Three miles south of Windsor Castle, in the western exurbs of London, stands a 25-ton equestrian statue of King George III, cast from old cannons in the decade after his death in 1820. Dressed as Marcus Aurelius, in toga and laurel crown, he sits astride his charger, regal and oversize, honored if not revered for a reign that lasted almost 60 years, from the creation of the first British empire in the Seven Years’ War through the final defeat of Napoleon.
Explore the November 2025 Issue
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
View More
A similar statue of George as a mounted Roman emperor once stood in New York City atop a marble plinth on Bowling Green, at the lower tip of Manhattan. Commissioned by grateful American colonists following the 1766 repeal of the detested Stamp Act—intended by Parliament to raise money from the lightly taxed colonials—the august figure lasted less than a decade. In July 1776, inflamed by a public reading of the newly adopted Declaration of Independence, Continental Army soldiers and other vandals broke through the iron fence surrounding the statue, lassoed George with ropes, and tugged him to the ground—“levelled with ye dust,” as a witness reported.
The mob decapitated the King and whacked off his nose. Musket balls punctured his torso, and looters scraped away the 10 ounces of gold leaf that coated rider and horse. The severed head, initially impaled on a spike outside a tavern, would be recovered by a British Army officer and shipped to England to illustrate the “Disposition of the Ungrateful people.” Rebels carted the headless rider and mount in fragments to Connecticut, where Patriot women melted the lead, ladled it into molds, and soon sent George Washington’s army 42,088 bullets. “It is hoped,” an American surgeon wrote in his journal, “that the Emanations of the Leaden George will make … deep impressions in the Bodies of some of his red Coated and Torie subjects.”
George was that kind of king, inspiring both admiration and regicidal contempt. As the British monarch during the American Revolution, he has, for two and a half centuries, symbolized haughty intransigence and been portrayed as a reactionary dolt incapable of grasping the fervor for liberty that animated his American subjects. On Broadway, he minces through Hamilton as a foppish, sinister clown, singing to the estranged rebels, “You’ll be back” and adding, “I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.”
In truth, the public opening by the British Crown of George III’s papers in the past decade reveals him to be a far more complex, accomplished, and even estimable figure than the prevailing caricature. He could also be ruthless, self-righteous, and so mulish that he threatened abdication unless his government maintained a hard line against American independence. The struggle with America, which he considered “the most serious in which any country was ever engaged,” was lost on his watch, at an estimated cost to his kingdom of £128 million, plus tens of thousands of British casualties and a reduction of the empire on which the sun supposedly never set by half a million square miles. Not long after the British defeat at Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781 all but ended the war, George asked “that Posterity may not lay the downfall of this once respectable Empire at my door.” Yet posterity has indeed blamed him for what his biographer Andrew Roberts called “the colossal disaster, the worst in British history until the loss of India in 1947.”
As bloodshed in America intensified following the initial gunplay at Lexington and Concord in 1775, George chose as his country seat Windsor, “a place I love best in the world.” In this redoubt, with its stout stone walls overlooking the Thames, away from the nattering courtiers and importunate government ministers in London, he could play the country squire with his growing family. A military band tootled martial airs every evening when the King was in residence, and in 1777 he personally designed the so-called Windsor uniform, a tunic of dark blue with red cuffs that George—his nation’s captain-general—wore as a costume of discipline and duty.
He would spend the final 14 years of his life at Windsor. Here he would be buried, and here his papers were deposited in the Royal Archives. In the 10 years since they were made widely accessible through an initiative, approved by the late Queen Elizabeth II, to catalog and digitize this trove, historians and biographers have climbed the 102 stone steps and 21 wooden stairs to the garret of the Round Tower, begun by William the Conqueror in the 11th century. Here are the papers, several hundred thousand pages in gorgeous red binders. Many are written in George’s tidy, looping hand—he served as his own secretary, personally drafting most of his correspondence until late in life, when he began to go blind. Anyone thumbing through these pages gets not only a tactile feeling of being in his presence but also a vivid sense of who he was and why he chose to wage war against his own people for eight years across 3,000 miles of open ocean in the age of sail.
George had ascended the throne in 1760, at the age of 22, England’s youngest king in more than two centuries. Unlike the two German-born Georges who preceded him—the House of Hanover had been offered the crown in 1714, when Britain was desperate for a Protestant monarch—this George was thoroughly English. “Born and Educated in this country,” he proclaimed, “I glory in the name of Britain.”
