The Last King of America: Andrew Roberts on King George III

the last king of america the misunderstood reign of george iii in naming this the book of the year the times of london called the volume magisterial my colleague at the hoover institution victor davis hansen calls the author of this book quote the most accomplished historical biographer in the english-speaking world with us today that author historian andrew roberts author of the last king of america on uncommon knowledge now [Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson a graduate of gonville keys college cambridge the historian andrew roberts is a professor at king's college london a lecturer at the new york historical society and the roger and martha mertz visiting fellow at the hoover institution here at stanford dr roberts is the author of more than a dozen major works of history including napoleon a life churchill walking with destiny and now the last king of america the misunderstood reign of george iii andrew welcome thank you very much peter it's great to be back on the show um a couple of opening questions if i might and the first involves just a few seconds of perhaps the most influential portrait of george iii prior at least to the publication of your book which comes of course from the musical hamilton and when push comes to shove i will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love when push comes to shove says george iii in hamilton i will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love fair no not at all for her i tap my foot to hamilton as much as everybody else um but there's another song of course where he talks about how he's going to kill your friends and family to remind you of his love in fact um he was a benevolent monarch he was a um a true enlightenment monarch and he was a renaissance prince in many ways and he was far from that uh sort of camp preening um sadistic character in uh hamilton the musical can i just i i get the of course you spent three years on this book and the queen recently released some 100 000 pages of papers dealing with george iii many in his own hand as i gather you've read that material so you've kept company with the man and i can't escape the feeling in the book that you like him yes and uh that's why i use the word misunderstood in the um in the subtitle because he has been hugely introduced by uh historians not just american historians which you'd expect but also by british historians the weak historians of the 19th and uh 20th centuries have attacked him as well for things that he simply was not guilty of and uh one of them is the the form of his madness which i'm sure we'll get to later but mainly it's the concept of him being a tyrant which of course uh thomas jefferson made um these ad hominem attacks on him in the declaration of independence i'll come to that as well so here's my second sort of first question i'd like just to establish this um a passage i'm going to quote to you from the last king of america quote the year 1775 ended with the british having signally failed to strangle the rebellion in its cradle although some in the government wanted to concentrate on blockading the colonies into eventual submission the majority including the king were determined upon a land war to force the issue so george iii was liberal humane generous likable devoted husband and father but at least at one moment he actually did wish the war against the americans once the americans had already um started the conflict at lexington and concord yes he was very much in favor of sending the battalions but the point was that there was no precedent in history for um colonies just being allowed to go uh you don't get that in the 19th century you hardly need to mention it to an american about the effect of secession of certain states and then actually you can take it through up until the 20th century it's not until um until 1905 that a um that a country i.e norway and sweden actually split apart without any bloodshed really 1905. all right of course the french are still fighting at jim pyongfu in 1958 and on and on it goes well absolutely and and you can see that in uh in lots of later parts in the 20th century but to expect an 18th century hanoverian monarch to just let america go without a shot being fired is i'm afraid completely impossible we will return to this george iii he's born in 1738 he dies in 1820 this is a good long life especially by 18th century standards he comes to the throne at the age of 22 in 1760. the last king to believe he ruled by divine right is charles the first who's executed in 1649. the last monarch to refuse the royal ascent to use the royal veto is queen anne and she does so in 1708. the last king to lead troops in ba in battle is george iii's grandfather george ii and he had done so in 1743 so as george the third comes to the throne in 1760 by then nobody believes a king of an english king rules by divine right nobody believes that he practice that he possesses in practice the power to veto legislation and nobody expects him to lead troops in battle this is a tricky bit for an american to grasp when he comes to the throne in 1760 what's his job his job is a limited constitutional monarch under the precepts of the glorious revolution of 1688 so his um family have been on the throne because they're protestants so one of his jobs is to be a protestant uh another you'd better give us a sentence or two on 1688 okay the glorious revolution which overthrew the uh stewards was king james ii was in part because he was a catholic yes and so they the hanoverians came eventually to the throne because they were not catholics right and so one of his primary duties um is is to be a protestant which was fine because he was a believing anglican and and a pious christian indeed um but also although he had the right to um to appoint prime ministers and and indeed governments cabinet ministers saw themselves as being responsible to him personally he only on one occasion in the entirety of his very long reign which as you say is the longest reign of any king of england is um once when he appointed william pitt the younger to be prime minister without the majority of the house of commons which was subsequently vindicated in the next general election so he was somebody who very much revered the uh british constitution and uh and was not like the absolutists of the past yes the absolutist of the past but also his contemporaries on the continent the the business the argument that he's not a tyrant the liberality of the man the way he's willing to live within the constraints of the british constitution comes out especially sharply at least to this reader when you contrast him with well absolutely you contrast him with catherine the great of course or frederick the great in uh prussia uh certainly the bourbons in france uh who behave so absolutist that they wind up having a revolution against them of course during his reign all the um the spanish who execute people um the ringleaders of uprisings in louisiana and so on during this period and so you can see pretty much any other um non-limited uh monarchy at the time was of an entirely different ilk from somebody who like george iii essentially went along with the common law right who never arrested any american editors or closed any newspapers in america or any of these kind of things which a tyrant would have done in the 18th century right and you draw out that it's important to george iii's formation that there are intellectuals at the time who are sorting out the job of king and you mentioned in particular bowling brook who writes the idea of a patriot king give us well this is key this is a key text written in the 1740s so when um georgia there was still a boy but written