Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Andrew Roberts is one of the most consequential biographers and historians in the English-speaking world today. A graduate of Cambridge University, Professor Robert serves as the Roger and Martha Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and is also a Visiting Professor at the War Studies Department at King’s College in London. He’s known around the world for his best-selling biographies on Napoleon Bonaparte, Winston Churchill, and his histories on World War II and the Waterloo Campaign.
His books not only tell a story, but teach us about leadership at some of the most crucial junctures in world history. His most recent biography, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, is no exception to this rule. And that book is the topic of our conversation today. Andrew Roberts, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Andrew Roberts:
Thank you very much, indeed. It’s great to be on the show again.
Albert Mohler:
It is great to have you again. And as I will simply repeat my pledge, the next time you write a book, we’ll be right in line to talk about that one. And we’ve talked about all kinds of things over the years, in terms of the course of Western history, the English-speaking peoples, Winston Churchill, and Napoleon, but now we’re talking about George III. And so, I think the obvious question, maybe on both sides of the Atlantic is, why 700 pages on George III?
Andrew Roberts:
Well, because, as the subtitle of my book points out, he’s a tremendously misunderstood monarch. He is somebody who, for 200 years, has been on both sides of the Atlantic, denigrated essentially as a monster and a tyrant, but with a huge cornucopia of new information about him, that the Queen has made available in the Royal Archives, it’s now possible to see that he was really anything but that.
Albert Mohler:
When I asked the question, why George III, a writer with your kind of interest, and your interest just shines through, not only are you telling a story, you have a point to make, and that point comes out in the title and the subtitle of your book, where again, you referenced the misunderstood reign of George III. How can such a massively important reign in history be so misunderstood? So, in other words, I just want to put this in the context, where did the story go off the rails in your view?
Andrew Roberts:
Right at the beginning. Of course, the central thing that we all know about George III is that he lost the American colonies, and that’s always been blamed on him pretty much personally by historians, largely the weak historians who dominated the 19th century, who reckoned that this was personally his fault. But really, the whole point about George III is that he was a constitutional monarch, he was a limited monarch, and he did what the cabinets and what the government, what the majority of MPs in the House of Commons, wanted. And again, and again, that was the reason that we in Britain lost the American colonies, and not any personal interventions on behalf of George III. That’s the first thing.
The second thing, of course, is that it’s now possible, finally, after a couple of centuries, to write a book in a period when we no longer stigmatize mental illness. And George III, who of course went mad—misdiagnosed, as it turned out to be. Nonetheless, he was mad, and this has been held against him, morally, by two centuries of historians, who actually blame him personally for his mental illness. And now, fortunately, we can get beyond all that.
Albert Mohler:
I ask those questions, but I want to stipulate, I found the book absolutely fascinating. I’ve enjoyed every one of your books, but I found this one more interesting than I expected it to be, given the fact that it’s difficult, not impossible, but it’s difficult to write a boring book about figures such as Churchill and Napoleon. But about George III, you think, again, on both sides of the Atlantic, different patterns of judgment against George III. But one of the things that you do very helpfully is to bring him alive. And I want to put him in historical context. The House of Hanover, the first British monarch since Charles I, who have been born and raised in England, that seems remarkable in itself.
Andrew Roberts:
It does, doesn’t it? But the House of Hanover, of course, came from Hanover, and the Stuarts, their predecessors, had been, after having lost the Glorious Revolution, and, indeed, also they lost the English Civil War, the same family, were very often in exile. So, it’s explicable in those terms at least.
Albert Mohler:
And he came along, and, after all, is George III. His father died just before he was 13 years old—very tragic life in so many ways. I think the opening chapters of your book demonstrates the vicissitudes of life for a boy who would eventually become king, and appears to have been liked by so few in his own family.
Andrew Roberts:
That’s right. But the thing about the Hanoverians is that everybody hated each other in that family. It was a profoundly dysfunctional family. And his father was hated by his grandfather, King George II. King George II was hated by King George I. George III’s son, King George IV, hated his father, George III. So frankly, it’s not unusual or unlikely. And in fact, the surprising thing is that George III himself loved his own father, Frederick, Prince of Wales. And this intergenerational hatred and conflict, which was baked into the British Constitution, actually was a systematic thing really.
It came to a terrible head when the poor old, as you say, 13-year-old George III, was left to sleep in the room below the putrefying corpse of his own father because his grandfather, George II, refused to have his son, Frederick, Prince of Wales, buried until, frankly, the decomposing corpse created such a stench that it had to be buried at Westminster Abbey. So, you see, he was very firmly thrust into this intergenerational feud.
