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..

Smashes assumptions, clarifies mysteries, establishes new perspectives and brings to life a figure demonized in American textbooks as a tyrant.

Massive and meticulous.

George III of England: cold-hearted, cruel, and villainous? Not so, posits historian Roberts...in his new biography, which while decidedly sympathetic to its subject—sometimes to excess—nevertheless presents a convincing case. This is not the first revisionist treatment of the monarch...but Roberts's extensive use of primary-source letters, essays, and other personal documents recently made available by the Georgian Papers Programme offers much fresh evidence that George III was not the arrogant and vindictive tyrant portrayed in popular culture, but rather an intelligent and conscientious king whose idealistic goals were stymied by political frictions and the misfortune of mental illness.

... [a] meticulously researched revisionist biography.

... a deeply textured portrait.