Let George Do It

The comment appears in this vivid review of the reign of George III, which details the king’s efforts to renew the monarchy and create a harmonious family life. Though he failed in the latter ambition, the book makes plain how today’s notion of royalty owes a greater debt to “Farmer George”—his nickname because of his fondness for agriculture—than most people realize.  

George III became king at the age of 22, in 1760, and was warmly received. “No British monarch has ascended to the throne with so many advantages as George III,” wrote Horace Walpole. The country had triumphed in the Seven Years’ War, and trade was flourishing. Walpole was especially impressed by the new king’s openness: “This sovereign does not stand on one spot with his eyes fixed on the ground and dropping bits of German news. He walks about and speaks to everybody.” George III was determined to avoid appearing like a transplanted German, as had been the case with his predecessors, George I and George II.  

But he was also painfully aware of his lack of experience. Acutely shy and awkward and with a nervous tic that made him say “what, what” at the end of a sentence, he would have preferred to be “a Berkshire gentleman and no king.” Meeting the demands of the job, writes Janice Hadlow, required an almost superhuman effort to recast his personality. 

To prepare him for his task, the earl of Bute, John Stuart, who became first minister, supplied him with a vision of kingship that was very different from that of his predecessors. This vision was one in which the king keeps himself above the political fray and, together with his family, provides a model for society: “It was the virtue of the king—the goodness of his actions as both a public and private man—that formed the source of all his power,” writes Hadlow.  

To succeed, George considered a harmonious family life crucial, and, here, his great-grandfather George I and grandfather George II had afforded powerful examples of how not to proceed, having both fought with their heirs with an almost pathological intensity. Thus, everything hinged on finding the right spouse. Sarah Lennox, his first pick, had been rejected for political reasons, so the role fell to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a Prussian backwater duchy. Once, in her grandfather’s day, Frederick the Great (while still crown prince) had visited Charlotte’s tiny family seat and found it distinctly odd that the ladies were darning socks during the evening meal. The fact that Charlotte’s father, the duke, had embroidered his own dressing gown made Frederick consider the man to be slightly cracked.   

But despite her modest background and plain looks, Charlotte was a clever woman, vivid and cheerful. She was interested in botany and an avid reader. Like the king, she loved music, and her sense of duty matched her husband’s. She was also extremely fruitful: Their union produced 15 children, two of whom died at birth. Though generally conservative, the queen, notes Hadlow, was up on the latest ideas on child-rearing—including Locke’s essay “Some Thoughts Concerning Education” and Rousseau’s Emile—as evidenced by the increasingly informal portraits of the royal offspring in more natural settings. The king himself participated wholeheartedly in his children’s games. 

Under the pressures of the job, however, harmony did not last. The war against the American rebels came close to breaking George III, and familiar patterns were reasserting themselves. Hadlow examines the king’s fraught relationship with the clever but debauched George, Prince of Wales, whose favorite pastimes were gambling, drinking, and whoring. At one ball, noted a participant, the prince “was so far overcome with wine as to fall flat on his face in the middle of a dance, and upon being raised from the floor, to throw the load from his stomach into the midst of the circle.” Even worse, the rakish leader of the Whig opposition, Charles James Fox, had recruited the prince into his fold and encouraged his bad behavior. 

What we have here, notes Hadlow, is a classic father/son conflict for which both parties shared responsibility: The prince was morally weak, but the king was envious of his son’s easy charm. George III was incapable of passing on a sense of mission to his son that might have given some purpose to the crown prince’s existence.  

Further darkening the picture was George III’s illness, which struck in 1788 and produced a manic state that mystified his doctors and necessitated putting him in a straitjacket. A “war by proxy” ensued between the royal physicians, with the prince of Wales’s man pushing for a diagnosis of madness and a regency; but the king improved just in time. (In the 1930s, George III’s illness was diagnosed as porphyria, while the latest research favors an inherited psychological disorder.)  

The women perhaps paid the heaviest price. The queen, exhausted by two decades of childbirth and her husband’s illness, withdrew into her own shell, while their daughters saw themselves as “a parcel of old maids,” consigned to lives of isolation and boredom due to the king’s failure to find husbands for them. He simply could not bear parting with them. Eventually, the princesses Charlotte and Elizabeth had to settle for middle-aged German princes, one of whom was so monstrously fat that Napoleon later said that “God had put him on Earth to see how far skin could stretch.” Princess Sofia, who became pregnant with an equerry, was of course forbidden to keep the child.

The threat from Napoleon restored George III’s popularity, but the king’s illness recurred on several occasions, finally resulting in a regency in 1811. He died in 1820, aged 81. Though he was fundamentally well-meaning and his concept of kingship was sound, his own needs ended up taking precedence over his family’s happiness. Hadlow sees George’s granddaughter, Queen Victoria, with her stress on duty, as the inheritor of his ideas, which have contributed greatly to the resilience of the British monarchy in the modern age.

Henrik Bering is a journalist and critic.