The final installment of our exploration into the life and reign of King George III delves into the tumultuous period of the American Revolution, culminating in the Declaration of Independence and the eventual conclusion of the war. We examine the narrative that paints George as a tyrant, scrutinizing the myriad of grievances levied against him, while revealing the complexities that lie beneath these accusations. This episode further chronicles the king’s descent into madness in the aftermath of the conflict, a poignant juxtaposition to the triumphs and achievements he garnered throughout his reign. Ultimately, we endeavor to reconcile the dichotomy between the historical portrayal of George III and the realities of his governance, showcasing his contributions that challenge the prevailing tyrant narrative. Join us as we encapsulate the legacy of a monarch whose life was marked by both fervent loyalty to his nation and profound personal struggles.

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Let's talk about evil for a second.

Real evil, the kind that gets written into history books.

The kind that makes philosophers make up new words and lawyers make up new laws.

We know what it looks like in practice.

We've seen enough of it.

It tends to involve a certain consistency, a pattern, if you will.

Power used deliberately, repeatedly, against the people who was supposed to protect Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

This is a staple of this kind of behavior.

Caligula doing pretty much everything that he ever did because he was crazy.

The Duke of Alba's Council of Blood executing thousands in the Dutch Netherlands while Spain called it justice.

That's.

That's tyranny with its boots on.

Tyranny that shows up, does the work right.

Now, here's the thing about tyrants is they, they leave marks.

Not just on the history books, on the actual landscape.

You know, in the burned cities, the emptied villages, the mass graves.

Really big new modernization projects that like sculpt a city into something to completely change what you think about it.

The records of the trials that either weren't really trials or the trials of those people after the fact, that if you want to find a tyrant in the historical record there, you know, the evidence is not hard to locate.

Tends to be pretty extensive.

So when a document charges a king with 28 acts of tyranny, 28.

You'd expect to find the wreckage, right?

The bodies, the silenced press, the dissolved courts, systematic dismantling of every protection his subjects ever had.

Well, we're going to look at one such case, one such document, and of course, the subject of that document.

On the third and final episode dedicated to the last king of America, George iii.

On another episode of the Remedial Scholar.

That's ancient history, I feel.

I denied critical need to know.

Belongs in the museum.

Stop skipping your remedial class.

Welcome back, lords and ladies.

I am your obedient servant and the remedial scholar, Levi.

This is the final part of the three part gauntlet on King George iii.

And you know, it's, it's.

I'm glad we're here, but it has been a lot.

There was a commenter on the youtubes that said that it was crazy that there's this much information about this guy.

I mean, realistically, there's more information about everybody going on ever.

But like, I have condensed all of that information into three episodes.

For instance, the book that I leaned on for most of the information here, the Last King of America by Andrew Roberts audiobook is 48 hours, I think.

So I could have made it longer.

I chose not to because I didn't want this to be a King George podcast.

Anyway.

Going to spare most of the begging and branding that I usually do, with the exception of I did receive an email telling me that the podcast was featured on Feedspots top 15 A level history podcasts.

Like as in really good, right?

And I hoped it wasn't a scam and I checked into it.

Seems to be legit, so pretty cool.

So if you go to podcast feed weedspot.com a/level, underscore history, underscore podcasts, you'll find this show amongst some other ones.

Some pretty popular, you can see like their social media following and stuff.

And then some like us, you know, pretty, pretty small but you know, trying to grind it out.

So that's kind of cool.

It's nice to be noticed, outside of my friends that I beg to listen to this show because I know there's more than just them that like history and I know that there's more than just them because most of my friends aren't really as into history as I am.

Like they just kind of tolerate me talking about it most of the time, which is like the whole reason I have this show.

But anyway, so that's pretty cool.

Anyway, let's, let's move on because there's a lot to get to.

Despite this being the third of three parts, it's not short on information.

So last we left off with the first shots of what would be the war for independence from the British Empire.

The colonies were sick, overreaching monarch King George iii, taking advantage of them time and time again, constantly executing his will on them with like oppressive and extensive use of force.

And although the Declaration of Independence had yet to be written, this was the storyline chosen for the cause of revolution, despite the fact that George himself had very little to do with the things that the colonists were angry about and instead ended up as the scapegoat for frustrations that began with Parliament's heavy tax hands.

Of course this is easy for us to see with hindsight.

Still, the colonists were angry.

And why shouldn't they be?

You know, they built something real over their generations of hard work, taming a wilderness, establishing communities, creating thriving economies, all while Britain was an ocean away, doing whatever Britain does, drinking tea, probably conquering things.

Anyway, now after all that self reliance, after all that pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, Parliament suddenly remembers they exist and wants money for a war that the colonists didn't even ask for.

Well, okay, they might have asked for it.

Repeatedly, for years, actually.

But, you know, the colonists had been begging Britain to do something about the French and their Native American allies threatening the frontier.

You know, Benjamin Franklin himself did go to London to plead for military assistance, but that's not the point.

The point is, once Britain did help, once they sent 21,000 soldiers across the ocean, which is also not an easy thing to do back then, doubled the national debt for this war and successfully removed the French threat, the colonists were perfectly capable of taking it from there, thank you very much.

The training wheels were off.

They didn't need a mother country anymore, especially not one holding an invoice.

And what an insulting invoice it was.

The Stamp Act, a few pennies on legal documents and newspapers.

Now, I know that doesn't sound like much.

And yes, technically, subjects back in England were paying about 50 times more in taxes.

And sure, money was specifically earmarked to pay for the soldiers who were still there protecting colonists from people whose land they were actively stealing.

But it's not about the money.

It's never about the money.

It's about the principle.

No taxation without representation.

Rallying cry for the ages.

The colonists had no representatives in Parliament, and therefore Parliament, no right to tax them.

Simple, clean, morally unimpeachable.

Now, some cynics might point out that most people in Britain couldn't vote either, and the British system was wildly unrepresentative across the board.

And others might note that the colonists had actually been offered representation and weren't terribly interested because they'd be outnumbered, outvoted on everything.

And still others might mention that the colonist assemblies had been governing and taxing locally for decades with no complaints.

But those people are missing the point, which is that the colonists were angry, and righteous anger doesn't need to be consistent, okay?

And they had every right to be angry.

For years, they had enjoyed what we might call a, quote, comfortable understanding with the mother country.

Right?

Britain provided military protection, access to global markets, legal framework, naval escorts for shipping, and the general prestige of being part of the world's most powerful empire.

In return, the colonists provided.

Well, I mean, they bought British goods sometimes, I guess, when they weren't smuggling Dutch ones.

It was a beautiful relationship Burton gave and the colonists graciously receive, like a teenager with a generous allowance who gets upset when dad asks them to mow the lawn.

The king draws a line on a map that says colonists can't Expand westward into Native American territory.

Excuse me, but those Native Americans weren't even using that land, right?

Not in a way that the colonists plan to use it anyway, which involved deeds and fences and profit margins and, you know, really cool stuff.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin.

These men had significant investments in western, Western land speculation.

Their financial futures depended on expansion.

And here comes the Crown telling them to respect treaty obligations with indigenous people.

As if treaties matter when there's money to be made.

The Quartering act was another outrage.

British soldiers, the same ones defending the colonies, yes, but still were to be housed in public buildings.

What?

And the colonial assemblies were just expected to help pay for it, for their provisions.

Now that's crazy.

And maybe the soldiers weren't even actually quartered in private homes, despite what you might have heard.

And they were there because the colonists had been asking for years for protection.

But in a larger sense, a truer sense, a more American sense, this was an imposition.

A standing army on colonial soil.

The fact that the alternative was no army and a much shorter colonial lifespan is besides the point.

