George III (Penguin Monarchs): Madness and Majesty

Description

A short, fresh and expert account of Britain's longest reigning king King of Britain for sixty years and the last king of the future United States, George III has traditionally had a bad press as the villain of Whig history and for America's Founding Fathers a monarch of madness - and, more recently, a figure of fun and menace in the musical Hamilton. Black turns back to the archives and instead locates George within his age as a man of duty and piety, and a king who faced the loss of key colonies, rebellion in Ireland, insurrection in London, constitutional crisis in Britain and an existential threat from Revolutionary France as part of modern Britain's longest period of war. George III rose to these challenges with fortitude and helped settle parliamentary monarchy as an effective governmental system, eventually becoming the most popular monarch for well over a century. He was also a talented and curious individual, committed to music, art and science. Taking the duties of monarchy seriously, from reviewing death penalties to trying to organize his children, George III offers a fascinating guide to this most interesting of periods.

Jeremy Black MBE is Emeritus Professor of History at Exeter University, Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. His two major fields of scholarship are military history and the eighteenth-century British history. Recent books include War and Technology, Rethinking World War Two and England in the Age of Shakespeare. He has held visiting chairs at a number of American institutions, including West Point, and received the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society for Military History in 2008.

This volume forms part of the Penguin Monarchs series, an impressive collection of short biographies written by renowned historians ... Their aim is not simply to summarise, but to offer genuine insights in accessible format. Black's analysis of George III is a welcome addition. [He] ... manages to pepper his trim narrative with lovely frills. The mark of a good short book is its ability to inspire curiosity and further investigation. Black achieves just that. -- Gerard DeGroot * The Times * Black brilliantly demolishes the paranoiac Whig view of George as trying to accrete powers to himself unconstitutionally. The George who emerges is a far more attractive figure than the Whig historians depicted, let alone Thomas Jefferson with his 28 histrionic and inaccurate accusations against George in the Declaration of Independence, and especially Lin-Manuel Miranda's hilarious but profoundly historically incorrect caricature. -- Andrew Roberts * The Critic *