for georgetown's father frederick prince of wales who everybody expected would become king and it really sets out a tory as opposed to a wig concept of a of a monarch who personifies the nation and who um uh is is a sort of unifying figure not just for wigs who were the people who'd run the country ever since the glorious revolution for the last 80 years but also for outsiders people like tories and uh you'd better take a ag i'm sorry but again a sentence or two to explain what tori what what does tori and wig mean in that context at that time the wigs tended to be the um oligarchic cousinage of aristocrats who had ruled britain for 80 years the tories were lower down on the social scale but still important they were the gentry the they they owned land but nothing like the amount of land that the the aristocracy owned um but they were a um a different um form of cousinage essentially right i i'm going to quote you one more time george's essays this is his essays as a young man suggests a young man who revered the way the glorious revolution had brought about liberty took william iii who's the monarch whom the whigs bring over from holland to replace james ii took william iii for his role model as king and passionately agreed with his father frederick prince of wales and bowling brook on the personal role of the monarch in defending the people against an overweening aristocracy so this is an adjustment at least for this american the adjustment the american has to make ah i th wheat at least i tend i'll stop trying to represent all americans there's a tendency to think of the monarch at the top of the system of aristocracy and george is no no no i'm not it's me and the people against that lot precisely yes and you see it later with the thought of disraeli for example and other um political philosophers whereby there has to be a um a force in society that is so powerful that they can negate uh anything that would oppress the um the ordinary people one last aspect of uh georgia's intellectual and psychological background that strikes me as important so important that we mention here we are trying to reduce an ox to a bullion cube again he comes to the throne in 1760 and just 14 years earlier the battle of cologne colloden has taken place in which english troops loyal to george the third second i beg your pardon george ii thank you suppress scottish troops who are loyal to the exiled stewards and you right george iii he he grew up in the knowledge that this that his accession to the throne was still threatened instinctive to the hanoverian dynasty was the assumption that rebellions if they could not be reasoned with must be crushed by overwhelming force close quote so again we tend to think but the madness of george iii george tends to be presented at least in popular culture in this country toward the end of his reign when the rain is totally secure but just when when he was a child there was still a rebellion taking place on the island of great britain and a really dangerous rebellion uh the um the scottish army and bonnie prince charlie got to derby which is only 120 miles north of london and so they were literally only a few days march away they stopped and returned but but the uh panic in london i don't know whether nobody knows whether george iii could have got a sense of the panic in london he was only seven years old but uh he'd definitely heard about it later on in his life where the banks crashed the they tried to move the gold out of the bank of england the um the royal family considered jumping back to hanover which is where they came from you know it was a uh it was a terrifying moment where the whole of the hanoverian succession might have collapsed all right that that strikes me as important to bear in mind as part of the background of the man as we come to the next topic which is of course this is i have to say this is six or seven chapters in this book of more than 20 chapters as i recall but it's the six or seven chapters that matter to an american so the rebellion um we set the context american colonists hold the eastern seaboard of this continent but french the french populate what is now quebec and as the american colonists move west and the french move south they bump into each other there's trouble i quote you again the last king of america on 17 may 1756 france and britain declared hostilities it was a conflict that would later be described as history's first world war close quote and it's a conflict that has almost no place in american consciousness because we start with a revolution but you argue the revolution can't be understand stood without grasping what took place a couple of decades earlier absolutely no americans should be should should definitely understand about what you call the french and indian wars and what we call the um seven years war because essentially it started here um the uh in 1754 there were clashes between the american colonists and the uh and the french and that uh rippled all the way through into what i call and other historians called a world war and so it's essential that um one appreciates that uh by the time of 1763 when that war ends um you have the french taken off the continent they were no longer any kind of threat to the american colonists because they had been sounding completely defeated in the french and indian wars and so the nearest french army is in haiti a thousand miles away and this is the moment therefore when the americans can uh create themselves as a as a new and independent nation and where they can grasp their self-government and that accomplishment i'm an american you're an englishman's uh what a frenchman might make am i putting it this way i don't know but the accomplishment of ridding north america of any french power to speak of is directed from london yes but it's directed by william pitt the elder all right americans participate washington uh george washington as a young man participates in a campaign but that is a that is an accomplishment of empire that's right and paid for of course which is the key which is what we come to which you come to us a difficult undertaking and an expensive undertaking and britain imposes a tax on tea prompting the 1773 boston tea party where's george the third in that and am i moving too quickly you're moving a little bit all right i want to just start with the stamp act which of course is is the um along with the sugar acts is the original um we'll do stamp sugar and tea yes all right um so with the uh with the stamp act this was a imposition that was going to be made and it was a it was a new tax and everybody of course hates them quite rightly and it was a tax that wasn't going to raise that much money about 50 000 pounds which if you divide it between 2.5 million americans or at least 1.9 million and enslaved americans is still a tiny amount of money two shillings and six billion per american per year but the drawback was with it that a it was a new tax and b it was a tax that was levied on um largely on lawyers and journalists who as we know even to this day could be valuable and there's that wonderful line that um from the 19th century saying that you should never annoy somebody who buys inc by the barrel yes and this was uh therefore not paid um except in georgia nobody paid the stamp act and instead they uh attacked the people who needed to raise it and tarred and feathered them and so on and started the whole of this concept especially when there was a stamp at congress and people came together from all of the colonies to to oppose it all right sugar and tea um sugar nuts excuse me no i'm sorry but on the stamp act where's george uh he's in favor of it at the beginning but when it was clear that the americans are not paying it he was he put