A lonely, diffident prince—“silent, modest, and easily abashed,” as one courtier recorded—he had grown into a robust, confident king, with a regal bearing, ruddy cheeks, a high forehead balanced by a dimpled chin, and what were described as “extremely fine” teeth. One writer reported that he considered it effeminate to have a carpet in his bedroom, and he often took to his horse for a gallop early in the morning regardless of the weather. George was habitually moderate; a biographer describes him as a “good-mutton man” who preferred a jug of barley water to wine. Shrewd rather than brilliant, he was not easily duped, and he possessed what one duchess called “a wonderful way of knowing what is going forward.”
His “unforgiving piety,” in the phrase of a contemporary, caused him to resist political concession and to impute moral deficiencies to his opponents. He disliked disorder and loathed disobedience. “My opinion is formed on principle, not on events,” he acknowledged, “and therefore is not open to change.” He saw himself as John Bull, the commonsensical embodiment of Great Britain, for which he should remain a moral exemplar—a thankless task, given his conviction that he lived in “the wickedest age that ever was seen.”
A few guiding precepts shaped his reign. The monarch must shun Roman Catholicism and preserve the British constitution, enshrined in documents such as the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights of 1689. His powers were far broader than those wielded by a British monarch today. But he could not rule by royal caprice; rather, he needed cooperation from his ministers and majorities in both houses of Parliament, restrictions that he embraced as a proper restraint on despotism. Not once would he exercise his right to veto a parliamentary bill, even those he opposed. He believed that maritime power and colonial policy should promote commerce, the bedrock of national prosperity. “I am born for the happiness or misery of a great nation,” he declared, “and consequently must often act contrary to my passions.”
Good kingship also required that he produce an heir, and toward that end he recruited a spouse in Charlotte, a 17-year-old princess from a small German duchy. It was said, unkindly, that George winced the first time he saw his homely bride, but they married six hours after meeting, and the happy union proved fertile: She produced children with regularity, eventually to number 15, in sharp contrast to George’s French rival, Louis XVI, who consummated his marriage to the Austrian archduchess Marie-Antoinette seven years after they wed.
Charlotte—“the Queen of my heart,” George called her—shared his religious zeal as well as his affection for Handel, country dances, and the theater. (For his part, he indulged her enthusiasm for dogs, jewelry, and snuff.) As an Enlightenment monarch, he promoted both arts and sciences, sponsoring the Royal Academy’s founding, in 1768, and building an observatory at Richmond Palace, where he personally took measurements of the transit of Venus across the sun, in 1769, to help gauge the size of the solar system.
He played the flute, piano, harpsichord, and organ; wrote a treatise on crop rotation for Annals of Agriculture under the pseudonym “Ralph Robinson”; and copied out a recipe for cough syrup—rosemary, rue, vinegar, and brown sugar, all “boiled in silver.” Always intrigued by how things were made, from buttons and pins to canals and warships, George also collected 2,000 clocks, watches, chronometers, barometers, and other devices, some of which he disassembled. In his lifetime he amassed the 65,000 books that would form the core of the British Library.
Today the so-called King’s Library is housed in a six-story glass tower that rises through the lobby of the British Library. The shelves hint at the breadth of George’s interests: a 1476 edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—reputedly one of the first books printed in England—as well as a dozen editions of Don Quixote in various languages, a 1759 treatise by Thomas Barnes titled A New Method of Propagating Fruit-Trees, and Flowering-Shrubs, and 200 versions of the Bible, including a 1455 Gutenberg. “He was an Enlightenment-type collector, in that he wanted to collect everything,” Karen Limper-Herz, the head of Printed Heritage Collections, told me. “Effectively, he was trying to collect his kingdom.”
The 65,000 books amassed by King George III are today housed in a six-story glass tower at the British Library. (British Library; © Sam Walton)
That extended to his realm in North America, as he tried to make sense of the colonial agitation. The collection includes An Account of the European Settlements in America, by Edmund Burke; The History of the British Dominions in North America, which started with their first discovery, by Sebastian Cabot, in 1497, and ended with the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, in 1763; and 14,461 pamphlets, among them a 1776 edition of Common Sense, in which the polemicist Thomas Paine, who had recently emigrated from England to Philadelphia, denounced George as “the Royal Brute of Great Britain.”
