He was far more involved with the day-to-day running of the government than later British monarchs. As he famously said at the start of his reign, “born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Briton.”ĭevout, conscientious, and hard-working, he drank little and ate moderately. Indeed, he rarely ventured away from the Home Counties (the area around London) and never left England.

George III, however, had been born in England, spoke English as a native tongue (he also spoke German), and never even visited Hanover. He also visited Hanover, where he had grown up, often. George II (who reigned from 1727 to 1760) learned English as a child, but spoke it with an accent. He never learned to speak English, and he spent much of his time in his German possessions. George I was 54 when he came to the throne. “I am born for the happiness or misery of a great country, and consequently must often act contrary to my own passions.” As Roberts notes, these words could serve as a leitmotif of his entire reign. “The interest of my country shall ever be my first care, my own inclinations shall ever submit to it,” George wrote to Bute. Told by his tutor, and later prime minister, Lord Bute, that marrying a subject was just not possible, George accepted Bute’s advice. It is a measure of how seriously King George III took his job that even before he came to the throne, when the 21-year-old fell in love with Lady Sarah Lennox, the exquisitely beautiful daughter of the Duke of Richmond, he gave her up. In fact, he was constitutionally scrupulous to a fault and, unlike most monarchs of his age, lived according to the principle that duty always comes first. But as Andrew Roberts shows in his magisterial new book, The Last King of America, George III was certainly no tyrant. He did indeed go mad, more than once in fact. Most Americans know only two things about King George III: that he was the British tyrant Thomas Jefferson denounced in the Declaration of Independence and that he went mad.

George iii book andrew roberts