a lot of parliamentary influence to make sure that it was repealed all right now can i just ask what is the mechanism by which the king exerts influence well he uses the immense power of honours if it's clear that the king is uh totally opposed to something then it's a very brave mp uh who votes for it because it's clear that that mp is never going to be so and so or lord so and so and so that's the um that's the number one uh power that he has really all right and i want to continue this is the moment to bring it up i think in the book you make clear how first of all he's a very he writes he seems to write constantly he's an extremely literate figure he collects tens of thousands of books his library is now the nucleus of the british british library he writes document after document after document as we said there are thousands of excellent documents in his own hand and he's constantly doing walkabouts and meetings and levies where he's gone people stand in a square and he goes around the room chatting with people so he knows these parliamentarians this is a group of people who actually know each other well he knows correctly it is correct he he knows the government side in fact opposition mps are not invited to levees um or drawing rooms as they're called ways where you have face-to-face contact with the king which is obviously so important in 18th century society but but it's confined really to the um to the um side of parliament that the king approves of but if he doesn't have contact with the opposition sorry i'm anticipating one of the if i'm anticipating let's just get the question out right now uh it is we'll go back we still have to do sugar and tea i don't have to do sugar because it's essentially the same story as sam's all right thank you you just you just saved a little television time but even as it is often said that the vietnam war was lost in congress you make the point that the government had to try to conduct this war on the far side of the atlantic ocean a logistically complicated and tremendously expensive endeavor while at the same time facing quite a lot stiff and informed and articulate opposition at westminster is that correct that's right the radical wigs the opposition under charles james fox supported the americans in fact they dressed like officers of the continental army they wore blue and buff to show their support of the uh of the americans and uh they consistently oppose the the war and they got much more stronger it's rather you're quite right the vietnam analogy is a very um strong one um but it's also the case of course that the british didn't send enough troops to america they at the top moment they had 50 000 but for most of the war they had 35 000 troops attempting to hold down these 13 colonies it just simply wasn't enough but as you had to give each true every soldier a third of a ton of supplies and foods and ammunition and so on um it became a logistical nightmare as you say to fight a war it had never been done before in history to try and fight a war 3 000 miles away but if i may back to the king for just a moment if the opposition don't get invited to these drawing rooms how does he know what the opposition is think is he reading reports is he well and is he receiving an unbiased flow of information from the government how does he know about the opposition he's get he's getting a daily report from the prime minister about the goings-on in the house of uh commons and the interesting thing about some of these and it's reliable it's reliable oh yes well first of all it says it uh says exactly how many people had voted and where and under what circumstances but also it's very interesting how it does give a uh at least lord north who was a was an amiable and affable figure even though he was a useless prime minister um would if an opposition member made a good speech he would say so and tell the king i see i see so these were jets these are gentlemen all right on to this the uh the boston auntie entity under tea tea was um an expensive commodity but there was a hope and a chance that when the east india company nearly went bankrupt in 1772 that it was going to be allowed to come and undercut the market in um smuggled tea essentially in massachusetts and elsewhere and bring the price of tea right down for the american consumer of course this wasn't going to be good for the boston merchants who were doing the smuggling and so as a result in december 1773 they hired and and used employees to attack these these ships of the east india company and destroy 9000 pounds in weight of tea overnight and this was the point at which it uh it really got nasty because the british government the british cabinet and the king all thought that the best way to deal with this would be to punish the massachusetts bay colony believing and this is where the king was incredibly badly informed by the royal governors that the rest of the colonies would not stand by massachusetts and they um did of course hugely and this was the reason that um only a little over a year later well 15 16 months later you get to the shooting war starting at lexington and concord we'll come to that in a moment john adams you quote this this is a very famous passage this is john adams writing to thomas jefferson years after the events and adams writes to jefferson the revolution was in the minds of the people and this was effected from 1769 to 1775 before a drop of blood was shed at lexington the records of 13 legislatures the pamphlets newspapers show the steps by which public opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the authority of parliament over the colonies close quote so what the government back in london is missing and therefore failing to convey to the king is how do we put this is an intellectual ferment there is a new consciousness arising among these 13 colonies they are beginning to think of themselves as americans and it happens with as americans they are elaborating their beginning notion of themselves as objecting to parliament but loyal to the king they were elaborating their notions of the rights that they have as englishmen there's an astonishing intellectual ferment which takes place by way of pamphlets and newspapers and it happens fast that's right is that correct it is correct but also ever since 1763 in the treaty of paris where they discover that of course there's no outside threat right they also have this proclamation in october 1763 which went out from the british government saying that the americans could not um colonize anywhere westwards of the allegheny mountains and that seemed to imply that the british just wanted to sort of um keep the american colonies on the eastern seaboard and where they could have no sort of ambitions to expand and you also um have as well as these these these pamphlets some absolutely superb orators who were um the patrick henry's and the uh and the thomas jefferson's and madison and these people um really were first-class um adams of course being a lawyer it's first-class uh people at essentially creating this whole new concept of uh of independence and the and and it's the right moment for america to become individuals because you've got this 2.5 million population you've got this burgeoning year-on-year growth huge economic growth about seven percent year-on-year you've got as many bookshops in more bookshops in philadelphia than in any other city of the empire and so all of these things are happening at the same time as the um as parliament is essentially putting rather unnecessary financial burdens even though they're small onto the americans so from the point of view of the king or correct me maybe it's better to think in terms of lord north his prime minister this lovely man who was useless