If habitually curious, George remained a homebody, never once visiting his dominions in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, or even northern England, much less Europe or America. Nonetheless, the wide world seemed to lay at his feet. Early in his reign, spoils won from France and Spain during the Seven Years’ War included Canada, Florida, several West Indian sugar islands, and an immense tract between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories,” one happy Briton reported. London became the center of the Western world, and Britain now possessed both the most powerful navy in history and a merchant fleet of some 8,000 vessels.
The creation of this first British empire brought its own vexations. Weighted with war debts, the treasury spent half of the government’s annual tax revenue on interest payments. It seemed only fair to the King and his government that colonists should help shoulder the burden; a typical American, by Treasury Board calculations, paid no more than sixpence a year in Crown taxes—one-50th of the average Englishman’s payment—even as Americans benefited from the eradication of the French and Spanish threats and from the navy’s protection of North American trade.
Yet Americans bridled at all attempts by Parliament to extract further revenue from them without the approval of their own provincial assemblies. For generations, a British policy of “salutary neglect” had left colonists accustomed to self-sufficient autonomy. They also resented British prohibitions against making hats, woolens, and other goods that might compete with manufacturers in the mother country. The deployment of British army regiments in America to keep white colonists from encroaching on Native lands to the west further aggrieved men such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, who saw opportunity and wealth just over the horizon. Almost imperceptibly, a quarrel over taxes and filial duty metastasized into a struggle over sovereignty.
While rescinding earlier tax measures, including the Stamp Act, Parliament, with the King’s agreement, asserted its own fiscal authority by keeping a small residual tax on tea. Whooping insurrectionists, said to be “dressed in the Indian manner,” responded by dumping 45 tons of British tea into Boston Harbor in December 1773. The King’s heart hardened. Spurning pleas for moderation, he denounced “a dangerous spirit of resistance” among “my deluded subjects” in America, whom he likened to froward children. This resistance to Crown authority, with its sulfurous whiff of republicanism, threatened not only to undermine Parliament’s authority but also to bring moral disorder and the collapse of European hegemony in the New World. “Blows must decide,” George wrote of the colonists in November 1774, “whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.” He advocated “the most coercive measures.”
The blows began to fall, first at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, then at Bunker Hill in June. By August, George had declared the colonies—“misled by dangerous and ill-designing men”—to be in “open and avowed Rebellion.” Anyone abetting the rebel cause was deemed a traitor. To his prime minister, Frederick Lord North, he wrote in October 1775, “Every means of distressing America must meet with my concurrence.”
Some Britons opposed the eventual deployment to America of almost two-thirds of the British army and much of the Royal Navy. William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, who had orchestrated Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War, was incensed. “You cannot conquer America,” he told the House of Lords. “If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I would never lay down my arms, never — never — never!”
But Parliament year after year supported the King’s hard line.
Certain strategic misconceptions, however, had seeped into British war policy. The presumption that military firepower would deter the other 12 colonies from following Massachusetts into armed rebellion proved wrong; bloodshed at Lexington and on other battlefields inflamed rebels from Georgia to New Hampshire. The King and his ministers, encouraged by senior British generals and self-serving Loyalist functionaries, also insisted that a majority of the 2 million white Americans remained at least tacitly loyal to the Crown. Yet that, too, was delusional. Modern scholarship suggests that Loyalists constituted perhaps 20 percent of the colonial population, never sufficient to control the levers of power—the Second Continental Congress and state governments—or to prove decisive in combat, despite the thousands of armed Loyalists who transformed the Revolution into a civil war.
Perhaps most wrongheaded was the conviction, embraced as an article of faith by the King throughout the war, that failure to reassert London’s authority would eventually unstitch the empire by encouraging insurrections in Ireland, Canada, the Caribbean, and India. Dominoes would topple. Conceding independence to America would plunge Britain into “a state of inferiority,” as George wrote to Lord North, and “into a very low class among the European states.” He added, “I hope never to live to see that day.”
Unlike most of the English monarchs who preceded him, George lacked military experience, although he had long considered the army “to be his own department,” one adviser reported. He threw himself into the details of expeditionary warfare: the choice of field commanders, the use of secret codes, the decision about whether seagoing colliers should be converted into men-of-war.
As the fighting intensified in America, he reviewed not only government correspondence to and from his generals but also intelligence reports, paymaster instructions, and commissary dispatches. He was consulted about the shipment of salt and candles across the Atlantic and about whether an amphibious expedition should strike North Carolina. He weighed in on which widows and orphans of redcoats killed in Boston should receive pensions, and whether American prisoners ought to be transported to India, where British territories were short of white settlers. He visited his troops in military camps and drafted detailed lists: of “Ships Building and Repairing” and “Oak Timber in Store” at various dockyards; of the commanders of his cavalry units; and of royal ships “in Ordinary”—the reserve fleet—including the number of guns each mounted.