And then came the tea.

Oh, that's sweet tea.

Not sweet tea, but not yet anyway.

You might think colonists would appreciate affordable tea.

You'd be wrong, because it wasn't about the tea.

It was about the principle.

The principle being that Britain had no right to do the colonists any favors they hadn't asked for.

And accepting such favors basically is agreeing to be taxed.

Essentially, this is.

It also undercut the local smugglers who had been providing perfectly good illegal Dutch tea and underground operations for many years now.

So the Sons of Liberty did what any reasonable group of principled men would do.

They dressed up as.

Well, nobody knows.

The speculation and the history of the event goes that they dressed up as Native Americans, Mohawk tribe.

That wasn't actually what they were trying to do.

They just didn't want to.

They were shedding their empirical clothes.

Right.

They're not going to be associated with your society.

Right.

And they dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor.

£92,000 of private property destroyed.

A bold statement about the limits of parliamentary authority, also technically a felony, but a patriotic one, am I right?

Parliament, shockingly, did not respond well.

The Coercive Acts, or as the colonists called them, the Intolerable Acts, because it's easier for Me to say, because branding matters closed the port of Boston until the tea was paid for, restructured the Massachusetts government, and expanded the quartering act.

Was it an overreaction?

Perhaps.

Was it predictable?

Absolutely.

When you destroy someone's property and dare them to do something about it, they usually do something about it.

But the colonists were shocked, shocked at this assault on their liberties after their peaceful demonstration involving wanton destruction of merchandise while wearing costumes.

The Continental Congress was meeting colonial armies, militias were drilling, and shots had been fired at Lexington and Concord.

The shot heard round world, so to speak, which is lovely phrase for what was essentially a skirmish that escalated because everyone was nervous and someone's musket went off.

It makes it sound so much more on purpose than what it actually was.

Wouldn't that be really funny if the entire war was just a series of misunderstandings?

It's like that movie Tucker and Dale vs Evil, where they just keep, like, being framed by situations like they're not actually doing anything bad, but the college kids think they are also.

I want to add that the first, like, few minutes of this, I was being satirical.

I don't actually believe that.

I hope it came across.

I don't know, I. I get nervous about that sometimes because I think that my tone is genuine, general, generally sarcastic sounding.

And I worry that that is how I come across when I'm trying to be realistic too.

But that was satire.

So, anyway, the colonists now faced a choice.

They could reconcile, pay for the tea, accept parliamentary authority, which Benjamin Franklin was on board for.

He even offered to pay for the tea.

And then they would go back to the arrangement that had served them reasonably well for over a century.

Or option B, curtain number two.

They could break away entirely, reject the crown and build something new.

But if they chose revolution, they would need more than grievances.

Grievances are complicated.

Grievances involve nuance, shared blame, decades of escalating misunderstandings on both sides.

Nobody storms a barricade for nuance.

Now, you might be asking why bullets needed to be fired at all.

Surely the Crown and Parliament knew well enough to simply let the colonists go, right?

I fully support an autonomous colonial America.

The logistics alone make it.

Make any other arrangement really confusing.

But here's the thing, folks, and I want you to really hear this because it matters.

Up to this point, no empire in the history of human civilization had ever just let a subordinate colony go.

Like, it just never happened.

It wasn't even thinkable.

Like, the entire concept of, you know, what you're right, this isn't working out.

And best, best luck to you did not exist in the imperial playbook.

Colonies were possessions, resources, extensions of the mother country and their power and prestige.

You didn't just give them away any more than you'd give away your own arm because you complained about it being attached to your body.

Right.

So let's look at some of the precedents available to King George III in parliament as they considered how to handle these unruly subjects across the Atlantic.

Spain, for instance.

Spain had been running a colonial empire in the Americas for over 250 years ago.

250 years.

And how did Spain handle colonial discontent?

And I was excited to see because you guys know I love some Tupac.

So the largest uprising in Spanish colonial history.

Tens of thousands indigenous people sick of exploitation and abuse, rose up against their colonial masters.

Spain's response?

Well, they crushed it pretty brutally, completely.

And when they finally captured Tupac Amaru ii, they didn't exile, imprison him.

They dragged him to the main plaza in Cusco, Cusco's plaza, the plaza for Cusco, made him watch as they executed his wife, his sons, his inner circle, and then they tied his limbs to four horses and tried to tear him apart.

And when the horses couldn't do that, he, you know, he was apparently built like an ox.

They beheaded him and dismembered the corpse for display across the vice.

Royalty.

Up to a hundred thousand people died in that rebellion and a suppression.

And Spain continued to rule Peru for another 40 years.

So that was how empires handled colonial rebellion.

That was normal.

Or consider the Dutch.

No, Spain fought for them for 80 years.

The 80 Years War.

Not a metaphor, not an exaggeration.

80 years.

The Duke of Alba, which we talked about, the Council of Blood, executed thousands.

The sack of Antwerp was 7,000 civilians killed in three days.

Spain threw everything it had at keeping those provinces and only gave up when it was financially and militarily exhausted beyond recovery.

The Portuguese, don't even get me started.

When, when Brazil started making noises about independence in the early 80s, Portugal sent troops, took a war.

When various African colonies sought independence in the 20th century, Portugal fought brutal colonial wars over a decade.

The French, Algeria, Indochina, the list goes on.

The Ottoman Empire didn't let territories leave.

The Russian Empire didn't let territories leave.

The Mughal Empire didn't let territories leave.

Nobody let territories just leave.

That's what made empires empires.

And the ones who tried to leave, well, you know, got put down pretty harshly like poor unconscious or encore les auteur as the French would say.

The on to encourage the others to stay in line.

If you let one province go, others might get ideas.

The whole structure depends on understanding that you can't just leave.

We're all holding this house of cards up, you know.

Now there were a handful of cases where colonies gained independence without full scale warfare, but even these hardly support the idea that peaceful secession is on the menu.

The Philippines were sold to the United States by Spain.

And then Filipinos who thought that meant freedom got to enjoy the Philippine American War instead.

He won its independence through a massive slave revolution that terrified every white colonial power in western hemisphere and left the island nation isolated and punished economically for generations.

Canada eventually became independent after 150 years through a gradual process that took until 8.

1982 almost made it older.

I did the old flipsy do.

Usually it's the reverse.

And even then, because Britain had long since decided the empire wasn't worth the trouble anymore, the few examples of peace peaceful decolonization we can point to came after World War II, when old empires were exhausted and broken, facing a new world order that frowned upon the whole enterprise.

India, Ghana, most of Africa.

Even then wasn't generosity, it was recognition that the game was up.

The empires held what they had, period.

So when the American colonists started dumping tea into harbors and drilling militia on the village greens, Britain's response, sending troops, closing ports, restricting self governance wasn't the aberrant behavior of a mad king.

It was exactly what every empire had always done forever.

It was in fact relatively restrained by historical standards.

Nobody was getting drawn and quartered, which is crazy because Britain loved to do that.

Like literally 50 years prior would have totally done that.

Nobody was getting sold into slavery.

The port of Boston was closed, not burnt to the ground.

They didn't release the cannons on it.

Think about what Britain could have done, what a proper empire would have done.

They could have armed and liberated every enslaved person in the south.

They did try.

They did do that in a minor way, but not as intense as they could have.

But they could have done it not even as a wartime measure, but as an immediate and total policy of destruction.

They could have just supplied Native American nations with modern weapons and pointed them at the frontier settlements.

They could have raised Boston, leveled Charleston, made examples that would have echoed for generations, because that's what Spain would have and did do.

That's what Rome did.

But Britain did it.

