June 5, 2025 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, American history hasn’t been kind to King George III. Branded a tyrant in the Declaration of Independence and dismissed as unfit to lead a free people, his legacy has long been misunderstood. British historian Andrew Roberts, author of The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, shares the true story of America’s last king and why we might just have the story all wrong.
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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 stadistic 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.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
And his mother, Princess Augusta. It was a very rural society.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
About eighty percent of people took their livings from agriculture.
It was a very hierarchic society, with a small aristocracy
at the top, but an awful lot of working people
at the bottom of society. It was an old fashioned
in a sense society because this was before the Industrial
Revolution and it was a country at war for much
(02:14):
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 deeply than the schoolboys of the day,
even at the best public schools in Britain. One of
(02:37):
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 can tell from these essays that he
had a true belief in limited constitutional monarchy. He was
(03:01):
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 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.
(03:27):
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, 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
(03:51):
in love with his wife, which was extremely unusual in
the Hanaverian family, which was otherwise 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
(04:12):
to permeate every aspect of his life, and it did,
and he felt that he had a close connection to
the Almighty. He much preferred talking to bishops than talking
to politicians that he went to church every.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Sunday and enjoyed it.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
The Seven Years War, which started actually here in America
before the official outbreak in 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.
(04:57):
So it was a world war, it's sometimes called by
his or into the 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
(05:20):
American continent Altogether. 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
(05:44):
after the war 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 Parliament which would raise taxes on printed paper.
(06:11):
The Stamp Act was intended to on 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 Stampact so much as the principle of it,
because for the last one hundred years or so the
(06:33):
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 quite unfortunate that the people who were
most hit, most heavily hit by the Stamp Act, namely solicitors, lawyers, journalists,
(06:57):
were also and always have been, and indeed are today
the most vocal people in society. America deserved independence. By
the seventeen sixties and early seventeen seventies, it was a
country of two point five million people. It had seven
(07:18):
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,
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 saying that the Thirteen Colonies could not
expand over the Allegheny Mountains westwards, and so it essentially
preserved the whole of the American continent west of the
(07:59):
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 Ohio
River Valley, were not going to put up with. So
these things all coming together created by the mid to
(08:22):
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 important
factor in the creation of the American Revolution was not
issues over taxation and representation. Frankly, both the South Carolinian
(08:44):
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 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, d C.
When we come back more of this remarkable storytelling, Andrew
(09:38):
Roberts telling the story of the last King of America,
King George the Third, Here on our American story.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
And.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
We're 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. We know what tyrants did 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
(11:37):
George the Third was doing none of that. He never
arrested an American editor closed in an American newspaper. 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 in
(12:06):
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 the time.
(12:28):
This would have been very good for American 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
(12:48):
the harbor. So this encouraged the Lord North 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
(13:09):
the King was told that by the royal governors that
the other provinces would not stand by Massachusetts. And 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 wars,
(15:28):
you get much worse atrocities than in normal state.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
On State Wars.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
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 hundred miles from
top to toe. It was a force that had to
(15:56):
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, 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
(16:20):
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 British Army was not
prepared for. They were the American militiaman, minutman and later
Continental Army soldiers were an awful lot better than the
(16:43):
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 was to send Sir
William Howe up the Hudson Valley from New York with
one force at the same time as Sir John Burgoyne
(17:04):
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 captured Philadelphia, and that led to Sir
(17:26):
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 the war. The Radical Whigs in Parliament
(17:50):
openly sided with the Americans. They wore blue and 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
(18:10):
great danger of falling, and.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
You're listening to Andrew Roberts tell a heck of his 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.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
So the British were.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Suddenly fighting a world war against 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 the
Franco Spanish fleet with thirty thousand men was about to
land in Britain and invade Britain. So instead of having
fifty 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.
(21:04):
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 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
(21:26):
of Independence was lost by the British. 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.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Pyrrhic victory for the British.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
If Valley Forge had gone differently and there were more desertions,
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
(22:09):
especially when the French turned the whole thing into a
world war, it's so much more difficult to fight on
more than one front. 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,
(22:29):
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 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
(22:50):
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 any more colonies.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
As it was. We did lose some, but it was a.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
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 Anjovan lands in the fifteenth
century and the fall of France.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
In nineteen forty.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
It was 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
(23:50):
Empire in 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 were not
forced to return to their servitude. But actually, when one
(24:12):
looks 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.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
I think that the real genius of the American Founding.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Was that the founding fathers did something totally exceptional in history,
because there are any number of other countries and peoples
throughout history 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,
(25:28):
the Austrians and the.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
Italians, the Turks and the Greeks.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
You know, in each case these were oppressive forces and
the other 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.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
That you can use the term.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
You know, he was not cruel, he was not despotic,
but he was somebody who had to go because America
was ready for its own independence. And that was proved
to have been absolutely the right 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
(26:19):
more powerful than anything else, and certainly that George the
Third's so called tyranny has to be seen in that light.
He was not a tyrant. 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
(26:43):
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 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
(27:03):
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 the king had learnt a
lot of the lessons really of the American War of Independence.
(27:24):
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 defeat far better than from anything else.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
So by the Poleonic Wars.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
You know, we had 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
(28:07):
never really amounted to 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
(28:30):
and deaf, and he was 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 writing of Great Britain. In
(28:51):
the king's obituary in The Times, it said, under the
guidance of George the Third, she held fast by the
laws and religion of her 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 in public, ever since
(29:14):
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.