as you say what did they what was in their heads what did they think the colonies were for oh they very much saw it as part of a global empire that something that was also growing of course in the uh that already was part of the west indies uh africa and uh india the east indies and so they they saw america as being an integral part of a sort of greater english-speaking union that would eventually stretch uh further and further around the world i have to keep this again it's like and therefore keep the french empire in in check well keeping the french in check is always worthwhile but um i say to the author of a book on napoleon but this is again a difficult a difficult one for america even as it's hard to understand the idea of kingship which you grow up with of course likewise it's difficult what all right they're building an empire but what for to get rich is to say is a commercial enterprise what are they doing it for no it's a classic example of capitalism in action where the americans were getting rich uh and indeed they were being taxed at something like two percent of the uh of what the britons were being taxed at oh for the good old days so exactly um so there was virtually no regulation there was very small bureaucracy and so on um and so what it was for was to be a um a great commercial global concept that was going to help everybody was going to help american development as well as uh british and was it uh so spanish were talking about a couple of centuries earlier but the spanish are explicitly or at least quite quickly in the spanish expansion comes the notion of catholicism and christianity that's not present in the same way in the british effort no not at all and also what you have to remember about the american colonies is there is how many non-conformists there were right so the anglican church didn't have the kind of power in america that it had in britain and the non-conformists especially the the very low church ones worried about a episcopalia being put up in um set up in um america and they certainly worried after the quebec act of 1774 allowed french quebecois catholics to retain their civil and religious rights that um that george iii was going to impose catholicism on americans it's a mad conspiracy theory we can see that it it does has no basis in fact whatsoever there's certainly nothing in the hundred thousand pages of georgia thirds papers to suggest it's true but a lot of people did believe it all right all right we come now to war 1775 and the siege of boston the british navy invests boston harbor with eight ten warships big expensive pieces of equipment that have sailed across the atlantic yeah a proper fleet and the army puts on land how many thousands of men i can't remember offhand but it it had already had four thousand in boston since fourteen since uh 1768. so it's a large army anyway all right and what role does the king play in making that decision very little he um he put ticks by the names of the four leading uh major generals but otherwise that was down to a combination of the admiralty the war office um the treasury and the whittling department and and obviously the cabinet all right this is this is in some ways the key to the whole argument it was the king's fundamental respect for the concept of crown in parliament that is to say for the limited monarchy for deference to the elected commons that helped bring about the american revolution had king george iii been a ruthless despot britain would have had a much better chance of winning the war well and also of stopping the war from taking place because what he could have done is said look i'm king of america and so i'm happy that the americans have got self-government and aren't paying taxation to uh the british parliament and so on and so one of the uh interesting things that some of the colonists asked for was for the king basically to step beyond his constitutional role and uh and become king of america that wouldn't require him physically to be in america but it would require him to prove to prevent parliament from taxing america or from having the veto rights over american legislation i see so conceptually they're anticipating what we now think of as the commonwealth where the queen is queen of canada precisely yeah right but you don't get the actual commonwealth until 1931 a bit later yes right and he wouldn't do that because because he was a constitutional monarch all right um the nature of the war on the one hand the reader of this book gets the feeling that everybody's a bit reluctant about it and george iii is disappointed that it has come to this and so forth also that in some basic way it's quite a gentlemanly operation on both sides starts off today starts that way all right so this is what i'm getting at i i just because you um do such a good job of sticking up for your side i do want to point out that when washington has put guns in charleston heights he permits howe to withdraw from boston peacefully when he could have he could have ripped up the army a bit the british army a bit all right so how are we to understand but at the same time the batter battle of bunker hill which is the first big-ish battle 400 americans are killed that's a huge number a shocking number and over a thousand british are killed this is these are shocking numbers for small communities including 90 british officers and so it's brought home who were of course aristocracy or or the high gentry at least and so it's very much brought home to britain's of the governing classes what is is going on here when those male packets reach london there's a shock there's a shock throughout the country people don't it's a very unpopular war at the beginning in britain they find it very difficult to recruit any soldiers for it because they are seen as britons the americans were seen as as cousins and you know they they many of them are actual cousins and you make the point that there's no conscription no and so there's a lot of problems with um with recruitment because the war is very unpopular until um the french get involved with which point it suddenly becomes tremendously popular uh for uh okay this is fascinating again um bits and pieces of this that i picked up because americans learn bits and pieces but take us through the military aspects of this you make the point that there's really only one british war plan that's coherent yes lord george germain the american secretary in the cabinet uh it has a what's called the germain plan which is to send sir william howe up from new york northwards up the hudson at the same time that sir john burgoyne is coming south down from canada and they were going to meet at albany and thereby split the new england colonies off from the rest of the of the colonies and that was going to be the plan the idea would then be to um to crush the new england colonies and uh the problem was there were several problems with the plan i mean apart from everything else coordinating um in those days over those that many hundreds of miles uh was uh across enemy held territory was in itself a problem um also to get to get uh any changes in the plan agreed in london took three months for a ship to get one um the way across the atlantic and then with the prevailing winds in the other direction the other side but the major problem was that sir william howe veered off eastwood's against the precepts of the plan and captured philadelphia which had lots of advantages in the it was the american capital and so on but um it did mean that the swarms of um of uh american troops that were around um burgoyne could capture him at saratoga in october 1777 and when they did that um the and the french learns about it uh france is drawn into the war or at least steps forward to try