They sent letters, which, you know, modern Britain, that's kind of the vibe that we get, and this is kind of what I mean is like this King George was in this spot where it was a transition of the old guard way of being a king into the more modern style of like, well, we'll just write them a letter and then they will decide.

And, like, that's how things got done, which is crazy.

Britain tried reconciliation, tried compromise, tried everything short of simply just giving in, because giving in wasn't something empires did.

And when war finally came, Britain fought it with one hand tied behind his back, constrained by budgets and factions and political considerations that no proper despot would have tolerated.

For a moment, Roberts, Andrew Roberts, the guy that is the author of the book that I used very heavily in my research, said this point, very beautiful.

He said, quote, had the.

Had King George indeed been the ruthless despot that Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson made him out to be, Britain might have won the war.

Now think about that for a second.

If George had actually been the tyrant of the revolutionary propaganda, if he could have suspended Parliament, executed traitors without trial, unleashed the full might of the British military without, you know, factual interference or moral restraint, they probably would have won.

A real tyrant would have won.

Spain would have won.

Napoleon probably wouldn't have won.

He probably would have done too much.

But you know what I mean?

But that's not what happened.

Britain fought a limited, civilized war against an enemy with nothing to lose and an ocean to hide behind.

And Britain lost, not because it was too brutal, but because it wasn't brutal enough.

Not because George was a tyrant, but because he wasn't.

Which is the whole point I'm trying to make in this whole thing.

But of course, colonists didn't see that.

Yeah, they didn't see it that way.

They needed a tyrant.

They needed somebody to amp up the stakes.

The villain to be, you know, the person.

Right?

You don't pledge your lives, your fortunes, your sacred honor against reasonable men with legitimate disagreements about parliamentary authority.

You don't whip farmers into a revolution fervor by explaining how British constitutional law operates.

They're gonna get bored.

You need a monster.

You need a face to hate.

You need a royal brute.

And so, as the smoke cleared from Lexington and Concord, the colonial leadership faced a crucial task.

Not just organizing against an enemy, not just securing supplies and alliances, but they had to craft this narrative.

A story that would justify everything that was about to happen, that would transform a tax dispute into a holy cause that would make treason feel like righteousness.

Now, the Declaration of Independence is, without question one of the most beautifully written, like legal documents in human history.

I mean, sincerely, the prose source, little logic builds, the rhetoric crescendos to a conclusion that feels not just inevitable, but righteous.

Thomas Jefferson.

You know, say what you want about the guy, he could write.

He really, really.

Right.

There's something almost Shakespearean about it, actually.

The cadence, the rhythm, the way it builds from philosophical premise to specific grievance to thundering conclusion.

We hold these truths to be self evident.

That's iambic, right?

That's poetry.

Wearing the clothes of political philosophy.

Jefferson, yeah, he wasn't just making an argument.

He is composing a performance, Something meant to be read aloud, to echo in the halls, cross battlefields, to stir the blood of men who might otherwise, you know, wonder if treason was really worth it.

When you think about it, really, really, really, really think about it, there's something almost romantic about this, about this whole thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Old Thomas, he's quite the romantic.

He's.

You know, there's a document that took weeks to draft, revised by committee, debated word by word, and produced an elegant calligraphy on parchment.

It's a breakup letter.

That's what it is.

It's a Dear John, one of them John Deere letters to the British crown.

But instead of scrawling, it's not me, it's you, or, you know, backwards, it's not you, it's me on the back of a tavern receipt and shoving it under the door, the colonists.

Not that I've ever done that.

The colonists hired the best writer they knew, put them in a room for 17 days, and produce this, a breakup text so beautiful that people would frame it, put it on their walls, which is hilarious to think about in abstraction.

I framed this breakup text because I hated it, but, man, she made some really good points.

And it was beautiful.

You know, quote, when, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, that's not a declaration of war.

That's.

That's an overture, baby.

There's a heartbreak in this dark document.

Beneath all the anger, a sense of what could have been.

We're Just not us anymore.

I'm so dumb.

This idea just cracks me up way too much, you know.

But this document, the Declaration, it seems to say we tried.

We really, we went to couples therapy.

We did our best.

And it just, you know, it left us no choice.

We gotta move out.

And if you don't think too hard about who's writing it and why, it is very, you know, it's pretty, it's adorable.

What Thomas Jefferson wrote, with help from Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and a whole bunch of other people, was a masterpiece of a political persuasion document.

A document so effective that 250 years later, almost happy birthday, we still treat it as something close to sacred scripture.

You know, we hold these truths to be self evident.

Life, liberty, pursuit, happiness, government deriving its powers, its just powers from the consent of the governed.

These phrases have shaped different political revolutions since they had been written and inspired millions.

But here's the thing about masterpieces of political persuasion.

They're not really history, you know, it's not really meant to be fair.

They're meant to win.

It's a document trying to persuade people.

It's a persuasive argument.

Right.

And the Declaration was written to win, to justify this revolution that had already begun to secure foreign support from anybody except for Britain, obviously.

Well, I don't know.

Now I wonder if there was a little part of Thomas Jefferson.

If he's like if I just put this loop on this, you just.

Right.

I think King George, I think he might just let us go.

That's also incredibly funny and really dumb.

But, but the, the goal was to transform this messy colonial dispute into clear moral battle between freedom and tyranny.

And Thomas Jefferson needed a tyrant.

And so him, along with these other people who have been starting this conversation, began to describe their complaints against King George.

28 charges against he.

Not the king, not Parliament, not Lord north, not George Grenville or Charles Townsend, who.

Or any of the other ministers who actually crafted the policies the colonists hated.

Just he.

Over and over, he has, he has, he has.

Like George III was sitting in his palace personally devising ways to torment his American subjects.

Make sure that Thomas Jefferson knows it was me.

He spent his evenings cackling over maps of Boston.

And now close it.

You know, we talked about the original sin.

The first great outrage started all of it.

George Grenville.

Right, Prime Minister George Grenville.

Not King George Different George entirely.

He's the one that pushed it through Parliament, you know, he's the one that wanted to implement it.

King George signed it.

But, like, that's what the King does at this point.

Parliament devises rights, passes the laws, and then the King signs it, and then that's the deal.

So, you know, I mean, when that happened, they knew who to blame.

They burned effigies of Glen Grenville.

They called them the tyrant.

They organized boycotts specifically targeting his policy.

Nobody blamed the king, right?

Colonists understood Parliament made the laws, then the King approved them.

And when the Stamp act was repealed, because it was repealed, after all that uproar, who got the credit?

The King.

Suddenly, George III was a hero.

Colonists toasted his health.

And they put that statue up, right, with the one of him on the horse looking like a Roman emperor, right?

They were all excited.

They wrote poems and probably kissed it, I don't know, all over.

Just.

He just signed the document.

They had decided to end it because it was hitting the economy in England and he was like, I agree, it's bad.

It's not going great.

So that's weird, you know, if the King hadn't been there, it would have been repealed because of the economic pressures, right?

The boycotts crushing British merchants.

And when things went badly, Parliament was the villain again.

When things went well, seems like the King was the one who saved them.

And you can't have it both ways.

Either the King controls the policy or he doesn't.

Either he's responsible for Stamp act or he deserves the credit for the repeal.

The colonists chose whatever interpretation suited the moment, and then when revolution became useful, they decided that actually, yes, the King, he's been the bad guy this whole time.

The statues now take them down.

You know, they melted that one, turned it into musket balls, which is poetic, I suppose, if you don't think about the logistic or the logical gymnastics required to get there.

The Townsend act, you know, named after Charles Townsend, Chancellor of the.

I don't even know.

Execr.

I don't even know that word.

But it was not the King.

It was Townsend.

