The Madness of King George

GEORGE III

America's Last King

By Jeremy Black

Yale Univ. 475 pp. $35

A ROYAL AFFAIR

George III and His Scandalous Siblings

By Stella Tillyard

Random House. 352 pp. $26.95

In the winter of 1855-56, the writer William Makepeace Thackeray traveled from Boston to Cincinnati, giving lectures to large crowds. His subject was "The Four Georges": George I, who became the first Hanoverian king of England in 1714; his son, George II; his grandson, George III; and George III's son, the prince regent, later George IV. "George the Third they have liked best, on account of the pathetic business," Thackeray reported to his family in England. His American audience couldn't help but be moved by Thackeray's tale of the king's last years of Lear-like blindness and senility, spent in seclusion at Windsor Castle, while the prince regent waltzed and Wellington won at Waterloo. And in our day, Nigel Hawthorne, in Alan Bennett's film "The Madness of King George," has brought powerfully and pitifully before our eyes the terrible earlier illness that befell the king and engendered the regency crisis in 1788.

But there is, of course, another George III to consider -- the one who reigned with faculties undimmed by mental or physical disorder. Thackeray damned this "other" George in his lectures. "He did not like Fox; he did not like Reynolds; he did not like Nelson, Chatham, Burke. . . . He loved mediocrities; Benjamin West was his favorite painter; Beattie was his poet." Nor was opinion in George III's American colonies more favorable, especially after hostilities broke out between British troops and the colonial militia in April 1775 at Lexington.

As Jeremy Black's thought-provoking new biography, George III, makes clear, American opponents of the Stamp Act, the Townshend Duties and the Coercive Acts had initially focused their resentment on British ministers and Parliament. With the outbreak of war, however, the rebels needed to cut the strong ties of loyalty that bound colonists to the sovereign. Black draws our attention to the deliberate -- and skillful -- process of vilification of George III that ensued as the war progressed. Thomas Paine called the king a "hardened, sullen-tempered Pharoah [sic]," and Black quotes the extended criticism of the king in the Declaration of Independence itself.

John Adams, Black reports, later regretted some of the expressions in the Declaration, "particularly that which called the King tyrant." Nevertheless, George III, who relished the role of "Father of the People," does come across as, at the very least, a dominating parent. Failing to appreciate the degree to which the colonies were banding together, the king wrote of the American insurgents as "rebellious children" and later of himself as willing to "show that the parent's heart is still affectionate to the penitent child." Designated as mulish and narrow-minded by Thomas Jefferson, George III was certainly incapable of seeing the benefits of any measure of filial autonomy. His strong paternalistic feelings were outraged by any opposition, whether from subjects in America who favored independence, from those in Britain who favored Catholic emancipation or from his flamboyant heir, the prince of Wales.

Stella Tillyard's A Royal Affair deals, as its title suggests, with rebellion within the royal ranks. A tight-knit family while their grandfather George II was alive, George III and his eight siblings were brought up comparatively plainly by their mother, Augusta, the dowager princess of Wales, following their father's early death. As adults, however, the royal brothers Edward, William and Henry outdid one another in behavior that reflected ill on crown and country. Edward was soon carried off by malaria, leaving George III to concentrate on Henry, who married a lady of dubious reputation without seeking his brother's permission. The king broke with him and instituted the Royal Marriage Act, requiring the assent of the sovereign to the marriage of any descendant of George II. William then confessed that he, too, was married -- to an illegitimate granddaughter of a former prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. George III promptly broke with him as well.

But the marriage that caused George III the most grief was one that he made himself, for his youngest sister, Caroline Mathilde, with Christian VII of Denmark. Faced with a violent, manic husband, Caroline Mathilde found love with his doctor, Johann Struensee. Together they managed to control Christian, introducing liberal reforms to Denmark. Then Christian's stepmother, Juliane Marie, took charge. Bending Christian to her will, she extracted confessions of adultery from Struensee and Caroline and sent one to the scaffold, the other to exile in George III's Hanover dominions.

Stella Tillyard is a noted storyteller and makes good use of archival sources in Denmark, in America and elsewhere for the details of her narratives. (In particular, she takes us at a rattling pace through some dramatic years in the 1770s.) However, it is unlikely that her hope will come true -- that George III will come to be seen "as one of many siblings himself." His quarrels with his American colonists and with his son the prince regent will always loom larger. ·

Flora Fraser is the author of "Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III."