to split america off from its uh um from britain off from its american colonies and the whole thing gets turned into a world war especially when the next um year the spanish declared war against britain and then after that the year after that in 1780 the dutch do as well so from being a con from being a colonial war which however was difficult enough which was which was was could well have been lost anyway because um as i say we only had 35 000 to 50 000 troops and at the absolute maximum and once it became a world war we went back down to 30 to 35 000 and we were stuck in the eastern seaboard cities of course we captured charleston in 1780 but otherwise it was new york and newport and um and there was a um superb i mean it has to be said a superb general in in washington you know his fabian tactics of of retreating wherever he thought that he was going to be defeated the way in which he managed to get off manhattan the counter-attacks at trenton and princeton the way in which he somehow kept that army together at valley forge which was a truly astonishing act of charisma and and leadership you know george iii he uh compared to that his generals um that were were people like um burgoyne and and howe and later cornwallis um who were simply not up to it um it is qui you're as english as you can possibly be and this is one of the many things that makes you so delightful but i must say it is bracing in this book to see that andrew andrew roberts goes into this history and the people that we're taught who knows what americans are taught these days now that we've all become woke and the 69 all of that in my generation was the people we were taught were great men turn out to be great men yes they stand up yeah they do stand up not just not just of course in the uh the soldiers in the war and the and the founding fathers before the war but also and with the sheer courage of course of standing up against the most powerful empire in the world is uh is a tremendous thing in itself because the american population was only about 20 of the of the british population um but also of course the creation of the constitution as well the idea that these are the same people who have the guts to do the fighting and then after the fighting you have the genius to put together such an extraordinary document it's courage and intelligence and prudence it's just this bundle of virtue and against that we've got lord north and general cornwallis so i want to come to the declaration in a moment but first let's let's let's end the conflict can you get us to yorktown and explain the role the french played and why that was viewed as decisive when in fact the war continued for some time out get us through all that if you don't mind yes well once cornwallis had landed down in south carolina and have made his way up to the yorktown peninsula um which was going too fast and not taking into account the huge irregular forces that were that were behind him he then the american regulars the american record so he's exposing his supply lines he's moving much too quickly his supply lines are tall intents and purposes shot to pieces um and uh especially once he's positioned himself in on the yorktown peninsula where he can be boxed in um and and was the key role of the french is in their navies in admiral de grasse who prevents him from being evacuated from the yorktown peninsula and instead in october 1781 he's forced to surrender with his whole force 7 000 men plus and that in effect brings to an end the um the shooting part of the um of the american war of independence although not the actual war which drags on because um lord north doesn't want to make peace and the king supports him in this this is it's important the king is a last ditcher um that's obviously explain can you cornwallis surrenders at yorktown devastating defeat even if you are a last ditcher what's the king's reaction do we know to fight on you see this is the thing he says well we've lost uh uh two armies now the other one being begoins uh and the and the best thing now is to gird our loins and and and uh and continue fighting and as max boot points out in his book on a regular warfare um what the what the romans would have done would just be to continue to send larger and larger armies until finally the um the american war of independence was defeated but they didn't have a majority they needed in the house of commons in ancient rome and uh by that stage charles james fox and the and the whig party were in a position to um prevent that war from continuing and so when how is it that the king is persuaded that it's over how is it that he's persuaded that the treaty of paris really must be that that those negotiations really must be concluded um it's a combination of factors but primarily it's it's what's going on in the house of commons the fall of lord north in the march of 1782 the incoming um radical government the way in which they um stop the funding vietnam again all over again it's 1975 essentially they won't fund the war anymore and and this is what finally persuades the king that uh the piece needs to be uh signed and he wants and he has a prime minister that he appoints lord sheldon who wants to try and do a deal with the americans whereby we keep new york and and newport rhode island i mean it's the most extraordinary kind of thing that they could possibly have you'd have enjoyed newport but new york we couldn't have spared it was quite a loyalist city remember new york yes um all right so again i want to return to the declaration but let's just last note on the revolution itself june 4th 1785 john adams now ambassador from the new nation of the united states meets the king adams has memorized a little speech he says quote i think myself to the king i think myself more fortunate than all my fellow citizens and having the distinguished honor to be the first to stand in your majesty's royal presence in a diplomatic character close quote to which the king responded i can't remember the exact wording but it's it's very gracious it's very gracious indeed yes exactly i wish i brought it with me i mean it's in the book obviously but um no he's he responds he says i even though i was the first to um support the idea of going to war um now that you've won i welcome you as uh as the um representative of the new independent united states it's a tremendously gracious way of dealing with it and it doesn't stop there his graciousness um the towards the uh the people who had essentially you know taken away his uh his jewel in his crown um but also when george washington retired as um as president in march 1797 he said that uh washington was the greatest character of the age by the way it's a relief to me to discover that you're human after all in all the years we've known each other that's the first time i've i've known you not quite to remember exactly i know i had something exactly a date or a quotation all right the declaration the other evening uh you gave a talk and i was sitting there taking notes and you referred to the declaration of independence as a propaganda document close quote propaganda full-time propaganda more propaganda document yeah and i'm afraid that i'm required as a patriot to bristle just a little so we'll come to that explain explain explain your argument well the war had been going on for 14 months by then and there had been a lot of bloodshed as we mentioned earlier on on both sides and in order to essentially make the american public recognize that loyalism was no longer an option for one-third or so of the americans and also that this was not just a war against parliament but this was a war against the king and this was not just about trying to get into some commonwealth arrangement this was about independence