That's why they're called the Townsend Acts, all of these things.

And then the King signed it.

The Coercive Acts, the ones that really pushed the colonists towards the war.

Parliament passed by huge majorities in both houses.

Lord North's government.

Yes.

With the enthusiastic support of most British politicians who were, frankly, sick of colonial ingratitude after everything Britain had done for them.

The King supported his ministers as he was supposed to do that.

That's what his whole thing was.

That's what a colonial monarch does.

You support the people who are in the power that you put there to do the thing.

But he didn't design him.

He wasn't like writing like, he was aware of all of this stuff, but it's not like he was telling them what to do.

Quote, he has dissolved representative houses repeatedly.

The declaration charges.

Well, yes, colonial governors appointed by the Crown, but acting under instructions from the Ministry, did sometimes dissolve colonial assemblies.

When those assemblies were passing resolutions denying Parliament's authority or organizing resistance to British law.

What did you think they were supposed to do at that point?

Governors dissolving legislatures that were actively undermining imperial authority was a tyranny.

It's pretty standard practice, I would say.

Every empire has done that.

Most were considerably less patient about it.

Quote.

He has kept us, kept among us in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislators.

Armies were there because the colonists had asked for them.

For decades, colonial assemblies had begged for military protection against the French and Indian War, Native American allies, all of the things Britain obliged and enormous expense, and won the Seven Years War largely on behalf of colonial security.

And then when the war was over and the soldiers stayed to maintain order on the volatile frontier, suddenly it was tyranny.

It's like these soldiers weren't there to oppress the colonists.

They were there because someone had to manage the aftermath of the largest war the continent ever seen.

He has affected.

Quote he has affected to render the military independence of and superior to civil power.

This refers to General Gage being appointed governor of Massachusetts after the Coercive Acts.

Alarming, sure, but Gage was appointed by the Ministry acting on Parliament's authority.

Parliament passed a law reorganizing Massachusetts government in response to the Tea Party Engage was chosen to implement it.

Again, Parliament, Ministry, not George.

Quote.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns and destroyed the lives of our people.

Dramatic much.

The Royal Navy was enforcing the trade laws that Parliament had passed, that all of the other colonies under the British rule were also held subject to laws that had been on the books for decades.

Burnt our towns.

The British had bombarded Falmouth and Norfolk.

Norfolk, whatever.

However you want to pronounce it, it's Norfolk.

But both times in response to active colonial rebellion.

This was not wanton destruction.

This was government trying to suppress armed insurrection.

What did the colonists really expect?

Like a strongly worded letter, Dear Mr.

Rebellion.

I'm so freaking.

Anyway, quote, he has excited domestic insurrections among us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages.

That's his word, is not mine.

The British did eventually ally with various Native American nations against the colonists, but let's be honest about why.

Because the colonists had spent a century pushing them off of the land, and the Crown had actually tried to restate.

Quote, Merciless Indian savages had very good reason to prefer British rule to colonial expansion.

Calling them savages while simultaneously claiming the moral high ground about liberty and equality is.

Well, it's something.

And that brings us to the charge Jefferson wrote, but Congress deleted, which is a very smart move on their part.

The one blaming George III for the slave trade.

Thomas Jefferson.

Yes, that Thomas Jefferson.

You know, the guy who enslaved over 600 people in his lifetime, who fathered children with enslaved women that he owned and only freed some of them.

And I use the term father loosely.

I don't know how consensual any of it was.

He tried to blame the king for slavery.

Of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, one of whom I have relation with, of them, 41 of them, sorry, owned enslaved people.

It's probably a bad time to point out that I'm related to one of the people that signed it.

I'm also related to this guy who.

Anyway, not great.

I didn't.

I wasn't me.

Wouldn't be me.

Anyway, 41 of them owned enslaved people at some point in their lives.

Nearly three quarters, these men who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in the name of liberty, at that very moment were holding humans as property.

The document was debated and signed in a building where enslaved people served at.

They served refreshments.

Oh, more tea, Mr. Jefferson?

Yes, that would be great, but don't look me in the eyes.

I don't know how he acted, but I assume it was like that.

And yet here was Jefferson with a straight face, steady handwriting, that George iii, who never owned any enslaved people in his entire life, who wrote against slavery as a young man we talked about that a little bit.

Would later sign a bill abolishing the British slave trade, was somehow responsible for the institution Jefferson personally profited from every single day.

The audacity of it.

It's impressive.

I guess Congress struck the passage not because it was hypocritical, though, because this is so crazy to me, though.

It was, you know, it was great.

It was A thing.

They didn't get rid of it because it was hypocritical.

Hypocritical, even though it was.

But because South Carolina and Georgia wanted to keep importing slaved people and didn't appreciate being made feel bad about it.

Made to feel bad about it.

That's the only reason it's not in there.

Because some of the colonies that would be on your side didn't want to feel guilty because they're running the game that they're angry about the king for being a part of, even though he wasn't.

I'm just saying that's pretty crazy.

The Northern delegates went along because, as Jefferson noted, their ships made good money transporting human cargo.

So to blame the king for slavery gambit failed.

But not for lack of trying.

The men who signed this document were not, for the most part, humble farmers fighting for simple liberty.

They were wealthy.

They were powerful slave owners, land speculators, merchants who had made fortunes smuggling goods to avoid the very trade laws they now cited as tyranny.

John Hancock.

You know, the guy with the gigantic signature on the page, the one whose little underscore thing I have stolen.

Come at me, John.

We'll see who bests who.

Yeah, bag of bones.

If for those of you who don't know, when I sign my artwork, there's a flourish that John Hancock does underneath his signature on the Declaration of Independence.

And I have stolen it to use for me because my last name starts with an H, not the guy I'm related to on the document.

But it's mine now.

Deal with it anyway.

John Hancock, one of the richest men in the colonies, made his money in shipping, including a fair amount of smuggling that the British had lately been trying to suppress.

The revolution was good for business fear.

John Hancock.

Benjamin Franklin had spent years in London trying to secure Western land grants for himself and his associates.

Independence would be much better.

George Washington had huge Western land holdings and significant investments in the frontier expansion.

The Crown's restrictions were costing him dearly.

Plus, let's be honest, the man wanted glory.

He'd been passed over by the British military establishment years earlier and still stung a little bit.

Thomas Jefferson, drowning in debt, much of it inherited, all of it tied up in land and enslaved labor.

The existing system wasn't working for him.

The new system might.

This isn't to say that they were insincere.

People can genuinely believe in liberty while also noticing that liberty happens to align with their financial interests.

But it does complicate the narrative a little bit.

These weren't disinterested philosophers sacrificing everything for abstract principle.

They were practical men who saw an opportunity and took it, then wrote a document brilliant enough to make their gamble look like destiny.

And the King they blamed for everything.

He was reading reports, holding meetings with ministers, trying to hold together fractious parliament, and doing what every British monarch had done for generations, supporting the policies of his government.

Not a dictator, not a schemer.

He was a cog in a machine, an important one, but a cog nonetheless.

The Declaration makes him sound like a tyrant out of ancient history, but the reality way more mundane.

And so George iii, earnest and dutiful and genuinely bewildered by how badly things had gone, became the royal brute, the tyrant, the monster.

It was never personal for him, but it sure was effective.

There's actually no indication that he ever read it.

Thomas Jefferson spent weeks writing this love letter, and the document destined specifically to wound, to justify, to transform King George into history's villain.

And the King apparently didn't want to read it.

And it's not because he didn't, like, care.

It's because him reading it would have given credence to what was happening right so far.

If he doesn't see it, it's not official, essentially.

I'm sorry, I didn't.

Your breakup text.