Albert Mohler:
Well, one of the points that came to my mind as I was reading is that, if you’re looking for a recipe to create a young man with pretty deep psychological, perhaps even psychiatric, issues, it would be the House of Hanover under those circumstances, with a 13-year-old boy who did love his father, unable to go, or forbidden to go, to his father’s funeral because his grandfather thought he was just too young.
Andrew Roberts:
Yes, that’s right. I mean, the relationship with his grandfather was terrible anyway, but it obviously only got worse once his father died. And there’s a point also where the grandfather starts physically abusing him, slapping him and boxing his ears, and so on, when the now Prince of Wales went to visit him at Hampton Court. And so, by the time the Prince of Wales was 18 or so, he’d set up a rival court, which had rival politics and rival politicians as a result. And so, the scene was set for huge rows over foreign policy, over finance, and also over the political legacy, essentially, of Frederick, Prince of Wales.
Albert Mohler:
Let’s fast-forward until the time that George III is king, and has certain ambition, certain political allies, and a certain understanding of the monarchy, the constitution, and the colonies. And I want to work backwards. So, Britain is now an Empire and it has colonies, and put that in the political context in Europe. In other words, this isn’t just about Britain needing and wanting colonies, it’s about Britain also seeking to maintain its security as a nation in a world in which Imperial powers are rising and threatening one another.
Andrew Roberts:
That’s right. And also France has a larger population than Britain, at the time. But if you take into account the wider empire of Britons, and especially the fact that in the Americas there were 22 colonies, 13 of them in North America, but lots elsewhere as well—Canada, West Indies, and so on. One recognizes that the burgeoning British Empire during the Seven Years’ War, what you call French and Indian Wars, from 1756 to 63, really set a completely new agenda, because it allowed Britain to play a major part in European politics because of the strength that it derived from the rest of its Empire.
Albert Mohler:
So, Britain is building this Empire, and also the English-speaking world. And by the way, you follow in the example of Churchill, of actually written history of the English-speaking peoples, writing about the civilizations on both sides of the Atlantic and a shared common culture. But as you look at the American colonies, what are the things you insinuate in this very interesting book, and you actually get to, is that there seems, in retrospect, to have been an inevitability to the fact that the American colonies were going to be very difficult for England to keep?
Andrew Roberts:
Yes, but it depends really on the constitutional form, really. I mean, the fact is that by the 1770’s, 13 American colonies were ripe for independence. You had 2.5 million population, you had a burgeoning economy, 7% year-on-year growth, you had more workshops in Philadelphia than in any other city of the Empire, apart from London. So, the North American colonies were ready for independence. Had Britain tried to have used some other condominium form of constitution where self-government essentially was given in the same way that it was in Australia, New Zealand and Canada in the 19th century, then, perhaps, it would’ve been possible to have extended the length of the union. But frankly, I doubt it. In any way that was trying to look 100 years forward, which, of course, people weren’t able to do, even George III.
Albert Mohler:
Certain issues, just a demographic destiny, and one of the functions in ways that I think Americans don’t recognize. One of the great threats to the British, both their domestic policy, European policy, and their attempt to hold on to North America, was preventing the colonies from moving west. And I think that’s a dynamic in all of this, coming up long before the emergence of the Revolution that many Americans don’t think about. We think of ourself as a transcontinental nation. Britain did not want the United States to be a transcontinental nation, even with the limited knowledge they had of the land mass.
Andrew Roberts:
That’s right. In the French and Indian Wars, they heard the British government had made direct bilateral treaties with large numbers of Native American tribes. And so, in October 1763, they made a proclamation that the process of settlement, west of the Allegheny Mountains, was to cease. And this, of course, bankrupted various people who had interests in the Mississippi Land Company, for example, the Ohio Land Company, and so on. And important figures… Some people who lost money on that included Henry Lee, George Washington, and others. But what it also did, essentially, was to send the message that Britain intended the colonies to stay tethered to the Eastern Seaboard, where they were in trading relationship with Britain, and was not going to go spreading across the continent to the Atlantic Ocean, as, of course, it ultimately did.
So, this was an understandable sense of frustration and irritation on behalf of, at least, the North American colonists. I mean, it was more popular, understandably, with the Native Americans, because it essentially turned almost the whole of the continent of America into one gigantic Native American reservation.