and sovereignty for the united states thomas jefferson war has hardened the position war has hardened the position and uh as it as it always tends to especially as this had a elements of a civil war to it yes and so um and so it was essential for the uh continental congress to make a radical step statement um that would also work as propaganda against the king and so that there could be no longer any sense of any uh loyalty towards the king and so there is no middle ground there's no way to eliminate any middle ground yes the the um the shifting alliances and shifting moods um have to solidify at this point by july 1776 and the statement had to be made that what we're fighting for is complete independence and so he had to be the king had to be vilified in order to do that you you can't you can't say he's a good king and he's a nice man and so on you've got to create him as a monster who in the words of the declaration of independence is unfit to be the ruler of a free people and so the word tyrant crops up relatively early and is repeated um in the document especially at the end and there are these 28 articles that um attempt to establish him as a as a tyrant and a monster right we better take a moment to explain that about the first third of the document is that wonderful preamble that we all we my lot all remember when in the course of human events and so forth but the i think even we we like the bit about life liberty and the pursuit of happiness i'm so happy to hear it then it comes to 28 specific charges now there aren't dates and numbers attached but you get the feeling that well let's just put it this way i have heard it said by people whom i think we would both revere but needn't go into that the first bit of the document the preamble alone is it's just up in the air it's sublime isn't it it is sublime but it could almost be it could take you in the direction of the french it could be a kind of it's not grounded what makes it a conservative document which what what demonstrates that this is that this is a conservative revolution i'm making points that are important as you will grasp and you can you can elaborate on it it's just trying to set you up here it's not trying to be a social revolution it's trying to be analytical exactly and it's grounded in this sense of common law there are grievances the king has done specific all right and there are 28 charges and you really will have nothing to do with 26 of them you're right um quote only two stand up the 17th and 22nd charges i'm looking at you can you remember those two yes of course all right the 17th is the one about taxation right and the 22nd is the one about parliament having veto rights over american legislation and they are in and of themselves justification for the revolution because that's what it's all about and so um you don't need the other 26 they are essentially padding that um they're having they are padding they as i say the first third of which i i love as much as you do i think but the uh but when he's accused of doing things that um that all of the previous monarchs had done without start sparking a revolution the navigation acts that come in under oliver cromwell in 1650 for example when he's accused of taking people across the oceans for trial not one american was ever taken across any ocean for trial by george the third when he's accused of exposed facto rationalizations essentially of things that had already happened after the war had started you've got to appreciate that what he's doing as a lawyer is padding his brief well all right give me a little bit of space here [Laughter] i'll make a little bit of a speech here got it and then i'll and then i'll just fall silent because this is the book and there are eight what's hundreds of pages here that show that you've thought about this much more carefully than i have however it seems to me that when you go through the charges well the first charge he's refused to ascend to certain laws and then i'm quoting you the fact that the king had on relatively rare occasions exercised his constitutional right to veto colonial legislation did not prove that the right was an improper one any more than a presidential veto over legislation would today but that's the point presidents are elected kings are not there's something to that charge it's not spurious it's not entirely padding it's saying we live in an arrangement in which that man over there on the other side of the water believes that he has the right to tell our legislatures nope not doing that not doing that and there's something to that there is something to the fact that americans american presidents are elected by americans of course but the on the on the very very few occasions that he ever vetoed anything which was usually because the royal governor had um said the representative recommended the veto and often because the royal governor very often such as the divorce um legislation uh said that it was because the um the uh legislature wanted it but the american people didn't agree with it so so in a sense what he was doing was doing that thing from the idea of the patriot king where his royal governor was representing the people against the um against the legislature it happened on more than one occasion but not but not more than not more than half a dozen all right and the idea that you you're going to have a revolution and kill people about that is um is something that you know all right let me do one more of these again i'm just going to quote you i'm quoting you against yourself the fourth fifth and sixth charges refer to interference with colonial legislatures the virginia assembly had been dissolved in 1765 over the stamp act and the the virginia massachusetts and south carolina legislatures in 1768 over the massachusetts circular letter but none of these actions was unconstitutional under the laws pertaining at the time close quote however they they do offend this crystallizing consciousness that we're americans nobody ought to have the right to dissolve our assemblies no i agree and and that's why you know ultimately independence as i say it was the right historical moment of for the development of america um but it's not you know the the fact that those were not going to be uh dissolved forever they were going to be dissolved and then um allowed to uh to reconstitute it was um it's not the um a tyrannical act to uh to do that okay i'm going to propose a settlement between you and me and the settlement is your point your point is that that he wasn't a tyrant he wasn't frederick the great he wasn't catherine the great actually the great is a bit of a so seldom a good sign yeah um but mike well so let me quote if i may the great historian the great american historian of the american revolution bernard balin this is the longest longish quotation but i'm going to indulge myself if you'll indulge me as well absolutely so balan writes about this intellectual ferment there were probing speculations theories by which a generation convinced of the importance of ideas and politics attempted to deal with the problems they faced but they were not mere mental gymnastics balin might also have said they were not mere propaganda or not mere padding i might suggest up and down the still sparsely settled coast of north america groups of men intellectuals and farmers scholars and merchants the learned and the ignorant gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments during the single year 1776 eight states drafted and adopted constitutions two of these state constitutions adopted before independence everywhere there were discussions of the ideal nature of government everywhere principles of politics were examined institutions weighed and practices considered close quote so all