Just as the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein was seen as a symbolic event in the invasion of Iraq, so the destruction of the equestrian effigy of George III in New York City on 9 July 1776 has been regarded as a defining moment in the War of American Independence. After it had been knocked off its pedestal it was decapitated. Thus, like Charles I in reality, George was symbolically beheaded. Where Marxist or neo-Whig historians of Stuart England sought long-term causes of the killing of Charles, revisionists argued that it came about as a result of contingent and unanticipated events. Few if anybody in 1642 sought the outcome of 1648–9, when England was transformed from a monarchy into a republic. Similarly scholars have looked for signs of American independence emerging long before the final break with Britain, some finding its roots in the motives which led colonists to cross the Atlantic in the first place. In the past American exceptionalism seemed to provide a solution to the problem of how thirteen separate colonies became united states. Of late, however, the differences between them and the mother country have been downplayed, until the replication of British norms across the ocean has become a commonplace of imperial scholarship, culminating in the vogue for ‘Atlantic history’. Now Brendan McConville has taken the notion a stage further. So far from independence being ‘in the womb of time’ he claims it emerged suddenly as a result of an immediate crisis in the years 1773 and 1774. Until then, he argues, the colonists were not aspirant republicans but ardent monarchists.
This is not quite the novel claim that it might seem. Many historians have accepted that the years 1770 to 1773 marked a ‘period of quiet’, and even that the colonies might well have been contained within the British empire, if Lord North had not obstinately retained the Townshend duty on tea, thereby precipitating the Boston Tea Party, to which he over-reacted with the ‘coercive’ or ‘intolerable’ Acts. Just as the men of 1642 did not anticipate the events of 1648–9 so the colonists who resisted the Stamp Act did not foresee, much less aspire towards, independence.
That they were ardent monarchists might come as a surprise to some, however. Professor McConville makes a substantial case for the extent of loyalty to the Crown in the colonies. Thus he shows how they observed a royal calendar throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the whole his sources substantiate his thesis, though occasionally they do not quite document royalist ardour as much as he claims. Thus he cites the Virginia Gazette of 4–11 February 1746 in support of his contention that the celebration of 5 November underpinned colonial loyalty to the regime. Yet it stated that William of Orange landed in Torbay on that day ‘to redeem us from standing armies in times of peace [and] from Septennial parliaments’. He seems unaware of the irony that those were charges that the Country opponents of George II's ministers were currently employing against them. Indeed he downplays the significance of Country ideology in the colonies, arguing that historians such as Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood who stress its importance take too secular a view of colonial mentality, which he claims was profoundly religious. It was the popery of the Stuarts that alienated the colonists and the Protestantism of the Hanoverians which endeared the Georges to them. Endearment is not too strong a term, for McConville insists that the kings inspired love in their American subjects.
He contrasts this with the alleged indifference towards, or even rejection of them, by their British subjects. But his paradoxical conclusion that the colonists were more loyal to the Crown than the inhabitants of the mother country is too starkly drawn. McConville, like so many, appears to have been misled by the extravagant claims for the extent of Jacobitism in the British Isles made by some historians. He did not have the advantage of reading Hannah Smith's salutary corrective to their distortions, Georgian monarchy: politics and culture, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 2006). Dr Smith abundantly demonstrates that ‘a pro-Georgian culture clearly flourished at local level’.
What McConville brings out more clearly than previous studies is the extent to which colonists who resisted parliamentary claims to tax them looked to the king to get them off the hook. They claimed that there were two constitutions, a British constitution, in which sovereignty lay with the king in parliament, and an imperial constitution in which it lay in the Crown alone. Kings, not parliaments, had issued the charters on which their jurisdiction was based. Their assemblies, not the House of Commons, had the power to raise revenues. When George III refused to buy this argument they turned savagely against him, destroying symbols of his rule such as the statue in New York.
