King George III

June 4, 1738 – January 29, 1820

British king during the Revolution, immovable on the colonies but the longest-reigning monarch of his era.

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George III was born on June 4, 1738, in London, the first king of the Hanoverian line to be born in Britain and to speak English as his native language. He came to the throne in 1760 at twenty-two, in the middle of the Seven Years' War, determined to be a dutiful, moral, and hard-working monarch after the scandals of his grandfather's court. He married Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and had fifteen children, collected books that became the core of the British Library, and studied farming so seriously that his subjects called him Farmer George. To the American colonists he became the villain of their story, and the Declaration of Independence is largely a list of charges against him. The picture is only partly fair. Parliament, not the king, passed the Stamp Act and the tea duties, and George III at first paid little attention to America. But once the crisis came he was immovable. He backed Lord North's hard line, refused to receive the Continental Congress's Olive Branch Petition in 1775, declared the colonies in open rebellion, and hired German soldiers to put it down. After Saratoga he insisted on fighting on, and after Yorktown he drafted a letter of abdication that he never sent. He accepted the Treaty of Paris with visible reluctance. Yet when John Adams arrived in London in 1785 as the first American minister, the king received him with grace, saying that he had been the last to consent to the separation but would now be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power. The rest of his long reign belonged to other struggles: the union with Ireland in 1801 and the wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. From 1788 he suffered bouts of a mental illness that historians still debate, and from 1811 his son ruled as regent while the old king lived on, blind and confused, at Windsor. He died on January 29, 1820, after nearly sixty years on the throne, the longest reign of any British king. For Americans he remains the ruler they rejected; for Britons he was a conscientious monarch who lost an empire and then helped defeat Napoleon. Follow his side of the story in the American Revolution journey.

King George III

Further reading

King George III

Further reading