right he wasn't a tyrant can i can i quote an american historian of this period as well richard brookheiser who says that uh america in the 1760s and early 1770s was the free amongst the free society yes yes yes yes so these of course these people were talking about all these um essentially seditious things and what did the truth and what did the king well because they lead to a revolution so they they are totally seditious in a sense but what did the king do about any of that did he try and clap anyone in jail for it did he try and shout their newspapers did he try and arrest them no catherine the great would have hung them so he's a different man from that all of that discussion he didn't try and stop this first town pac congress or the first continental congress from meeting you know this is the kind of thing that a tyrant who had troops in the in the uh region would have done okay well so let's do a counterfactual then you seem to me to be granting the point which is that this was a time balance point is that this is a time of astonishing intellectual and cultural ferments this is this really and truly does bear comparison with with with the grease of peregrine yes something is really happening here so what is the counter factual how could have if the if if the north government and the king had recognized that there was a growing consciousness on the other side of the atlantic of i think what what we call it nationhood as opposed to colonies that they are thinking through the rights that they're elaborating on their rights as english subjects and coming up with how do we avoid the war what they well we avoid the war by having um william pitt the elder when he becomes prime minister in 1766 who let's say doesn't have such debilitating gout that he's unable to be prime minister and is able to too old and unwell he's he's gone mentally it's the gout has mentally affected him to the point that he can't meet the king for two years key years 1766 to 68. but instead of that what we have is a as a fit uh william pitt the elder who um who who conceived far enough into the future or indeed can just look over the irish channel to the irish parliament and gives the americans their own parliament a parliament which is a single body that speaks for the whole of the 13 colonies you coagulate amalgamate sorry the the 13 colonies into one essentially nation state which is self-governing you have the commonwealth concept in 1766 rather than in 1931. all right it has to happen a little bit soon it has to happen before the siege of boston it has to happen before lexington right of course before before all the intellectuals eliminate the middle ground well exactly what it has to do really is come before the um between the repeal of the stamp act and the boston tea party i see all right well now that we've rewritten history and can i just say what will happen after that of course because what will happen after that if the english-speaking people somehow stayed together as a single political entity into the early 20th century the kaiser cannot start the first world war there's no way he could invade belgium if america is a if we're already in if the america is a part of the of the same entity as uh as britain without the first world war you have no nazis no bolsheviks no uh holocaust and the world's a much happier place i can't gain say a word of that i'm tempted to i'm trying it'll occur to me but i can't gain say a word of it right now all right after america all this is absolutely fascinating and i've enjoyed every moment of that but the man george iii uh treaty of paris ends the revolution in 1783 the man reigns for another 37 years and in that time britain largely consolidates its position in india it's still the east india company not hasn't been taken over by the government it consolidates its position in india sets in place the first rudiments of steam-powered industry defeats napoleon enlarges the navy by the time he dies in 1820 the stability of the throne is taken for granted as it could never have been 59 years earlier when he ascends to the throne and britain has assumed the place in world affairs that it will retain for 150 years as the most powerful nation on earth what role did george iii play in post-america britain um he played a major role but um in some of the things that you mentioned such the industrial revolution that you mentioned he played no um appreciable role whatsoever he never visited a factory never went down a mine um in other aspects like the napoleonic wars that you mentioned he played a a very significant role because he was part of the william pitt the younger sort of internal revolution essentially which meant that we didn't make peace with france and revolutionary and napoleonic france needed to be ground down essentially and when the prussians fought it for 53 months the austrians for 108 months and the russians for 53 58 months we fought britain fought against revolutionary and napoleonic france for 242 months and this is largely because the king will not make peace with a regicide and atheistic um country like um like revolutionary france so they're the last ditch looks tendencies work yes all right but of course by this it's so sad because by the time waterloo happens the great moment of victory comes he is he's blind and deaf and he's gone mad and he's senile living in um windsor castle playing his hearts he called and his london you know he doesn't know that he wasn't even aware so war of 1812 as we call it when british troops burn the white house what's going on there that's again not got nothing to do with him unfortunately he has his unfortunately i apologize fortunately apologies i i realize i could tease you so much peter but i can't go too far i meant unfortunately i mean i mean fortunately uh he um in the um february of 1811 by which time he's gone mad for the last time um three months before that there's a regency and uh and all of the um regency meaning that his son his son becomes george the fourth who becomes rules is prince regent with all the powers of the king right he now signs legislation he he holds cabinets he appoints prime ministers he declares war on america i see i see all right and um all right he reigns for 59 years you quote the obituary that appears the manchester guardian quote actually a lovely thing i think in the perplexity of nations the throne of the king of england was the only one unshaken and its stability was the work of his virtue that's a true statement yes but again at the end of this conversation as at the beginning i have to ask you the notion of kingship why do we care that the throne is secure um we care because it is um the thing that makes britain secure you only have to look 22 miles across the english channel to see the when the king of france has his head chopped off and indeed the queen of france then um the next stage is the terror and you go straight from 1793 executing the king to 1794 when they're when they're guillotining 40 000 people a year and um nobody wanted that to happen in uh in britain except for some of the extreme radicals um and that explains his tremendous popularity that and the fact that he'd got over his his most serious bout of illness of that of that point and so he's seen as somebody who's farmer george who is interested in the way that people made 80 percent of britain's made their livelihoods in agriculture he's seen as being frugal in terms of what he eats and drinks uh being financially prudent um being hard-working immensely hard-working how many children 15 children and i'm not saying that that's that implies hard work but i am saying that he's a family he's very much a family man uh he but he is he's so hard working and he dates his letters to the minute