(12:06):
in December seventeen seventy three to keep the price of
tea high for those Bostonian merchants, many of whom were
also smugglers to profit from, and the British government wanted
to allow the dumping essentially of huge amounts of tea
from the East India Company, which was going bankrupt at
(12:27):
the time.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
This would have been very good for American.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Consumers of tea because they would pay much less for
their tea, but this wasn't good at all for the
Bostonian merchants, who had their men attack the ships that
were bringing the tea into the harbor and through nine
thousand pounds in weight of tea, tons and tons of
tea into the harbor. So this encouraged the Lord North
(12:53):
government back in London to passed various tough acts called
the Intolerable Acts in America, the coercive Acts in Britain
against the Port of Boston and the province of Massachusetts Bay.
And the King was told that by the Royal governors
that the other provinces would not stand by Massachusetts. And
(13:16):
it was one of many, many appallingly bad pieces of
advice that he got from his men on the ground.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
It was always disastrous.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
When the royal governors and other important peoples, just like
General Sir Thomas Gage, the commander in chief of the
British Army in America, told the King that the Americans
would react meekly to the coercive acts, he couldn't have
got it more wrong. In fact, they reacted with fury
and also in a unified way. Once the Declaration of
(13:48):
Independence was published famously on the fourth of July seventeen
seventy six, the reaction across the thirteen colonies was immediate,
and on the ninth of July, the King's statue in
the Bowling Green in southern Manhattan was pulled down, melted
down to create forty four thousand LED bullets for the
(14:10):
Continental Army, and right the way across the colonies, his
role insignia was taken down and burnt. He was burnt
in effigy. The names of various colleges and streets and
even cities was changed to get rid of British monarchical nomenclature.
So it was a really very powerful and immediate response.
(14:41):
The British people split on a number of different lines.
On religious lines, the Anglicans being more in favor of
the war, the Dissenters against it. On class lines, it
tended to be a much more middle class thing to
be in favor of the war, the working classes didn't
much like the idea, and also actually interestingly, regional lines.
(15:04):
Some counties supported it, other counties didn't. In America, some
one third of the population were loyalists. They didn't want
the war to break out at all. Quite a lot
of them actually raised arms against the Patriot Cause and
the Continental Army. So it was an element of civil
war as well, which explains the atrocities. In all civil
(15:28):
wars you get much worse atrocities than in normal state
on state wars. In order to try to subdue the
Thirteen Colonies, the British had to send an army which
never exceeded fifty thousand men, and for most of the
war was between thirty and thirty five thousand men, which
was nothing like enough for an enormous country of eighteen
(15:50):
hundred miles from top to toe. It was a force
that had to be given one third of a ton
of supplies per man, and so that also was a
tremendously difficult logistical problem to get that across the Atlantic,
three thousand miles of the Atlantic with the Royal Navy,
(16:10):
especially when later on in the war these ships were
being attacked. And it's always very dangerous to fight against
people who actually used their marksmanship to put food in
their children's mouths, and that was true of an awful
lot of Americans. The actual marksmanship was something that the
(16:31):
British Army was not prepared for.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
They were the.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
American militiaman, minutman and later Continental Army soldiers were an
awful lot better than the British were expecting them to be.
The British had a strategic plan, really the only workable
strategic plan of the war from the British side, which
(16:56):
was to send Sir William Howe up the Hudson Valley.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
From New York with one force.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
At the same time, Sir John Burgoyne came down from
Canada to Albany with another and they were going to
meet and thereby secure the Hudson Valley and cut off
the New England Colonies from the rest of the Thirteen Colonies,
and that, if it had come off, might have won
the war. But Sir William Howe veered off Eastwoods and
(17:23):
captured Philadelphia, and that led to Sir John Burgoyne being
captured at Saratoga in October seventeen seventy seven. At the
time of the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga, the public opinion,
which hitherto hadn't really mattered very much in British politics,
suddenly became an extremely important aspect, and it turned against
(17:47):
the war. The Radical Whigs in Parliament openly sided with
the Americans.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
They wore blue and.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Buff clothes, which was the color of the Continental Army officers,
and was a highly difficult moment for the whole of
the British political set up. The government essentially was in
very great danger of falling.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
And you're listening to Andrew Roberts tell a heck of
a story. And it's true. It was our first civil war.