Albert Mohler:
Joseph Ellis, the American historian, writes about tragedies in historical analysis and divides between the avoidable tragedies and the inevitable tragedies. And there’s a sense in which I find that very helpful, looking at the landscape of history, and looking particularly at the United States, issues related to the European peopling and the spread of European colonies throughout North America, eventually the westward expansion of the American nation. But he points out that if there are inevitabilities, they would come down to the massive size of the United States, and the inevitable growth of the American population. And the fact that strains and stresses in Europe and between England and Europe, just basically meant that the place where the English-speaking peoples could eventually spread out, was going to be North America.
Andrew Roberts:
Well, that’s right. And also, of course, the key thing that happened as well in 1763 was the Treaty of Paris, which brought to an end the Anglo-French War. And what that did was to mean that the French were expelled from the North American continent. So, you no longer had the fear of France amongst the American colonists.
The nearest French Army was in Haiti, which was over a thousand miles away. And so there was no organized body of troops, apart from, of course, the British Army, to actually prevent the westward spread, what was later called Manifest Destiny of America, westwards. So yes, you’re right. It was obviously a great tragedy for the Native American people, but for the North American colonists, it was the obvious place to go.
Albert Mohler:
I think another historical note, this is, we’re setting up the dynamic that would eventually lead to revolution and war, is that George III and the British aristocracy, political class, saw what became the American colonies as a singular opportunity to create a new England in a way that wasn’t true anywhere else, simply because the English-speaking population was now dominant in populating in these colonies. And so this was a new Britain.
Andrew Roberts:
Yes, in a way that you couldn’t really get in Asia or Africa or any of the other places that Britain was setting up its imperial ambitions. The big difference, of course, was that it wasn’t really a replication of Britain. The people that went out to America were not going to put up with the class stratification and hierarchy that you had back in Britain. They were very often not Anglicans, they were people of lots of faiths, especially nonconformists. They were, a lot of them, Scots and Irish and people who didn’t consider themselves as English anyhow, even within the British context. So, actually, those British aristocracy that you mentioned, who saw it as all being another Surrey or another Kent being transplanted across the Atlantic, got it dangerously wrong.
Albert Mohler:
But that actually is important to understand. Again, I think you actually make that point implicitly and explicitly in the book. And the other thing is how personal the colonial and Imperial reality was here, how personally tied to the king these colonies were, because that sets up a period of massive misunderstanding. And you’re one of the very few to walk through this in a way that I think is really fascinating. It reminds us, it could have gone otherwise. There could have been other arrangements, but that would’ve required a different king. I just wanted to ask you, so his personal feelings towards these colonies, what were his personal feelings? Because in this system, it matters.
Andrew Roberts:
Yes. Well, you’re quite right. I mean, the connection is a personal one because the charters that set up almost all of the colonies were with the king.
And so it was a much more personal connection than it was with a lot of the rest of the Empire. And, also, George III had no animus against the Americans. He wasn’t somebody who was snobbish about them, or disparaging about them in the way that some people in British society sometimes were. He was somebody who was very interested in what was happening in America, he bought lots of books about them. We know that because they’re still there in his 80,000-book library. And so, yes, you’re right. There is an attempted personal connection, but of course he never went there. He was not a traveler.
Albert Mohler:
But he never went anywhere.
Andrew Roberts:
He never went anywhere. Precisely. Exactly. He never went north of Worcester or west of Plymouth. He was King of Ireland and Scotland, never went to either of them. He was Elector of Hannover as his surname implies, didn’t go there either. He stayed pretty much within a small region of Southwest England. So, there was no actual personal connection, in that he didn’t know any of the Americans leaders, for example.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Although he came to know them when they were quite American, as a matter of fact, but we’ll have to hold that for a moment. But as you tell the story, I think one of the most interesting developments is that, as there is this rising sense of independence and of nationhood in the colonies, the colonists make a distinction between the king and the Parliament. And this is the great missed opportunity, or least you could argue it’s a missed opportunity. The colonists did not first seek to rebel against the king, but rather they sought the king to give them relief against Parliament. It turns out in retrospect to have been a brilliantly shrewd argument from the Americans intended to at least grant George III the possibility of joining an effort against Parliament and basically cementing his identity with the American colonies.
