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The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III
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79/100Critics
43/100Scholars
Author:
Andrew Roberts
Publisher:
Viking
Date:
November 9, 2021
King George III has been ridiculed as a complete disaster who frittered away the U.S. colonies and went mad in his old age. But here, historian Roberts argues that George's bad reputation comes from propaganda meant to turn colonists against the King, who was in fact a wise, humane and even enlightened monarch beset by political enemies, debilitating mental illness, incompetent ministers and disastrous luck.
What The Reviewers Say
Mr. Roberts deftly traces the maneuvers that, soon enough, defeated Fox and brought William Pitt the Younger to power.
Although The Last King of America effectively refutes Paine, Jefferson and, for that matter, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Roberts is asserting what 20th- and 21st-century historians already know: George III was not a tyrant who lost the American empire; he respected the British Constitution and deferred to Parliament.
Roberts’s narrative challenge is gigantic. George III reigned for six decades (1760-1820), during which his world exploded with revolutionary fervor, first in North America, then across Europe, followed by two decades of desperate war with revolutionary and Napoleonic France. With insight and aplomb, Roberts completes his mission, revealing the king to have been a conventional, conservative gentleman, uxorious husband and father of 15.
George, Roberts writes, "more than filled the role of King of Great Britain worthily; he filled it nobly". After reading this mammoth, elegant and splendidly researched biography, no open-minded reader could possibly disagree..
