Roberts has analyzed 8,500 pages of George’s schoolboy essays, including appreciative tributes to John Locke and to Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, which so many of the Founding Fathers would cite as their own lodestar. George was the first Hanoverian born in England, passionately patriotic and fascinated by English political traditions - foremost among them the institutional balance of powers that American revolutionary theorists would later claim as their own founding principle.

(As with dogs and their owners, the subjects of biographies are notorious for growing to resemble their authors.) Most of this is convincing. Instead, the George III described by Roberts is a thoughtful, patrician defender of the British constitution and its exceptional liberties.

Roberts makes it his mission to prove them wrong. Bennett’s play-turned-film offered a more sympathetic portrait, but America, it seems, still sees this “power-mad little petty tyrant” as the personal embodiment of British authoritarianism, a totem against which the American rebellion in 1775 was both justified and inevitable. The claims Roberts makes for his hero are occasionally grandiose: in a subtitle evidently framed with one eye on the press release, George is billed as “Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch.” (The shades of Mary Tudor, Richard III of England, or even Macbeth of Scotland might have comments.) But Roberts begins his account of George’s life and legacy with a litany of quotations from contemporary American media, and reading this list of ultra-nationalist mendacities it is hard to deny that George has had an unfair press in his former colonies. The author sets out explicitly to rescue Britain’s third Hanoverian king from willful American ignorance - and golly, is there plenty of that around. I have deep sympathy, therefore, with the impulse behind Andrew Roberts’s biography of George III.

A few years ago I encountered a highly educated editor at a reputable American news outlet who was under the impression that George V and George VI were “Hanoverian” sovereigns, for surely they had been the son and grandson of George IV. The fate of Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III is notorious - Hollywood turned it into a film entitled The Madness of King George, in part lest American audiences assume it a tertiary sequel to The Madness of George I. Every British historian has a story about the witlessness of Americans when it comes to the Georgian kings.

2021 book about misunderstood reign