Andrew Roberts:
That’s right. But ever since the Glorious Revolution in 1688, almost a century earlier, the Hanoverians had very much seen themselves as constitutional monarchs, they weren’t divine right monarchs that the Stuarts saw themselves as. And so this wasn’t going to work. They weren’t going to do what, for example, Her Majesty the Queen today does, where she considers herself to be queen of 16 countries equally. That wasn’t the case in the late 17th century. The Hanoverian monarchs very much considered themselves to be king of England and the English Empire, of which the colonies obviously were important constituent parts. So you don’t have this ability, as you did after the creation of the British Commonwealth by the Statute of Westminster in 1932, of being able to separate the crown from the crown in Parliament. And the crown in Parliament, at that stage, back in the 18th century, was all. And so George III didn’t go down any of those constitutional routes that the colonists, as you say, very brilliantly, presented to him.
Albert Mohler:
So, I want to ask a question. I wanted to ask of your book as I was reading it, and I’ll ask you. Did George III understand what the colonists were proposing? In other words, there’s a sense in which, looking at the evidence, it’s like he just ignored it, or did he contemplate it?
Andrew Roberts:
I don’t think that’s fair. No, I think he very much understood and he saw it as a debating tool, as a method of trying to split the British Monarch from the British Parliament, to sow divisions in the cabinet and generally to cause trouble, rather than as a genuine possibility that he should become King of America and also be king of a completely separate entity, which is Britain. As I say, that did come about in the following century and the century after. But at the time, it was a totally genuinely revolutionary concept. I mean, there’s no example of it, for example, in Europe, at the time. You get something like it with the Austrians and the Hungarians after the Dual Monarchy of 1867. But again, that’s a century in advance.
So, how it would work would be very difficult as well, because of course you’d have had a parliament in New York, but in what sense would the king have been able to have interacted with it on a regular basis considering that communications took well over three months to get one way and back again? So, I think that he didn’t interact with it in a meaningful way, not because he didn’t understand it or that he ignored it, but just simply because he thought that it was a ruse.
Albert Mohler:
So that gets me to the turning point for Americans here, and you acknowledge this in your book. But I guess, understandably, historians in the United States give this much more attention. The dawning realization came to the American colonists that it was simply implausible that a Parliament seated in London could ever represent them, would ever represent them fairly. But beyond that, that that parliament in London would have a sinister motivation to limit the growth of the United States, lest it basically created an unwieldy giant it could not control, which I guess arguably is exactly what happened.
Andrew Roberts:
Yes, exactly. That’s right. And that’s why it was right for America to become independent in the 1770’s. I mean, Parliament didn’t exercise particularly onerous powers over the Americans. You do have the Stamp Act of course, but that was only attempting to raise between £40 and £60,000 from 2.5 million people. And the idea was, of course, that America should stay in the same trading block as Britain. But it wasn’t as though Parliament was attempting to influence or legislate over every aspect of Americans’ lives—that was done by their local legislatures. But ultimately, Parliament did have veto rights over them, and that’s the breaking point, that and the power of taxation, of course.
Albert Mohler:
Right. So, in retrospect, the taxation was not all that onerous. It would not have greatly affected the American economy, but the American…
Andrew Roberts:
It would affect it, in fact, because almost every penny by the tax Stamp Act was going to be spent in America. And when you get later onto the Tea Act, in fact, what that was going to do was to about half the price of tea for the American consumer. So, these were not onerous, as you say, and they weren’t intended to be.
Albert Mohler:
No, they weren’t onerous, they weren’t intended to, but they were a very clear manifest signal to the Americans, that we will never be able to control our own destiny. Not only that, but Parliament, and you see this in the speeches, you see this in the letters, that Parliament was really acting in such a way that it made clear the views of the colonists were merely background information not taken very seriously.
Andrew Roberts:
And one of the problems here is the royal governance, because, of course, had they done their job an awful lot better, or even a slightly bit better, then you wouldn’t necessarily have had the troubles when you did, at least. I think we both agree that they were going to come at some stage.
But the idea that they suddenly burst out into actual physical violence and bloodshed in the mid-1770’s is not preordained because you…had the role governors played it more sensibly. Their job really was to represent the king to the American people, and represent the American people to the king. And although they did the first half of their job, they were very, very bad in letting the king and Lord North, the Prime Minister, and the Cabinet, and the government realize the sheer sense of frustration and anger about the taxation situation by the 1770’s. They did an appallingly bad job. They never really explained the perfectly understandable problems that the American people had with the taxation issue. And there were 13 of them, one for each province, and they really let the king down.
