In 2015, Queen Elizabeth II allowed 200,000 pages of the Hanoverian monarchs’ private papers to be put online by the wonderful Georgian Papers Programme, a collaboration between King’s College London and the Royal Archives. Had there been any plan on George III’s part to establish an oppressive regime in his North American colonies, there would have been at least a whisper, shadow or echo of it somewhere amongst his extraordinarily extensive correspondence and memoranda. Yet there is nothing of the sort. Instead, there are papers attesting to his genuine interest in American topography, flora and fauna, and local lore.
King George bought books about America, quizzed Native American chiefs about their customs and showed the kind of paternal attitude that one might expect from a constitutional monarch. Of any sinister plan to oppress his colonists there is not a word. Yet this is the man of whom Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence: “A prince, whose character is marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
The Declaration is a curious document. The first third of it is written in sublime, almost Shakespearean prose that still has the power to make one proud to be human, about the self-evident truth of all men being created equal, and so on. Then the second part, a full two-thirds of it, presents a series of no fewer than twenty-eight ad hominem charges against George III. Of those charges, only two hold water. The other twenty-six are a combination of ex post facto rationalizations, wild exaggerations, near-paranoiac fantasies, and accusations of oppression about various laws that had been in existence ever since the colonies had been founded nine monarchs earlier in the time of Elizabeth I.
If George III had been a tyrant before the outbreak of the American Revolution, he would have done the same kind of things that tyrants did elsewhere in the world. He would have stationed troops in American cities, which he never did in the special circumstances of Boston after 1768. He would have closed newspapers and arrested editors, which he never did. He would have at least attempted to prevent the Stamp Act Congress and First Continental Congress from taking place. He would certainly have interned the ringleaders of the Boston Tea Party, which, out of his respect for Magna Carta and English common law he never once so much as considered doing.