More from Andrew Roberts the book The Last King of America.
Go to Amazon or the usual suspects and buy it.
After these messages, and we continue with our American stories
(19:40):
and our final segment on the story of the Last
King of America, King George the Third. When we last
left off, Britain was in crisis as public perception on
the war began to turn and things were about to
get worse for Britain. Here again is Andrew Roberts with
the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
What happened then was that the French got involved in
the war in February seventeen seventy eight. The French were
always there when they need you, And in seventeen eighty
the Spaniards declared war, and in seventeen eighty also the Dutch.
So the British were suddenly fighting a world war against
(20:29):
these three major European powers, which turned the whole of
the American War of Independence into a colonial backwater.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Whilst we fought for our very existence.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
There was one point in seventeen seventy nine, when Nefranco
Spanish fleet with thirty thousand men was about to land
in Britain and invade Britain.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
So instead of having fifty.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Thousand men in America, we had to drop that down
to thirty five thousand and just stay in the eastern
seaboard cities that we'd already held by that stage. We
were to capture Charleston in seventeen eighty, which in many
ways was the greatest British victory of the war, but
it didn't change the overall balance of forces because the
(21:14):
war was being fought in Gibraltar and in the East
Indies and the West Indies, Africa and so on. There
were any number of reasons why the American War of
Independence was.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Lost by the British.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Some military historians, including me, in fact, think that it
couldn't have ever been won after the escape of George
Washington from Manhattan, if the Battle of Bunker Hill hadn't
been such an extremely expensive pyrrhic victory for the British,
if Valley Forge had gone differently and there were more desertions,
(21:49):
and the sublime charismatic leadership of George Washington had either
not been there or not been so impressive, then there
was a chance of that rebellion being being smothered in
its cradle. However, by the time that he had got
through the Valley Forge months it was pretty much and
especially when the French turned the whole thing into a
(22:12):
world war, it's so much more difficult to fight on more.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Than one front.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
There were also lots of other problems in that the
British War Office hated the Admiralty and vice versa. Lots
of the generals all hated each other. The generals often
hated the admirals and vice versa. I mean, it was
quite extraordinary the amount of internal bickering that went on,
especially of course when it looked like it was going
to be a losing war. Once the British were fighting
(22:41):
a war not just on two fronts, but on five
or six fronts, the torrent was just too strong, and
George the third took a long time to recognize that
actually we were going to lose the thirteen colonies, that
they were going to become independent, and that the sooner
the war ended, the more likely it was that we
weren't going to lose.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Any more colonies. As it was.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
We did lose some, but it was a question of
drawing a line before the situation got even worse. The
defeat was the most catastrophic strategic reverse for Britain between
the loss of the Ajovan lands in the fifteenth century
and the fall of France in nineteen forty. It was
(23:26):
deeply humiliating for the king. It brought down the Lord
North government. It was expensive both in blood and treasure,
and of course the loyalists, over eighty thousand of them,
had to flee the United States, and they got out
with their lives, many of them and escaped to Canada,
from where they helped build the Second British Empire in
(23:51):
India and Africa and elsewhere. It was also very fortunate
that the slaves who had escaped from their masters, including
those actually who that belonged to George Washington, a couple
of them, were also allowed off in the British ships
from New York to Canada, and so we're not forced
to return to their servitude. But actually, when one looks
(24:13):
at the Germaine clan, at the low level of recruitment,
at the hatred's mutual jealousies and bickering between the departments
and so on, and indeed the just sheer width of
the Atlantic. None of these were George the Third's fault.