Albert Mohler:
Thinking of the course of what became the American Revolution, and by the way, let me ask you as an historian, what is the preferred way of referring to this period in British history? In other words, when Americans are out of the room, what do British historians call the Revolutionary War?
Andrew Roberts:
We call it the American War of Independence.
Albert Mohler:
Okay. That’s what I’ve seen. And that makes a great deal of sense. And, of course, it’s extremely similar, and that’s one of the sense of the commonalities in the English-speaking world. There’s a good deal of understanding what that represented. But in the course of that war, and we have to make this amazingly brief, in this conversation. But in the course of that war, one of the interesting questions is, when did Britain decide, number one, that it was facing a war of independence that it would have to put down, it could not ignore? And then secondly, when did Britain really decide that it could not win this war, it could not hold these colonies?
Andrew Roberts:
Well, the first question was Lexington and Concord. That was the point that April, that the blood started to be shed. Then there came the absolutely devastating news in Britain, that the Battle of Bunker Hill had not been a victory.
The assumption was that regular forces, the Red Coats, were automatically on a field of battle, destroy a essentially militia army. And when the battle turned out to be a hugely expensive victory, that came as a massive shock to the British establishment and beyond. The point at which intelligent people, shall I say, thoughtful people, people who had a sense of geopolitics, started to recognize that this war might not be won, was when Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga in October 1777. And what happened four months later when the French got involved in that war, the French were always there when they need you, is to turn it from a colonial struggle to a world war.
So, we were suddenly, Britain was suddenly fighting against France in the West Indies, and East Indies, and the Mediterranean, and so on. Then the following year, Spain gets involved in 1779, and we have a thousand-day gruelling Siege of Gibraltar. Then after that, the Dutch, by which time, the Royal Navy, which was bigger at the time than any of the individual navies, was essentially swamped by the French, Dutch, and Spanish navies. And the whole thing became an impossibility, a world war that was not going to be won.
There were some moments, like the fall of Charleston in the June, I think it was, of 1780, where there were certain positive signs for Britain. But overall, it was pretty clear by the time that they withdrew just to New York and Newport Rhode Island and Charleston, that without a massive infusion of forces, and Britain never tried to put more than 50,000 men into the North American theater, which was nothing like enough, obviously, that the war was ultimately going to be lost. And to criticize him, and I do criticize George III a lot in this book, it’s not an ideography.
He was the last person really to recognize—it wasn’t until 1780, the autumn really of 1782, that he recognized that the game was up.
Albert Mohler:
The version of history that American school boys, school children, are taught is romanticized when it comes to France. It’s basically, we were fighting against the crushing monarchical power of Britain, and along comes the French friends in order to intervene against the massive power of the British Navy. What’s not really told in that tale is the fact that this was geopolitics in Britain, and frankly, of burgeoning and developing global Empire. And so, France had a very, very clear national interest, and it had a lot more to do with regions beyond the United States than the United States. I think you helped to think that up.
Andrew Roberts:
Yeah. You mustn’t for a moment think that the French fought on your side in the American War of Independence, because of their love of American freedom, democracy, and its representative government. They obviously were involved, at the very same time, in crushing all of those things in places like Corsica, for example.
Their sole interest in helping you in the American War of Independence was to try to wrest the colonies away from Britain, and thereby, weaken Britain, which it succeeded in doing to a very great degree. Of course, the thing that allows Britons to have some kind of schadenfreude over all of this, is that the vast cost of the American War of Independence to the French Exchequer meant that by 1789, the king was forced to call the Estates General, their version of the Parliament, which hadn’t been called for years, in order to try to balance the books. And it was that that started the French Revolution, that led to Louis XVI having his head chopped off. And what goes around, comes around in history very often.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. With the vengeance, as a matter of fact. And now, there’s some aspects of George III just that would be fun to talk about—his love of books and the building of his own personal library. I’ve had the joy, it was actually back in the eighties when it was more accessible, I had the great privilege of looking closely at some of George III’s library. Simply one of the most remarkable libraries in the English-speaking world.
Andrew Roberts:
That’s right. And it forms now this centerpiece, the kernel essentially of the British Library at St. Pancras, five stories of books, some 80,000 books. And it wasn’t just a personal library, it was one that he allowed scholars like Joseph Priestley and Dr. Johnson to come in off the street to Buckingham Palace and read. It was kept in a beautiful octagonal room. In fact, he had five libraries in Buckingham Palace, and he had this wonderful collection.