uh all of them you can see how many he's writing about all sorts of issues and he's also got this tremendous sense of both christian party and duty and so uh if you're looking for the um for a template for the modern monarchy for her majesty the queen today you can do an awful lot worse than then go back to george the third from george iii to andrew roberts for a moment here's the last king of america here's your book on churchill here's your book of napoleon you add all the books that you've written it is an astonishing achievement and you're not even that old well that's sweet i think of myself at 58 is quite so old pizza so so andrew how do you do it what are your so give me your research methods how do you go through these masses of material that you must master to produce this and then tell me about your writing methods well the research is obviously the most fun bit of writing the book where you go to the royal archives or this uh fantastic um collection that the queen has put online that king's college london and the georgian papers program have um have made available and um and then you go around the country to various other archives and how many research assistants do you have i've never employed one and never will not ever it's too dangerous um and and then once you've got all of the information together you sit down and and write the book there are some historians who don't you who write it as they get the information and i am terrified of doing that just in case you come across a piece of information that completely invalidates months exactly so um so so that's what it is and and yeah all right no no but i want to know about the writing method you and i have discussed this but i'd like to put this i'd like the world to see to hear how you actually go about writing a book like this right well once i've got all the information together i um i start work between 4 30 and 5 o'clock in the morning every morning and then after lunch i have a 45 minute churchillian nap and then i go back to um to writing so i can fit quite a lot of time into the day i do try to make sure that i'm not doing anything in the evenings apart from you know having dinner with my wife i don't um socialize whilst i'm writing the book terribly much but you you put in so you go from five you put in seven hours before breaking for lunch yeah and that's seven i mean now but the thing is how many times how many times do you turn away from the keyboard to play sudoku [Laughter] focus and concentration but um also uh it's it's quite it's it's fun you know it's not as though it's work and writing history is is tremendous fun all right um once again hamilton what comes next you've been freed do you know how hard it is to lead you're on your own awesome wow do you have a clue what happens now do you have a clue what happens now says george iii in hamilton 250 years later how's the anglo-american project coming along andrew well what happened next for america of course is that it became the greatest nation in the world fortunately we uh handed on the battle to uh or at least had the battle um taken from us by a power that has the same aspects of law and language and liberty that has the same precepts of of decency and a law-based world order and therefore we couldn't have been luckier really as britain's the the people who come next are the americans who've already established through this constitution that they are a great nation so it's totally different really um from today where the successor top dog world power is one um that is essentially totalitarian they haven't succeeded to top dog just yet not yet no but their gdp is going to be um outstripping yours at some stage in the next 10 to 15 years there are parts of the south china seas that i'm worried and the u.s fleet isn't going to be able to get to you look at what's happening in ukraine and and the possibility of taiwan the horrors of the idea of an iranian bomb you know the the anglo-american uh sort of world order uh which we've enjoyed uh thank god for the last um 75 plus years is under severe and dangerous threat today so is there an argument this actually we haven't discussed so i'm just trying to i'm floating one out for you is there an argument china is 1.4 billion this country's 350 million can't do that alone you just can't do that alone is there an argument that there is something in the british heritage that remains of immediate importance that is to say to stand up to china will require the united states and australia and india and canada and of course britain itself and perhaps as many bits and pieces of the commonwealth countries as one can get precisely because although we rebelled against you and we've had our disagreements over the years somehow or other you look at franklin roosevelt and churchill and you look at margaret thatcher and reagan and all these years later and i put it to you but obviously want to hear what you have to say george bush and tony blair george bush and tony blair but even even as indira gandhi is playing games with the soviets and trying to there's something about india is a democracy after all the working language in india is english there is something in the british heritage even at this vast removal of decades that remains of use and may be necessary i i couldn't agree more i i like to see it as uh it's called the anglosphere um it's something that definitely exists when you look at intelligence the five eyes intelligence you look at this wonderful orcas um pact that we have the orchestra act is australia the united states and britain and britain yes exactly um you look at the amount of trade between us and as i say the law and language and so on there is undoubtedly something that could be and is a serious counterpoise to the um upcoming and dangerous totalitarian threat from national socialist china all right um one final time let me quote you the last king of america george's sense of duty had a profound effect upon the monarchy when we look at the reign of elizabeth ii with its light motif of hard work conscientiousness christian piety abstemiousness philanthropy and luxuriousness we indeed see george iii last question then and this is again an american fumbling around for something that doesn't really come naturally to us next year elizabeth ii will celebrate her 70th year on the throne and turn 97 she is powerless and yet she is omnipresent how do you sum up her reign does the monarchy still matter in some way i think it does matter to all patriotic britons and to everybody in the sixteen countries of which she's queen and the 54 countries of the commonwealth i think that she shows um in her own personality this sense of duty of commitment when she was 21 she said that her whole life would be spent um in the service of the people of the commonwealth and that's exactly what's happened so you have a woman who made a promise to people on her 21st birthday and has spent the next more than half a century more than 70 years uh fulfilling that promise to the letter and that's something i think that um that anybody is going to respect and admire and thank her for andrew roberts author of the last king of america the misunderstood reign of george iii thank you thank you very much lisa for uncommon knowledge the hoover institution and fox nation i'm peter robinson [Music]

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 215,210

Keywords: Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson, Andrew Roberts, King George, King George III, England, American Revolution, America’s independence, British parliament, Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, British History

Id: A_YshIZzY6w

Length: 72min 8sec (4328 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 11 2022