We're still on for Sunday, right?

The London Chronicle published it in full on August 15th.

Every coffee house in London was buzzing about it.

You would think Lady Whistledown might have just released her hot gossip rag.

But George was silent when Thomas Hutchinson, the former royal governor of Massachusetts, sent the King a copy of his pamphlet refuting the declarations charges the receipt might have non pulse George, since again, acknowledging it would require acknowledging that he'd read the thing it was responding to.

And, you know, perhaps he simply didn't care what a collection of rebels thought of him.

Perhaps he misunderstood it, or perhaps he did understand it in some intuitive way.

You know, like I said, engaging with it with propaganda kind of only certifies it as legitimate.

Or perhaps, and this is the most poignant possibility, he.

He recognized that this document wasn't really about him at all.

It was about a narrative.

The constant the colonists needed to tell themselves.

And what can you really say to that?

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the colonists were doing enough, reacting for both of them, the Declaration prompted an orgy of destruction aimed at the king's image.

Royal.

Royal coats of arms, they were torn from churches and courthouses and burned.

And in Boston, shop signs featuring crowns and lions were thrown into a bonfire in King street, which I bet was renamed to Tyrant street in Providence, the royal arms from Colony House were paraded through the streets and set ablaze, along with an effigy of the king.

In Philadelphia, his portrait was hung upside down.

Now, now, now, the blood's gonna rush your head.

In Baltimore, he was burned in an effigy in Huntington, Long island, with what Roberts calls a, quote, element of overkill.

George was hung on the gallows, exploded and burnt to ash.

Yeah, I guess just a little bit of overkill.

The most famous act of symbolic regicide that happened in New York City after Washington ordered the Declaration read aloud to his troops.

The crowd descend in green and tore that statue down that we talked about, turned it into musket balls, which is a painful irony.

The head was carried into a wheelbarrow to the Blue Bell Tavern, impaled on a stake, accompanied by fifes and drums playing the Rogues March.

When the British later retook New York, an engineer named John Montresor found the mutilated head and sent it back to London, where it was displayed to illustrate the disposition of the ungrateful people.

Which is some pretty good counter propaganda, if I do say so myself.

Washington himself disapproved of, quote, the appearance of riot and want of order in the vandalism, though he doubtless appreciated the extra ammunition.

And the king said nothing, wrote nothing, apparently read nothing.

He simply continued doing what he had been doing, supporting his ministers in their effort to support, suppress.

Not support to suppress the rebellion.

I say attempting, because what actually happened was less coordinated than coordination, than chaos.

The war effort wasn't led by a tyrant with absolute power.

It was managed by a cabinet of men who mostly couldn't stand each other, overseen by Parliament, divided into factions that agreed on almost nothing, and executed by generals who received their orders months after those orders were relevant.

Lord north, the prime minister, a charming and capable parliamentarian who knew perfectly well that he was not a war leader.

He begged to resign repeatedly.

The anxiety of his mind, one observer note, had deprived Lord north of his memory and understanding.

He called it that, this damnable war.

He told the king that if he remained in charge, national disgrace and ruin will be the consequence.

But George kept him on, partly out of loyalty, partly because the alternatives were worse, and partly because the king had secretly paid off North's death's debt, paid off North's Debts to the tune of 16,000 pounds, which made the whole relationship uncomfortably complicated.

You don't.

It's hard to loan friends money.

Lord George Germain Jackson, the American Secretary, was not only in charge of the war, but Germaine carried a stigma that poisoned everything he touched at the Battle of Minden.

Oh, Minden.

I know it well.

That sentence was read aloud to every regiment in the British Army.

And now, 17 years later, here he was directing a war from London.

And every general who served under him knew exactly what the men at home thought of him.

He quarreled with virtually every commander sent to America, and they returned the favor by blaming him for everything that went wrong.

Pretty good.

The Earl of Sandwich, first Lord of the Admiralty, spent most of his time defending his turf rather than coordinating naval operations.

And I will have you know, I did put consume after sandwich because I thought it was funny.

So deal with it.

The bureaucratic nightmare was not great.

Arranging tents for single regiment, requiring required coordination between the Guards, the Board of Admiralty and the Secretary at War.

Orders took months to cross the Atlantic.

Responses took months more.

By the time London learned what had happened in America, the situation had already changed completely, which is not great.

While the government fumbled, the opposition cheered for the enemy.

At brooks Club on St. James's street, which George called a quote, den of aristocratic drunkenness, high stakes gambling and radical ideas, Whig politicians drank toast to George Washington.

They bet on British defeats.

Charles James Fox, Jamie Foxx, the most flamboyant of the opposition Whigs denounced North as the blundering pilot who had brought the nation into present difficulties.

Which sounds like probably the worst thing you could say to a British guy.

He wasn't just opposing the war, he was rooting for the other side.

And there was nothing George could do about it, because that's how Parliament worked.

The King couldn't silence his critics.

He could only watch as his own government tore itself apart.

This was the machine that was supposed to defeat the Revolution.

A reluctant prime minister, a disgraced American secretary, a jealous Admiralty, a divided Parliament and an opposition that actively celebrated colonial victories.

Not exactly the ruthless engine of tyranny that the Declaration has described.

I don't Know why I keep dipping into random accents?

I think winter's been too long is what I think.

I need to be outside a little more.

Not a ton more, because I will burn, but just a little bit.

Getting Delulu, as the kids say.

Anyway, into this chaos came the strategy that would lose the war.

General John Bergoni.

Bergoni as Italian for sure, would march south from Canada through the Hudson Valley.

General William Howe would march north from New York, and they would meet at Albany, cutting off New England, the hotbed of the rebellion, from the rest of the colonies.

Divide and conquer.

Yeah, it sounds better.

Simple, elegant, you know, kind of thing that works beautifully on a map in a London office.

The problem was that maps didn't show swamps.

Maps don't show forests so dense that an army moves at a crawl.

Maps don't show supply lines stretched hundreds of miles through hostile territory.

And maps don't certainly don't show what actually happens when one general doesn't actually know what the other one is doing.

Germain's orders to Howe were vague.

Trusting, not ordering, not commanding.

Trusting.

That's not a very good military directive.

That's a hope dressed up in official stationary.

That's not good.

How decided to reach Philadelphia by sea, sailing his army down to Chesapeake Bay, route that took him even further from Burgoyne.

Burgoyne, who was already hacking his way through the New York wilderness, wondering where his support was.

By the time Howe's decision reached London, months had passed.

By the time London's response could have reached Howe, the campaign season was over.

Burgoni.

Burgoyne, meanwhile, was discovering that the wilderness of upstate New York was not cooperating with his timetable at all.

His army was enormous.

Seven thousand regulars, plus artillery, plus camp followers, plus baggage trains stretched for miles, moving all of that through the roadless forest, requiring building bridges, clearing paths, hauling cannons through mud.

The Americans falling back before him felled the trees across.

Every route, which should have taken weeks, took months.

At Bennington, a foraging expedition of Hessian dragoons was mauled by American militia.

Burgoyne.

Burgoyne.

Burgoyne.

I don't know.

We're going with Burgoyne.

Burgoyne lost nearly a thousand men in a single engagement.

That was supposed to be simple supply run, so not great.

By September, Burgoyne had passed through Past the point of no return.

Couldn't go back to canada.

The season was too advanced.

He.

His supplies too depleted.

He could only push forward and hope that Howe or Clinton in new york Would come to his rescue.

And they did not.

At Saratoga, General John Burgoyne surrendered his entire army to the American General, Horatio Gates.

5700 British and German soldiers laid down their arms.

It was the first time in history that an entire british army had surrendered in.

In the field.

The news reached london in early december.