But bibliophilia was only one of his great enlightenment concepts. He was also very interested in science, had a large collection of scientific instruments. He was very interested in the heavens. He helped finance Herschel’s great telescope, largest telescope in the world, that through which Herschel discovered Uranus, which was originally named after George III. He had a great arts collection as well. Some half of the paintings in the royal collection today, which is the largest art collection in the world, private art collection, were bought by George III.
So, you have this tremendous enlightenment figure who unfortunately was denounced by Tom Paine in the pamphlet, Common Sense, as being the Royal Brute of Britain. There was literally nothing less brutish than somebody who, like George III, for example, invited Mozart to come to play in Britain, tried to keep Haydn in Britain, and of whom Handel said that, “While this boy lives, my music needs no other champion.”
Albert Mohler:
George III is also, just in terms of American history, he’s influential in ways people don’t recognize. Even in the architecture here in the United States, I have to say. Even the building in which I am sitting is inspired by architecture that really became standardized in George’s long reign. And so, we have Georgian architecture, it included other Georges, by the way, but in particular, George III, given the length of his reign and the influence of the royal prerogative. Americans think of architecture without recognizing it’s George III.
Andrew Roberts:
Yes. Georgian architecture, which for me, at least, is the finest form of architecture, that neoclassicism which is so perfect in terms of perspective and symmetry and so on, was, as you say, to find its apogee in the reign of George III. But, as you also say, of course, it was the longest reign of any King of England. It’s nearly 60 years, so there are an awful lot of great architects like Robert Adam, and James Wyatt, and William Chambers, and so on, who were working both before and after his reign.
Albert Mohler:
And because his reign was so long, that raises the other issue, there was a before American independence and there was a after, and the after was also long. And I think this is another thing that, to Americans, it’s a corrective, because in one sense, the American historical interest in George III ends with the achievement of American independence. And so far as in the American imagination, George’s thought of, he basically just escapes from the scene. But there’s a lot of George’s reign to remain.
Andrew Roberts:
Well, 37 years of it. He carries on until January 1820. So, you’re right. And he fights another major war, in fact, one that ultimately becomes a existential war for Britain.
Albert Mohler:
That’s right.
Andrew Roberts:
In many sense, a much more important war than the American War of Independence. And that of course is the Napoleonic Wars, which went on for an awful lot longer. They started in 1793, went all the way through to 1815, and ultimately the British were victorious in that war. But poor old George didn’t know about it himself because, by that stage, he had gone mad for the fifth and last time in his career. So, the last ten years of his reign were spent in Windsor Castle, no longer in control or even knowing what was going on. So, in that sense, the last chapter also of my book and of his life is rather pathos-laden.
Albert Mohler:
Very painful, but also instructive. And you really do go at the issue of identifying the cause and nature of George III’s mental illness. And so, give us a little background there, because I think Americans who have an historical interest think they know what the diagnosis was. You’re pretty sure that what Americans think they know is wrong.
Andrew Roberts:
Not just Americans, actually, most British people also think it was porphyria. This is largely because of the Alan Bennett play, later turned into the movie, The Madness of King George, which stated that it was porphyria, but it wasn’t. The extraordinary thing is that about half a century ago, a mother and son team gave completely misleading symptoms to a team of doctors who understandably diagnosed the wrong illness, this porphyria illness. In fact, having worked with some of the leading porphyria experts and other people in mental illness and given them the correct symptoms, in fact, we now know that it was manic depression type one. It was a form of… Sorry. It was bipolar disorder, effective type one, a form of manic depression.
And the poor man, the way he was treated was abominable. They cupped him and they bled him, and they forced, and they created artificial blisters on him. They kept him in a straight jacket for days on end. They attached him to a chair, which was nailed to the floor, did absolutely everything that was the exact opposite of what you should do with people with manic depression essentially. It was a form of torture. And so it was, as I say, a very pathos-laden end to his life. But I think it’s very important to recall that actually none of this had anything to do with the American War of Independence, because the first major outbreak didn’t take place until 1788, which was five years after the American War of Independence was won by America.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Yeah, I don’t think Americans, at least, first of all, I don’t think Americans think much about George III, to be honest. And as you say, they would have most of their knowledge in popular culture, and from that film. But I think what’s interesting is that those who think they know something probably know something wrong, and it’s because the porphyria diagnosis was supposed to be the modern enlightened understanding. In other words, that was presented as the corrective to mean spirited, pre-scientific diagnoses of mental maladies. It just shows you, for one thing, that this entire process of psychiatric construction and all the rest, it’s a conversation that did not take place during the time of King George himself.