George’s extensive library of military texts and books about America included Establishments of His Majesty’s Land Forces and Garrisons (1778), a volume bound in red morocco, with every British regiment recorded in wispy threads of black ink, along with its size, per diem allotments for officers, and other statistics. A List of Your Majesty’s Royal Navy, also in red morocco, informed the King across more than 100 pages that he commanded 125 ships of the line—each carrying 60 guns or more—plus 270 frigates and lesser craft, down to sloops, cutters, and hoys. Those vessels would collectively be manned by 45,000 sailors in 1777.
In addition to a first edition of Paradise Lost and a two-volume 1775 treatise titled American Husbandry, the King amassed tens of thousands of maps, allowing him to study his realm from an armchair. Those included exquisite battle maps of various British clashes against the American rebels, in Boston, Brandywine, Germantown, Charleston, and, ultimately, Yorktown. A particularly poignant map, annotated in 1783, depicts “the boundary of the new republic of the United States.” The King’s Library, one scholar wrote, provided “a retreat and even a solace for a monarch of retiring disposition whose long life was punctuated by bitter political acrimony.”
A Hessian mercenary’s watercolor depiction of a fellow German soldier (EMU History / Alamy)
George also took the lead in hiring auxiliary troops in Germany, which he insisted could be had “at a much cheaper rate, besides more expeditiously than if raised at home.” In seeking such mercenaries to bolster his British legions, he dictated the deal points for pay rates, transportation arrangements from Europe to America, and the war materiel to be provided. On his orders, the British colonel negotiating with various German princelings was told, “Get as many men as you can,” because “the King is extremely anxious.” Eventually some 30,000 “Hessians”—as all German troops were called, regardless of their specific origins—would battle the rebels.
At first those rebels had avoided accusing the King of complicity in prosecuting the war, preferring the fiction that only his hard-line ministers and other bellicose Britons were at fault. That discretion ended with the publication of Paine’s scathing Common Sense, which excoriated George and repudiated monarchy in general. Soon enough, his portrait was burned throughout the colonies; the royal arms vanished from American street signs and buildings; and he was subject to mock trials, executions, and funerals, a contempt that wounded him personally. The Declaration of Independence listed what Samuel Adams called George’s “Catalogue of Crimes,” a hyperbolic, 16-sentence indictment that charged him with tyranny, turpitude, and bad faith. Down came that gilded statue on Bowling Green in New York.
So much about this war baffled George, including how his reign had become entangled in a squalid brawl in the empire’s most distant marchlands. Crushing the insurgency proved far more vexatious than the King and his men had anticipated. Paine pressed the point in an open letter to the British published in 1777. “In all the wars which you have formerly been concerned in, you had only armies to contend with,” he wrote. “In this case, you have both an army and a country to combat.”
British officers deftly adapted European combat tactics to American terrain by stressing mobility, extended battle lines, and uniforms better suited to woodland fighting. But frictions beset the King’s cause. Senior commanders feuded with one another and with their political masters at home. Penny-pinching prevented a timely expansion of the Royal Navy and full mobilization of the army early in the war. An inept British supply system splintered responsibility for transporting troops and supplies across the Atlantic among the Ordnance Board, the Navy Board, the Victualling Board, and the Treasury, depending on whether the cargo to be shipped was a gun, a man, a horse, camp equipage, food, or other war necessities.
The King and his men continued to misjudge the American temperament, both in the broad, visionary commitment to a republican future and in the seething resentments that fueled the insurrection—not least from Britain’s incineration of more than half a dozen American towns. After General Washington’s successful surprise attack on the Hessian garrison at Trenton on Christmas night 1776, Lord George Germain, who directed the war from London as the American secretary, told his emissaries he hoped “that the unexpected success of the Rebels there will not so far elate them as to prevent them from seeing the real horrors of their situation.”
Months later, the last remnants of an Anglo-German army of 8,000 men, who had invaded New York from Canada, surrendered at Saratoga on the Hudson River—a “most fatal event,” in the judgment of Prime Minister North. Unbowed, the King declared the calamity “very serious but not without remedy.” Yet soon the French would come into the war against Britain, to be followed by the Spanish and eventually the Dutch. Britain remained all but friendless, as the kingdom had been since 1763, with only tiny Portugal as a putative ally.