Jeremy Black deals with the dilemma which colonial claims that he alone was sovereign over America presented to George III. When Charles James Fox taunted Lord North with being a tory in 1775 the prime minister retorted that ‘the aim of toryism was to increase the prerogative. That in the present case the administration contended for the right of Parliament, while the Americans talked of their belonging to the Crown.’ Black concludes that ‘despite charges that his intentions were despotic, George was not interested in the radical option of rejecting the pretensions of the Westminster parliament’. He is at pains to point out that, notwithstanding the Declaration of Independence, George was not a tyrant. ‘I knew it a nonsense when the guide in Liberty Hall referred to George III as a tyrant’ he tells us in the acknowledgements ‘but I could not help but be moved by the quest for liberty that this fine city [Philadelphia] represents.’ It is now the conventional wisdom among historians on both sides of the Atlantic that the king did not act tyrannically. And of course he cannot compete on that score with Pol Pot, Stalin, or Saddam Hussein. Yet it begs the question why did the Americans accuse him of tyranny? It could well be that they were simply paranoid. Paranoia is a theme that runs through American history. McConville amply demonstrates it in the colonists' wild allegations of popery and Jacobitism in the king's own entourage. But Locke had taught them that they had a right to liberty and property. For the king and parliament, in which they were not represented, to take their property by statute was to act at least arbitrarily, and in their eyes tyrannically.
Although it is subtitled ‘America's last king’ the book is by no means confined solely to the relations between George and the colonies. Quite the contrary; the American dispute takes up a relatively brief part of what is a full account of George's reign, as befits a contribution to the Yale English Monarchs series. Like the others this is beautifully produced, with seventeen illustrations. Half of the twenty chapters narrate the king's career, while the other half deal with such themes as ‘Character and behaviour’, ‘Family’, and ‘Religion and morality’. The narrative affords the reader a clear and authoritative guide through the tortuous politics of the reign, from the instability which marked the young king's accession to the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France and the final onset of George's insanity. Black is particularly sympathetic to the king's proneness to psychiatric illness, which has been diagnosed as being symptomatic of porphyria, though he thinks too much has been made of this diagnosis. Black suggests the possibility ‘that George suffered from a cyclothymic personality disorder’! The thematic chapters round out his picture of the king, which is on the whole a sympathetic portrait. George emerges as a conscientious, religious, almost puritanical individual. The bucolic interests which led him to be named ‘Farmer George’ contrast sharply with his eldest son's addiction to gambling, which he loathed. Where the prince of Wales was prodigal the king was abstemious. ‘The political world was to see George as industrious, committed and pertinacious. These characteristics owed much to an inner conviction that drew on a strong personal piety, and a clear sense of morality; a conviction inclined to rectitude, not subtlety.’
As might be expected from a historian who has ransacked the archives of Europe, and studied international diplomacy in the eighteenth century, there is a tendency to compare George with other monarchs. This is a theme throughout the book, which particularly informs chapters on ‘Eighteenth-century monarchy’ and ‘Reputation and comparisons’. Black feels that the king with whom George is best compared is Louis XVI. He even compares them as husbands and fathers. Thus he notes that George and his wife Charlotte had fifteen children while ‘in contrast Louis XVI had difficulties, either medical or of sexual technique, and did not consummate his marriage for seven years’! George was more manly in other ways, in Black's view, for he believes that the English king ‘showed a resilient ability to keep his nerve under pressure when compared with Louis XVI's indecision. His handling of the Gordon Riots in 1780 and the serious political crisis of 1783–4 was more successful and more adroit than Louis's actions were to prove in 1788–9.’ But that begs the question of whether the situations the two kings faced were themselves comparable. It could be argued that Louis XVI was confronted with a far greater threat to his authority in France than any George experienced in England. In which case one wonders how helpful the comparison is. Yet Black insists that ‘if the comparative context leads at times to a disconcerting perspective, it is one that is essential, not least if issues of significance and success are to be considered’.
Where previous biographers have paid relatively little attention to George's interest in the arts and the sciences, Black devotes a chapter on ‘Culture’ to these, demonstrating that the king was not ‘a philistine whose cultural activity was best summed up by his teaching his dog to dance’ as John Wolcot, who called himself ‘Peter Pindar’, described him. On the contrary George took a keen interest in such arts as architecture, books, music, and painting and sciences like astronomy, botany, and clockwork. ‘As far as the arts and sciences are concerned’, Black concludes, ‘it is best to note George's role as an informed and committed patron, with wide-ranging interests, and a desire to become engaged, as he showed in his performance of music. George was no mere spectator, a verdict that is more generally appropriate.’