Andrew Roberts:
No, that’s right. And as I say, I go into it in the appendix of my book in some detail, and I do give the symptoms and so on. And pretty much the whole of modern medical evidence, opinion, that has taken all of this into consideration agrees that it was not porphyria, but instead, as I say, manic depression.
Albert Mohler:
But what does that mean for a monarchy? Take that as an insolent American question.
Andrew Roberts:
Well, it weakened it tremendously, of course, up until the moment that his son, George IV, became Prince Regent in 1810, and stayed as Prince Regent for ten years until his father died in 1820. But I mean to have two kings essentially alive at the same time, wasn’t good for the monarchy. The knowledge, of course, that there was madness in the family wasn’t good for the monarchy. There was a major problem with regard to the actual running of the country in the earlier stages, in the 1788, 1801 and 1804 outbreaks of his madness, because of course the king was tremendously important. As we mentioned earlier, he signed the warrants that you raised money for, he signed the Acts of Parliament that turned them into law, and so on.
So, yes, I go into my book in some areas, it calls rather ridiculous things to happen, where although the king was declared to be mad by his doctors, nonetheless, because the government needed his signature on documents, they would go to him, and in his moments of clarity, they’d explain what they needed and he’d sign the documents and then he’d go mad again. So, you do have a rather tragic comic series of episodes in his reign.
Albert Mohler:
You make clear that George III’s estimation of George Washington is not just mythological, that he had this understanding that someone who, like Cincinnatus, would gain such valor on the field and then go back to run his farm, made him the greatest man of the age.
Andrew Roberts:
Yes. He called him the greatest character of the age. And also, I wonder if I could just read two sentences of what he said about John Adams as well, which was at the famous audience, when John Adams became the first American Ambassador to England, and they met at St. James’ Palace. And George III said this, he said, “I’ll be very frank with you. I was the last to consent to the separation, but the separation having been made and having become inevitable, I’ve always said, and I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.” And I thought that was a gracious way for him to have dealt with that situation.
Albert Mohler:
No, and as a matter of fact, I marked that. I think that’s about page 479. I marked it because I found that very moving and I also felt it, the pathos of what that must have been like for Adams and for King George III. I mean, this is a rebel coming now to present documentation in order to represent an independent nation that had torn itself from the crown. That had to be one of the great moments of English-speaking history.
Andrew Roberts:
I think so. And not just any old rebel, I mean, it was John Adams it was this giant, this intellectual leader of the Revolution, this absolutely extraordinary figure who was so epicentral to the Revolution. I think, just to speak up for George III for a moment, he was very, very unlucky that he had people he was up against, as I say, an intellectual leader like John Adams, a wordsmith like Thomas Jefferson, a soldier and charismatic leader like George Washington, a polymath like Benjamin Franklin, and people of the quality of Alexander Hamilton and Monroe and Madison.
For you to have had squeezed as it were into one decade, 1770’s, men of such stature and such leadership capacity and such genius essentially—the poor old British. George III was entirely outclassed, but so were all of the British politicians who were very lackluster, frankly, apart from the Elder and the Younger Pitt, and neither were there during the American Revolution. And also our generals who simply were… The best of them were pretty bad, and the worst of them were absolutely disastrous.
Albert Mohler:
In 1986, when I was first studying in England, I went to Ely, and I went there basically not for my dissertation interest, but because of architectural interest. I wanted to see the cathedral. And in spending some time at Ely, I discovered something, and it puzzled me. Here I’m an American doctoral student, and it took me a few moments to figure out what I was reading. But it was a reference in the 1780’s to the dead of what we would call the War of American Independence, yes. And it referred to the attention given to the dead by King George III, and by George I of the United States of America. Again, the British don’t know what to do with George Washington, even how to refer to him.
Andrew Roberts:
No, that’s very interesting. I haven’t seen that. I was at Cambridge University, so I used to go to Ely quite a lot. And unfortunately, I missed that tablet. That would’ve been a very interesting one, yes, because they did rather assume that George Washington would take on the monarchy of America. Lots of people thought that that was what was going to happen in Britain. I mean, it’s absurd when one thinks about it now, but in those days, republics were not the norm.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and they really didn’t have the intellectual furniture to imagine an electoral presidency that would continue, and the Americans weren’t certain it would work either. But, by the way, it leads to an interesting thing. In the 20th century, one of the greatest political debates inside the American political class is the prospect of an incapacitated American President, incapacitated by physical problems or by mental disability. And so, you may call your Chief Executive or your Head of State, you may call your Head of State a King or a President, but mental illness is going to be a radical challenge either way.