Parliament sought a way out by renouncing its authority to tax the Americans and appointing a peace commission empowered to offer other concessions. But granting full independence to the rebels remained nonnegotiable. George refused “to enter into what I look upon as the destruction of the empire.” Lord North, miserable and overmatched as a wartime prime minister, pleaded a dozen times to resign, but the King balked at releasing his most trusted courtier. “Recruit your mind,” he urged North. To the Earl of Sandwich, he declared, “If others will not be active, I must drive.”
Drive he did. Always stalwart in the face of peril, George rallied the nation when a huge Franco-Spanish invasion fleet appeared off England’s southern coast in August 1779. Soon enough the armada sailed away, beset by sickness, poor seamanship, and confusion, without a single enemy soldier setting foot on English soil or the opposing fleets exchanging salvos. Yet victory remained out of grasp. Even a British military triumph was unlikely to yield an enduring political solution, given the animosity aroused by years of killing and the prodigious expansion of the American colonies, which were doubling in population every quarter century, an explosive growth unseen in recorded European history and four times England’s rate.
With the surrender of another British army at Yorktown in October 1781, the war was all but over, although another two years would be needed to negotiate the peace treaties. The House of Commons had delivered a stunning rebuke to the King by resolving that “the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.” George contemplated giving up the throne, and in March 1783 drafted an abdication announcement, “a self-indulgent and characteristically self-pitying private expostulation written to make himself feel better,” Roberts, the biographer, would write. George set aside the speech undelivered, to be discovered in his papers. As the King later admitted to John Adams, the first minister to the Court of St. James’s from the newly independent United States of America, “I was the last to consent to the Seperation.”
The American artist William Walcutt’s 1857 painting of the toppling of the King George III statue (Bettmann / Getty)
Such obstinacy would define his legacy for centuries to come. Failing to recognize the wide gap that had developed between Britain and the colonies, he could not understand the primal American yen for autonomy or the grievances accumulating across the Atlantic. Perhaps only great wisdom and a knack for compromise could have averted the violent rupture of 1775, but George possessed neither virtue.
His life still had almost 40 years to run after the American Revolution, a span replete with glory—including Napoleon’s crushing defeat at Waterloo—but also abject misery. As a young king, George had been briefly afflicted by a mysterious illness once thought to be porphyria, a rare blood disorder that can ravage the nervous system. In October 1788, when he was 50, the malady returned with intensity, perhaps, one physician speculated, as a result of reading King Lear. Over the course of several months, he grew erratic, delirious, and “so ungovernable,” an aide wrote, “that recourse was had to the strait waistcoat: His legs were tied, & he was secured down across his Breast.” A phalanx of doctors also used such dubious treatments as leeches applied to the temples and blistering of the head and feet. The attacks abruptly ended, but returned with redoubled fury for several months in 1804, to again be treated with the straitjacket.
This “madness,” as the behavior would be labeled in a 20th-century stage play and film, is now believed to have been “mania, a severe version of what we now label ‘bipolar disorder,’ ” according to Sir Simon Wessely, a former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Perhaps triggered by the death of George’s youngest child, Princess Amelia, in 1810, the manic agitation recurred, this time lasting the remainder of his years. With the King incapacitated, his eldest son, George, the Prince of Wales, acted in his stead under the Regency Act of 1811.
George soon descended into abject dementia and no longer recognized his family. Queen Charlotte saw him briefly at Windsor for the last time in June 1812, then never visited again. Blind and partially deaf, he grew a long white beard and played the harpsichord despite being unable to hear the notes. He died of pneumonia in 1820 at age 81, after 59 years on the throne, but without ever meeting the granddaughter who had been born a few months earlier to Prince Edward, his fourth son. That child, named Victoria, would take the crown in 1837, then rule for more than six decades and preside over the rise of a second British empire.
As for that equestrian statue of George on Bowling Green: The whereabouts of the head are unknown—it disappeared shortly after it was shipped to England. All that remains of the rider and horse are a few fragments, including the mount’s tail, displayed by museums in New York and Philadelphia, plus a few unearthed musket balls with the same chemical signature as the original lead statue.
Support for this article was provided by the British Library’s Eccles Institute for the Americas & Oceania Phil Davies Fellowship. It appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “The Myth of Mad King George.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