He can indeed slightly be faulted over the low recruitment
(24:33):
actually because of some decisions that he supported, But this
was the Lord North ministry getting things wrong constantly, and
also the generals not even supporting the plan that they
put their names to. So you know, it's very often
that King George the Third is blamed for losing the
American War of Independence, But of the ten or so
(24:53):
factors that did lose Britain that war, he was only
really marginally involved in one of them. I think that
the real genius of the American Founding was that the
founding fathers did something totally exceptional in history, because there
are any number of other countries and peoples throughout history
(25:17):
who have escaped depression and set up their own country
and founded their own sovereignty. One thinks of the Israelites
escaping from the Egyptians, the Spanish fighting the Dutch, the
Austrians and the Italians, the Turks and the Greeks. You know,
in each case these were oppressive forces and the other
(25:37):
people escaped from oppression. What America did was to demand
its own freedom and independence and sovereignty from a power
that was not oppressing it, from a king who was
not a tyrant in any way that you can use
the term. You know, he was not cruel, he was
not despotic, but he was somebody who had to go
(25:59):
because America was ready for its own independence.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
And that was proved to have been absolutely the right.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Decision for America, because a century later you were the
most powerful nation in the world. I think that the
sort of takeaway message is that America's demand for autonomy
was more important and more powerful than anything else, and
certainly that George the Third's so called tyranny.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
Has to be seen in that light. He was not
a tyrant.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
The declaration was wrong when it said that he was
unfit to be the ruler of free people, because he
was the ruler of Britain and we were a free
people at the time. Article two of your Constitution invests
huge amounts of power in your president, and I noticed
last April the Harvard Law Review argued very convincingly that
(26:53):
in fact, the present American president, the imperial presidency as
it has grown to become, is in fact much more
powerful than George of the third was as King of England.
So unless you believe that the imperial presidency of today
is a tyranny, then I don't think that you can
continue to believe that George the third was one and
(27:17):
the king had learnt a lot of the lessons really
of the American War of Independence. So in the French
Revolutionary and subsequently Napoleonic Wars, Britain was in a much
better state military, in fact nothing There's nothing better for
an army than to lose a war in time for
the next one, because people learn from the necessity of
(27:40):
defeat far better than from anything else.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
So by Napoleonic Wars, you know, we had.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
People who were officers who were able to be chosen
on their talents rather than how rich they were or
where they came from in society. And we had one
thing that George learned was how important it was to
stick to the war. We didn't trust the French royalists,
who liked the loyalists in America never really amounted to
(28:08):
as much as was hoped for, and so overall it
was a better war for Britain to fight, and not
least of course it was against the French. The king
was on the throne for longer than any other king
of England. He was on the throne for nearly sixty years,
but the last ten years of which was a regency,
because he had gone blind and deaf, and he was
(28:31):
also senile, and he was mad. So the last decade
of his life, from eighteen ten to eighteen twenty is
a very sad and pathos ridden one, where he was
in Windsor Castle and no one came to visit him.
He played the harpsichord to himself and couldn't even hear
the music.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Writing of Great Britain.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
In the king's obituary in The Times, it said, under
the guidance of George of the third, she held fast
by the laws and religion of her our ancestors, and
escaped the vortex of the French Revolution on the edge
of which she stood. And in December seventeen sixty eight,
John Wesley wrote his whole conduct, both in private and
(29:13):
in public, ever since he began his reign, the uniform
tenor of his behavior, the general course, both of his
words and actions, has been worthy of an Englishman, worthy
of a Christian, and worthy of a king.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
And a special thanks on the production to Monty Montgomery
and a special thanks to Andrew Roberts. The book The
Last King of America. Go to Amazon and the usual
suspects and pick up a copy, and my goodness, what
a story about what we were really fighting about and
for which was our autonomy. It wasn't about money. It
was about us deciding for ourselves who we were and
(29:52):
who we would become in the end, the story of America.
Here on, our American stories
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Into
Host
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