Andrew Roberts:
That’s right. Yes. Well, that’s why you passed your, is it your 25th amendment?
Albert Mohler:
Yes.
Andrew Roberts:
That works out what to happen should your Chief Executive …
Albert Mohler:
But only in political context, in other words, no one knows how that would actually operate.
Andrew Roberts:
No. No. Well, I hope you never have to find out.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. Well, amen to that. So, one question, as we narrow to the end here, how is it that George III is remembered in Britain today? And so, let me just ask you, was there more interest in your book on the American side or on the British side?
Andrew Roberts:
Well, there were… It sold very well in America, which I’m very pleased to say. So, I’m assuming that that represents interest. But then on the other hand, there are five times more Americans than there are Britons, so that might have explained it as well. He’s remembered today as being, in many ways, the founder of the modern monarchy, He bought Buckingham Palace, he bought the Gold State Coach that we use for great occasions. We’re going to be using it later this year for the Platinum Jubilee. He invented various aspects of the royal family, the royal walkabout, and the Royal Enclosure at Ascot and the Trooping of the Color, and so on. So, he has this reputation, along with his granddaughter, Queen Victoria, as having founded the modern monarchy. And some people who think about these things also see in Her Majesty the Queen today, especially her sense of duty and hard work and commitment to the nation as being something that has come down from George III. So yes, he has a much more… He’s certainly not called Mad King George, like he sometimes is in the American press.
Albert Mohler:
Well, yes, but the fact is that there is a clear distinction in the United States between those who tend to be very interested in history and the great mass of the population. And I’m sure that’s true in Britain too, far less concerned or aware of the history, but what reading your book …
Andrew Roberts:
Sorry, can I just interject there, because you are so right. And there was a survey of British school children taken not long ago, in which some, I think the number was 25% or so, literally about a quarter of them, said that they believed that the American War of Independence had been won by Denzel Washington.
Albert Mohler:
That’s a good clarification. Thank you. Yeah, but looking at that, I just want to say, again, I really appreciate your work, your painstaking work and presenting these major historical volumes for us, whether it’s on Napoleon or Churchill or Disraeli soon to come, and also George III. The one that surprised me was George III. Now, once I was halfway through your book, I was no longer surprised, but when I thought about Andrew Roberts, after Churchill, after Napoleon, after the history of the English-speaking peoples, what would come next? George III is not a swashbuckling figure on world history, but he did sit astride so much of that history.
Andrew Roberts:
Yes, and also I was very fortunate to come across this great avalanche of new information, and that’s always a very attractive thing for a historian. And the Queen has made a hundred thousand pages of George III’s personal papers, his memoranda and his correspondence and so on, available. And there were things in that. Do you mind if I just mention one sentence read one sentence, which I discovered in these archives, which I think really do show a lot of positive light on this man, which had never been spotted before. And that was, when he was Prince of Wales in the 1750’s, he was writing an essay on Montesquieu’s Essays on the Laws.
And in it, he wrote this, “What shall we say for a European trafficking black slaves? The very reasons urged for it, will be perhaps sufficient to make us hold such practice in execration. For an inhuman custom, wantingly practiced by the most enlightened, polite nations in the world, there is no occasion to answer for them, for they stand self-condemned.” And I think for somebody who then, of course, never bought or sold a slave in his life, who never invested in any of the companies that did that and who ultimately signed the legislation that abolished the slave trade, yet for… I think that all of those things are tremendously impressive. And yet for 200 years, he has been held in a morally lower light than the signatories of Declaration of Independence, 42 out of the 56 of whom owned slaves at some stage in their lives.
Albert Mohler:
Given the moral weight of history and the seriousness of these issues, I am not going to follow that up with another question. I’m going to let that comment stand, just given the stature and the mind of King George III. I wish I could have known him. It’s just one of those things where you think, “Now that I have thought more seriously about George III, I would like to know more about him.”
So, Andrew Roberts, thank you as always for just a wonderful historical and biographical work. You keep turning them out, I’ll keep reading them and talking about them.
Andrew Roberts:
Thanks very much, indeed. I much enjoyed it.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Andrew Roberts, for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 150 of these conversations at albertmohler.com, under the tab, Thinking in Public. For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Until next time, keep thinking.