Lord north delivered it to Parliament on December 3, calmly, soberly, framing the disaster as serious but not fatal.

The king wrote to him the next day Praising the, quote, manly, firm and dignified part you took and insisted the situation was very serious.

Whitboat.

But not without remedy.

And not without remedy.

That was George's position.

He would hold it for four more years.

He was not a man who gave up very easily.

He was not a man who gave up at all, really, which was both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.

But saratoga changed pretty much everything.

Not because britain couldn't absorb the military loss.

It could, and it would.

Raise more troops, spend more money, try again.

Saratoga matter.

Because of what happened next, the french entered the war.

The french had been watching the american rebellion with keen interest, Quietly supplying the rebels with money and weapons for years.

But they hadn't been willing to intervene openly, not until they were confident that the americans could actually win.

Saratoga provided confidence in that.

Spain followed the next year, and then the dutch the year after that.

So that's.

That's pretty crazy.

It started as a colonial rebellion, now teetering on the point of world war.

Potentially.

Lord north, defending the government's conduct after yorktown, Made a point that deserves more attention than it usually gets.

This was not, he insisted, A war of the crown.

It was a war of parliament and therefore of the people as a whole.

Parliament had voted for the measures that provoked the conflict, Funded the war year after year, Debated strategy at every turn.

The opposition had complained loudly, but they had never managed to stop it.

This wasn't a king's personal crusade.

This was a democratic.

Well, as democratic as 18th century.

Britain got a decision to suppress a rebellion.

North went further.

Nor did it ever cease to be popular Until a series of unparalleled disasters and calamities Caused the people, wearied out with almost uninterrupted ill success and misfortune, to call out as loudly as peace as they had formerly done for war.

That's the key.

The British people wanted this war until they didn't, right?

And when they stopped wanting it, they blamed the king, just as they had praised him.

When the Stamp act was repealed, they condemned him.

When Yorktown fell, Parliament, the institution that actually made the decision, somehow escaped accountability.

The man who signed what Parliament gave him took all the blame.

That's crazy.

With the French entry, the conflict expanded across the globe to the Caribbean, which I guess isn't really that much further to India.

Gibraltar, a little further away.

The American theater became one front of many, and arguably not even the most important one anymore.

The Sugar islands off the West Indies were more economically valuable than all 13 colonies.

But combined propaganda war intensified alongside the military one.

In America, every British action was framed as further proof of tyranny, which is hilarious to me.

You should not respond to us trying to kill you, because that's tyranny, man.

The burning of towns, raid of coastal communities, the alliances with Native American nations all fed into the narrative that the British were waging a war of extermination against innocent people.

But the revolution was not a unanimous uprising of freedom loving colonists.

It was in many places a civil war, with Americans fighting Americans and atrocities committed on both sides.

The British story never gained the same traction.

The Americans controlled their own narrative and they told it better.

Jefferson and Payne and the Continental Congress understood something that the British minister ministry never quite grasped.

In a war with ideas, you have to win the argument, not just the battle.

The Continental army, meanwhile, was learning how to fight.

They had started as an armed mob.

George Washington himself described his early troops in terms that would make a modern HR department not pumped.

Among these were dirty, nasty people and unacceptable kind of stupidity.

They lacked discipline, supplies, training and experience.

And they lost most of their early engagements.

New York fell, Philadelphia fell.

But they learned Baron von Steuben.

French officers brought expertise, and eventually French soldiers and ships brought numbers.

The Americans discovered they didn't have to win every battle.

They just had to survive to keep an army on the field, to make war expensive and interminable, Interminable, until Britain lost the will to continue.

And Britain was losing that will.

The national debt ballooned, Taxes rose, trade suffered in opposition.

Parliament grew louder every week.

It seemed even supporters of the war began to question whether it was worth the cost.

Yorktown was almost an accident of convergence.

The British fleet sailed out to meet him, fought a tactical war, and then inexplicably, catastrophically, sailed back to New York for repairs.

Instead of pressing the engagement, Degrassi was left in control of Chesapeake, and Cornwallis was trapped.

Now Washington, recognizing the opportunity, marched south with the continental army.

French forces under rochambeau joined him.

By late September, 8,800Americans and 7, 800 French soldiers had Cornwallis's 7,400 men surrounded by land, while degrassi blocked any escape by sea.

The siege lasted three weeks.

Legend has it that the british band played the world turned upside down as the soldiers marched out to lay down their arms.

That's probably apocryphal, but there's no contemporary accounts that confirms that.

But it captures the moment pretty good.

The world had indeed turned up upside down.

When the news reached London on November 25, Germain brought it personally to Lord north at 10 Downing Street.

North received it, and according to Jermaine, as he would have taken a bullet through his breast, he paced the room, arms flung wide, repeating over and over, God, it's all over.

Oh, God, it's all over.

Game over, man.

And it was.

Though George didn't know it yet, or rather, he refused to accept it.

He, you know, you know, very stubborn.

It's that German in him.

Three days after receiving the news, the king wrote to Germain, if, quote, if we despond, that's dip it in Australia.

If we despond, certain ruin ensues.

He wanted to fight on.

He believed the war could be won.

Still, he rather foolishly sometimes, but, you know, new armies could be raised, new strategies devised.

The French were overextended.

The Spanish were wavering.

Americans were exhausted.

If Britain could just hold out for something, something would break in their favor.

But parliament had other ideas.

On March 20, after 12 years in office, lord north finally resigned.

George was devastated.

He drafted a message.

Historians call it the America is lost memorandum, and went further.

He drafted an abdication speech.

He would renounce the throne, he wrote, and retired to his beloved Hanover, where he could live out his days far from ungrateful island that had Abandoned him.

And he never delete delivered it.

And it's also very funny that he was like, I'm gonna go to Hanover.

He never left London, which is something I'll get to in a bit.

But something held him back from doing so.

Duty, probably.

That relentless sense of obligation to had driven him his entire life.

He couldn't abandon his post, even if his post had became a misery.

So he stayed.

He accepted the new ministry under Marquess of Rockingham, the very Whigs he had despised, the men who had opposed the war from the beginning.

He watched as they negotiated the peace that formalized his failure.

And then he did something pretty remarkable.

He had been one of the architects of the rebellion.

He had helped draft the Declaration of Independence.

It spent years in Europe working again, working to secure.

Working to secure alliances against Britain.

And now he was standing in the palace of the King he had helped to defy, waiting to present his credentials.

George received him with grace.

More than grace, with warmth.

He said, I will 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 have always said, as I say now, I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.

That tipped into Australian a little bit.

Adams was moved.

He hadn't expected this, which is something that the King was really good about doing.

He really like, likes to pull 180 on people.

He expected coldness, hostility, or at best, formal courtesy, you know, which mask.

Instead, here was the royal brute of revolutionary propaganda, speaking like a statesman, like a man who lost, knew he had lost, determined to lose with dignity.

The circumstances of this audience are so extraordinary.

Adams managed to reply, the language you have have now held is so extremely proper that I must remark that I have no attachment but to my own country.

An honest man will never have any other.

George replied, it was by all accounts a genuinely affecting moment.

The King and the revolutionary standing in a gilded room, finding their way towards something like mutual respect.

But there was a price for all of it.

The war, the betrayals, the propaganda, the failures, they had all taken a toll, and not just politically, but personally, physically, mentally.

It's it said either way in many of the readings.

So it is just dependent on who you read but something happened to him and this only came further in over the years.

In October, the King began behaving erratically, talked incessantly, he couldn't sleep, became violent with his attendants.

He fixated on Lady Pembroke, declaring her his true wife instead of Charlotte.