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 stadistic 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.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
And his mother, Princess Augusta. It was a very rural society.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
About eighty percent of people took their livings from agriculture.
It was a very hierarchic society, with a small aristocracy
at the top, but an awful lot of working people
at the bottom of society. It was an old fashioned
in a sense society because this was before the Industrial
Revolution and it was a country at war for much
(02:14):
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 deeply than the schoolboys of the day,
even at the best public schools in Britain. One of
(02:37):
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 can tell from these essays that he
had a true belief in limited constitutional monarchy. He was
(03:01):
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 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.
(03:27):
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, 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
(03:51):
in love with his wife, which was extremely unusual in
the Hanaverian family, which was otherwise 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
(04:12):
to permeate every aspect of his life, and it did,
and he felt that he had a close connection to
the Almighty. He much preferred talking to bishops than talking
to politicians that he went to church every.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Sunday and enjoyed it.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
The Seven Years War, which started actually here in America
before the official outbreak in 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.
(04:57):
So it was a world war, it's sometimes called by
his or into the 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
(05:20):
American continent Altogether. 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
(05:44):
after the war 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 Parliament which would raise taxes on printed paper.
(06:11):
The Stamp Act was intended to on 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 Stampact so much as the principle of it,
because for the last one hundred years or so the
(06:33):
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 quite unfortunate that the people who were
most hit, most heavily hit by the Stamp Act, namely solicitors, lawyers, journalists,
(06:57):
were also and always have been, and indeed are today
the most vocal people in society. America deserved independence. By
the seventeen sixties and early seventeen seventies, it was a
country of two point five million people. It had seven
(07:18):
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,
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 saying that the Thirteen Colonies could not
expand over the Allegheny Mountains westwards, and so it essentially
preserved the whole of the American continent west of the
(07:59):
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 Ohio
River Valley, were not going to put up with. So
these things all coming together created by the mid to
(08:22):
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 important
factor in the creation of the American Revolution was not
issues over taxation and representation. Frankly, both the South Carolinian
(08:44):
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 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, d C.
When we come back more of this remarkable storytelling, Andrew
(09:38):
Roberts telling the story of the last King of America,
King George the Third, Here on our American story.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
And.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
We're 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. We know what tyrants did 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
(11:37):
George the Third was doing none of that. He never
arrested an American editor closed in an American newspaper. 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 in
(12:06):
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 the time.
(12:28):
This would have been very good for American 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
(12:48):
the harbor. So this encouraged the Lord North 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
(13:09):
the King was told that by the royal governors that
the other provinces would not stand by Massachusetts. And 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 wars,
(15:28):
you get much worse atrocities than in normal state.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
On State Wars.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
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 hundred miles from
top to toe. It was a force that had to
(15:56):
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, 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
(16:20):
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 British Army was not
prepared for. They were the American militiaman, minutman and later
Continental Army soldiers were an awful lot better than the
(16:43):
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 was to send Sir
William Howe up the Hudson Valley from New York with
one force at the same time as Sir John Burgoyne
(17:04):
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 captured Philadelphia, and that led to Sir
(17:26):
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 the war. The Radical Whigs in Parliament
(17:50):
openly sided with the Americans. They wore blue and 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
(18:10):
great danger of falling, and.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
You're listening to Andrew Roberts tell a heck of his 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.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
So the British were.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Suddenly fighting a world war against 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 the
Franco Spanish fleet with thirty thousand men was about to
land in Britain and invade Britain. So instead of having
fifty 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.
(21:04):
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 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
(21:26):
of Independence was lost by the British. 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.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Pyrrhic victory for the British.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
If Valley Forge had gone differently and there were more desertions,
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
(22:09):
especially when the French turned the whole thing into a
world war, it's so much more difficult to fight on
more than one front. 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,
(22:29):
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 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
(22:50):
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 any more colonies.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
As it was. We did lose some, but it was a.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
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 Anjovan lands in the fifteenth
century and the fall of France.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
In nineteen forty.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
It was 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
(23:50):
Empire in 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 were not
forced to return to their servitude. But actually, when one
(24:12):
looks 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.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
I think that the real genius of the American Founding.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Was that the founding fathers did something totally exceptional in history,
because there are any number of other countries and peoples
throughout history 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,
(25:28):
the Austrians and the.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
Italians, the Turks and the Greeks.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
You know, in each case these were oppressive forces and
the other 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.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
That you can use the term.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
You know, he was not cruel, he was not despotic,
but he was somebody who had to go because America
was ready for its own independence. And that was proved
to have been absolutely the right 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
(26:19):
more powerful than anything else, and certainly that George the
Third's so called tyranny has to be seen in that light.
He was not a tyrant. 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
(26:43):
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 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
(27:03):
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 the king had learnt a
lot of the lessons really of the American War of Independence.
(27:24):
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 defeat far better than from anything else.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
So by the Poleonic Wars.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
You know, we had 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
(28:07):
never really amounted to 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
(28:30):
and deaf, and he was 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 writing of Great Britain. In
(28:51):
the king's obituary in The Times, it said, under the
guidance of George the Third, she held fast by the
laws and religion of her 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 in public, ever since
(29:14):
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.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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