Charlotte, he called Pitt a rascal, and Fox his great enemy, his friend.

Everything was reversed, everything was wrong.

Political stakes very big.

If George was incapacitated, the Prince of Wales would become Regent and.

And the Prince of Wales was everything George was not.

Dissolute, extravagant, and a friend of Charles James Fox, Jamie Fox.

A Regency would mean a new government, new policies, completely complete reversal of everything George had worked for.

One of them, Reverend Francis Willis, a 71 year old priest with a medical degree who ran an asylum in Lincolnshire, employed methods that were radical for the time.

Cleanliness.

Yeah, right.

Activity, good nutrition, behavioral therapy.

Kind of witch is this guy.

He also used straight jackets.

When the King became violent, George called the straitjacket his coronation chair and told Willis with what clarity he could muster, I am afraid of you.

But Willis's methods worked or the episode ran its course.

The King returned to his duties, but he was not the same.

Charlotte's hair.

Queen Charlotte, her hair had turned gray.

During this crisis, closeness between the King and Queen, their famously affectionate marriage, never fully recovered from this.

The modern diagnosis, arrived through careful analysis of contemporary accounts, is bipolar disorder, type 1 with psycho psychotic features.

The older theory, popularized by the play and film the Madness of King George, held that he suffered from porphyria, which is a metabolic disorder.

But again, recent scholarship has discredited that interpretation.

Symptoms fit mania, elation, pressure of speech, disinhibit, disinhibited behavior, occasional violence, disorders of thought, insomnia, recurring throughout his life, managed for years and then finally unmanageable.

He never recovered.

And the King would spend the Last decade of his life at Windsor, blind, deaf, wandering the halls in a purple dressing gown, playing the harpsichord for hours, talking to people who weren't there.

The accounts from these final years are pretty harrowing.

You know, George grew.

He grew this, like, long white beard, wandered the corridors in this gown, like I told about.

He played the harpsichord for hours on end.

I gotta tell you, I kind of want to know what that sounded like.

I bet it was good.

I bet it was really good, actually.

He still played it.

He forgot that Charlotte had died.

He spoke of the late king in third person, referring to himself as if he were already dead.

He was a good man, yes.

King George is good man, yes.

In his madness, he had achieved something like perspective, you know, giving himself his flowers in a weird way.

The actual George of these years, described by those who saw him, the most disheveled figure ever to bear the title of King of England.

His beard wild, unkempt, his clothes hanging loose on a gaunt figure, his eyes holding the vacant stare of a man no longer present in his own body.

But the portrait shows, you know, none of this.

He is.

I mean, this drawing does show.

He's got a long beard and he's gray and he's, you know, it's.

It's from the profile, so he's not looking dead on at you, but it is a lot more composed than a lot of the descriptions are.

But the fiction of royal dignity was maintained even when reality had collapsed entirely.

And they owed him that much, at least.

He was 81 years old.

He had reigned for 59 and 96 days longer than any English or British monarch before him.

Ammonia was what took him in the end, quietly, while he was already far away from the world that had exhausted and betrayed and abandoned him.

The British public mourned him, genuinely mourned him.

This is worth dwelling on because it complicates this narrative of the mad king, right?

Shops closed, people of all classes wore black.

They mourned him because they had loved him, not in spite of knowing him, but because of it.

They loved Farmer George The King, who cared about crop yields and livestock breeding, who wrote agricultural journals under pseudonym because he was genuinely interested rather than seeking glory.

He would literally just, like, talk to people when he would visit, when he would, like, make his rounds and, like, visit the community, he would, like, talk shop with some of the farmers, which is hilarious to think of, like, just the King just being like, yeah, so I'm having trouble with potatoes very seriously.

Yes, my lord.

And they love that, you know, they love that he kind of had this more simplistic life.

He dressed very plainly compared to most of the aristocracy at the time, as they dressed in, like, these gaudy outfits, you know, competing for their excess, essentially.

They love that he was faithful to his wife, genuinely, consistently faithful.

Loved her very clearly loved this lady over 50 years, in an age when royal mistresses were so expected that their absence was remarkable.

And they loved that he worked, that he took his duties seriously and that he rose early, stayed late and actually read documents that he was asked to sign.

They loved that he was accessible.

George walked among his subjects like I discussed, in a way that his predecessors never really did.

He stopped to talk the farmers, he visited manufacturers.

He attended public events not as a distant icon, but as a participant.

The public response was outpouring with genuine concern.

When he recovered, they were excited.

Spontaneous celebrations across the country.

Not commanded, not orchestrated, but genuinely expressions, genuine expressions of relief and express affection.

Man tongue twistered myself.

Church bells rang, bonfires burn.

Compare this to what happened 10 years after his death, when George IV died, at times wrote that there never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than the deceased king, which is crazy.

The son who had embodied everything George III despised, extravagance, dissolution, cruelty, was dismissed with content.

His funeral cost 238,000 pounds, 10 times what his father's had cost, and nobody cared.

The father who had lived, simply worked tirelessly and suffered enormously, was remembered with something approaching love.

In Britain, at least.

Anyway, they knew difference between the man and the myth.

And George III never left Britain, as I mentioned earlier, not once.

He was the first Hanoverian monarch who was truly British.

Born in London, raised in England, speaking English, the Lords, the King's English as his first language, thinking of himself as an Englishman rather than a German prince temporarily stationed on an island.

He'd never vetoed a single act of Parliament, not one in 59 years on the throne through countless ministries and countless pieces of legislation, many of which he personally disagreed with.

He never once exercised the royal veto and he had the legal right to do so, a right his predecessors had used freely.

William III vetoed bills.

He disliked Queen Anne and vetoed the Scottish militia bill.

1708, the last time a British monarch used that power.

The stewards claimed divine right.

The Tudors had made and made an unmade religious settlements at will.

George III faced challenges that would have justified, by standards of the time, far more aggressive use of royal power.

Lost a war, lost colonies.

Like he could have just overruled parliament and said, hey guys, you are doing really badly.

I'm going to put these generals in charge and just let them do what they do and report back to me.

Like just wartime mentality, I guess.

He lost war, lost colonies, lost.

He faced riots and radicals and opposition that openly cheered for his enemies.

John Wilkes published libelous stuff, celebrated for it.

Thomas Paine called him a royal brute, sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

On this, the characterists depict him as a fool, a tyrant, a madman.

And George the did nothing.

He didn't suspend habeas corpus, he didn't pack the courts, he didn't arrest his critics, censor the press, do any of the things that an actual tyrant would do.

I will never acknowledge that the king of a limited monarchy can on any principle endeavor the cha.

The change.

Endeavor to change the constitution and increase his own power.

George said he meant it.

He lived it, suffered for it.

The man Jefferson accused of establishing an absolute tyranny was, in practice one of the most constitutionally restrained monarchs in British history.

Less tyrannical than Elizabeth, who had executed rivals and controlled the church.

Less tyrannical than the Stuarts, who had claimed divine right and ruled without Parliament.

George iii, the royal brute, was a constitutional monarch who actually behaved like one and got called a tyrant anyway.

By men who owned slaves, speculated stolen land, and knew perfectly well that their accusations were propaganda rather than truth.

He worked harder than any king before him.

He rose at 6 in the morning, worked until late night reviewing military promotions, reading diplomatic dispatches, studying parliamentary ability kept Britain stable during the most turbulent period in modern European history.

The French revolution toppled a monarch, executed a king we've heard about it convulsed the continent.

The Napoleonic wars reshaped the map of Europe.

Britain endured.

George provided the steady, stubborn, relentless commitment to resistance that held the nation together.

He built one of the great libraries of his age.

65,000 printed books, 19,000 pamphlets and tracks, 4,000 maps actually read and annotated and which donated to the British Museum at his death, doubling the institution's holdings.

Also hilarious that he had so many maps and then, like, never left London.

That's very funny to me.

He supported astronomers.

William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, nice.

I'm such a child.

George visited Herschel's telescope and peered through it himself, marveling at the spaces.

When Carolyn Herschel, William's sister had and brilliant astronomer in her own right needed support, the King provided it, making her the first woman in Britain to receive a salary for scientific work.

Pretty cool.

Then there was John Harrison.

We talked about that last time.

Is he related to me?

I don't know.

Probably better relation than the other ones I mentioned in this episode.

After he was denied his prize of money by the Board of Longitude Longitude with his marine chroma chronometer, George rectified the situation, made sure he was paid.

Never owned anybody that was a slave.

Wrote against slavery as a young man, calling it inhuman custom, wantonly practiced.

Whatever Jefferson claimed, the King's record on slavery was considerably better than that of the slaveholder who accused him.

And none of this fits the narrative of the royal brute.

As I've discussed, none of it appears also in the Declaration of Independence, which is weird, you know, we don't like how big of a tyrant is, but the dude really loves paintings.

That would have been a really fun document to read.

Despite his love for art, we just can't get down with his tyranny.

His family life, which had been his greatest joy, became in his later years a source of constant anguish.

His sons were a disaster, basically all of them.

The Prince of Wales, the future George iv, for George was a spendthrift, glutton and libertine who seemed destined by fate to embody everything his father despised.

He ran up astronomical debts, secretly married a Catholic widow in violation of the Royal Marriages act, sided with Fox and the opposition, the Whigs, specifically to wound his father.

The Duke of York was caught up in the scandal involving his mistresses selling army commissions.

Duke of Clarence openly lived openly with an actress and fathered 10 illegitimate children.

The Duke of Cumberland was accused, probably false, of murdering his valet.

Duke of Kent broke mutinies in the units he commanded.

George had wanted to raise his sons with discipline, duty, moral seriousness, and failed pretty comprehensively.

His daughters failed, fared only slightly better.

Several descended into melancholy and kept too close, denied marriages.

You know, any independence that might have given them any freedom on their own lives.

That must suck.

She was 27.

Spent her final years as an invalid.

She left her father a morning ring, described with an inscription, saying, remember me.

Oh, God.

George collapsed within weeks of her death.

This time, he would not recover.

Pitt's solution to Irish unrest was legislative union.

Ireland's parliament would be abolished, its representatives absorbed into Westminster.

Irish Catholics would finally be allowed to sit in Parliament, participate fully in political life.

And George refused.

So not.

Not a good look, Georgie.

Absolutely, immovably, on the grounds of conscious his conscience.

At his coronation, he had sworn to uphold the Protestant faith.

To him, not a political promise, but a sacred oath.

Catholic Emancipation would violate that oath, and he would not consent to it.

He would rather, he said, beg his bread from door to door.

Pitt resigned after 17 years of partnership.

Closest working relationship George ever had with a prime minister ended over a question of religious conscience.

Was he right?

Catholics would probably argue no.

Historians also argue no.

But you can't argue that he was acting like a tyrant in this thing, in this moment either, because I think it's.

I think it's a little more different.

He's bound by his religiosity, right?

Willing to lose his best minister, then violate his understanding of his sacred duty.

And you can disagree with this conclusion, but can't question that he reached it through genuine moral reasoning, I guess, no matter how silly you find it.

This was the same man Jefferson accused of a long train of abuses designed to establish an absolute tyranny.

Mine could betray him.

And it happened once, it happened again.

So he actually began to, like, research into it, you know, different variations.

He looked more into straight jackets that were used to hold him, examine different protocols employed in private asylums.

He wanted to understand what would happen if he lost his reason again.

Not to prevent it, because he knew he couldn't, but to manage it, I guess, ensure that his episodes would be handled with as much dignity as the circumstances allowed.

And you know, that's the king looking at his own potential madness with a clinical detachment, which is kind of interesting.

You don't really get a lot of that these days.

Mainly because there's not many kings left.

Not really the behavior of a tyrant either.

I would say not behavior of a man terrified of losing control.

A tyrant I feel like would double down like, I'm not crazy, you're crazy.

And he's just arguing with the wall.

Don't argue with me.

Anyway, he was terrified of losing control and determined to maintain it even when he couldn't.

A commemorative medal struck after his death bore the inscription Peter Patrier a father of his country.

Not ours, but his country.

Right.

Anyway.

And so we come to the end.

Three episodes 60 years of rain.

One man blamed for an empire's failures, forgotten for his success successes.

We began with a boy never expected to be king.

Determined to be a patriot.

King watched as he inherited this empire at its zenith and struggled to maintain the peace that followed.

Trace the road of revolution.

Policies that weren't his ideas at war that Parliament wanted Parliament bungled.

And we watched George become the scapegoat for a systems failures that had mostly nothing to do with it.

The villainization of George in the Declaration of Independence, you know, forgetting about Parliament, I guess and all of the things, all of these slave owners calling him a tyrant.

And that's story one.

For 250 years we've been telling it but you know, the people who actually knew him remembered him as someone else.

Farmer George, a faithful husband man who worked and endured.

When he died, they mourned him.

When his son died 10 years later, they didn't.

So I feel like that might tell you everything you need to know.

For generations the myth held.

But in recent decades, you know, something shifted which is a big part of the modernization of some of the royal archives.

The monarchy has been making as of late George's volumous, voluminous.

The big volumes of George's correspondence which were only available to scholars for a long time, now available to anybody with Internet, which is pretty cool.

And then enable people like Andrew Roberts to write the Last King of America, which I again highly recommend.

Very interesting.

Goes way more in depth than I did.

But you know, what we learn, I feel like contradicts everything that I knew about King George.

Even though I did not know a lot, I just knew bad guy, Revolutionary War Hamilton, funny thing.

And then he was.

It was deeply intellectual, which is very surprising.

Like you don't think about kings in that way, you think of them as like sitting on the throne and making decisions and.

And you know, they got the map with the sticks and the little guys and this guy's like, I want a planetarium, mother.

And he got it.

And it is very studious.

He had a huge collection of different, like, scientific tools and things.

Very interesting and love to learn.

Just an intellectually curious guy.

And I think that's probably one of the more surprising bits about him, like how.

How well read he was.

He researched everything, looked into so many things, like he was not an absolute monarch and didn't control everything, but he did the preparation as if he was like pretty crazy.

And back on Andrew Roberts, he has a very good quote in his book.

He says that George III is probably is, quote, the most unfairly traduced sovereign in the long history of the British monarchy.

And after three episodes, three long episodes, I am inclined to agree.

And that brings me to you.

If you made it this far through the Seven Years War, Stamp Act, Saratoga, Yorktown, through the madness, recovery, madness again, and you understand something that most people never will.

History obviously more complicated than the stories we inherit.

So here's my ask question.

The narratives, Read the sources.

When someone tells you a story that's too clean, too simple, too perfectly suited to somebody's agenda, dig a little deeper.

The truth is usually typically more messy than and more human and more interesting than what is being presented.

And if this series meant something, do you share it?

Leave a review.

Tell someone who thinks George 3rd was just a crazy tyrant.

Tag Lin Manuel Miranda.

No, don't do that.

You know, the best history, I think, isn't just informing, but challenging, like preconceived notions.

It makes us reconsider what we thought we knew.

And that's why I enjoy doing this.

And George iii, he deserved better than a story we told about him.

Maybe 250 years later, we can finally start telling a better one.

So that keep questioning the past.

The future will thank you.

We'll see you next time.