George III

George III wasn’t supposed to be interesting. That was the job of his more scandalous ancestors or the opium-poet offspring who followed. Yet here we are, centuries later, still fascinated by the man who lost America, talked to trees, and might have had the world’s most misunderstood case of porphyria. When people think of George III, they usually reach for three things: the American Revolution, madness, and possibly that time he was outwitted by a pigeon in a wig. Alright, maybe not the last one. But they wouldn’t be entirely wrong to imagine his reign as a royal soap opera with an unusually long runtime.

He was never meant to rule. Born in 1738, George III only ended up as king because his father, Frederick, Prince of Wales, died before getting a chance to wear the crown. That left young George with a job title he hadn’t auditioned for. When he finally inherited the throne in 1760 at the tender age of 22, Britain was already halfway through the Seven Years’ War, a global playground scrap that had everyone from Prussia to Portugal flinging cannonballs at each other. George walked in, fresh-faced and determined to Do The Right Thing, a phrase that would haunt him like a badly written musical refrain.

He was different. He didn’t carouse like his predecessors. No mistresses flaunted in the royal garden. No expensive baubles bought on a whim. Instead, George married Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, had a whopping 15 children (one gets the feeling Charlotte would have appreciated fewer), and tried to bring something resembling morality back into royal fashion. He read everything. He made notes in the margins. He cared.

And then he lost America.

To be fair, America wasn’t exactly holding tight. The colonists had been grumbling for a while about taxes, representation, and the general notion that maybe they didn’t need to check with a small island thousands of miles away every time they wanted to buy tea. Parliament kept poking them with increasingly pointy sticks—the Stamp Act, the Tea Act, and other bits of bureaucratic genius—and the colonies eventually snapped.

George III wasn’t twirling his moustache and cackling as redcoats stomped over Boston. He genuinely believed in the unity of the empire and saw rebellion as both dangerous and disloyal. The irony? He was more restrained than his ministers, many of whom treated the colonies like an annoying child who’d outgrown their allowance. George tried to balance, negotiate, and preserve dignity. In the end, diplomacy got buried under musket fire. The colonies declared independence in 1776. George read their declaration and reportedly didn’t lose his temper. He just sighed and wrote a few notes in the margins. Typical.

He never quite got over it. The American Revolution felt personal, not just as a monarch but as someone who genuinely thought he had been a fair ruler. The press and the pamphlets called him a tyrant. His enemies called him unhinged. His supporters called him unlucky. He called it a betrayal.

And then things got weirder.

George began showing signs of what doctors then referred to as “madness” but what might have been a rare metabolic disorder called porphyria. Symptoms included discoloured urine, sensitivity to light, confusion, and manic episodes. George once talked for hours without pause, another time he insisted that a tree in Windsor Park was giving him instructions. His courtiers tried to keep things discreet, but you can’t exactly hide the fact that the king is conducting royal business with shrubbery.

The court brought in physicians who applied all the medical genius of the 18th century—which is to say, they bled him, blistered him, and force-fed him until his screams echoed down the palace corridors. George sometimes got better. Sometimes he didn’t. The worst episode came in 1810, after the death of his favourite daughter, Princess Amelia. Whatever had been fragile in his mind cracked completely. He became unresponsive. Unreachable.

By 1811, the government had enough. Parliament passed the Regency Act, making his son, the flamboyant and fiscally irresponsible George IV, Prince Regent. Thus began the Regency era, full of gothic novels, empire-waist frocks, and an alarming number of powdered dandies. Meanwhile, George III remained in Windsor Castle, blind, deaf, and mentally adrift, occasionally playing the harpsichord and believing he still governed the country.

But this isn’t a story of pure tragedy. George was, in many ways, a revolutionary monarch. Not in the muskets-and-manifestos sense, but in how he saw kingship. He took it seriously. Painfully so. He read every dispatch. He corrected punctuation in cabinet documents. He once insisted that a comma be removed from a treaty because it was grammatically incorrect.

He had a library. Not a token shelf of dusty books for show, but a real, living collection. He studied astronomy, collected scientific instruments, and supported agricultural innovation. He was the only British king in history who could explain crop rotation. He adored the Royal Academy and the British Museum. He even bought up the collections of bankrupt aristocrats to keep knowledge in the public sphere.

People mocked him for his domesticity. The press called him boring. Some cartoonists drew him as a farmer on a tractor while the empire burned. But George knew what he was doing. He thought kings should behave better than everyone else. They should set an example, even if that example involved porridge, early bedtimes, and a worrying obsession with turnips.

His relationship with his children was more Shakespearean than serene. His sons were extravagantly disobedient. George IV, the eldest, spent more on clothes than the army. The younger princes gambled, drank, and generally treated royal duty as an abstract concept best ignored. George loved them. But he didn’t understand them. The values he lived by—duty, frugality, faithfulness—looked downright alien to his heirs.

Charlotte, his wife, endured it all. She watched her husband slip in and out of lucidity for decades. She defended him when courtiers whispered. She raised their children, negotiated court politics, and somehow never seemed to crack. One gets the impression she would have made a very capable prime minister.

In the end, George III lived longer than anyone expected. He ruled for 59 years and 96 days, the longest reign of any British king. He died in 1820, blind, mostly forgotten by a court that had already moved on to newer scandals and shinier uniforms. He left behind a broken family, a fractured empire, and a reputation that would take centuries to rehabilitate.

But rehabilitate it did. Later historians looked past the madness and the war. They saw the mind beneath the chaos, the monarch who tried to steer a nation through revolution and reform, often without thanks. He became less of a caricature and more of a man—one with flaws, certainly, but also with a stubborn sense of duty that never quite let go.

Hamilton painted him as a campy villain, and fair enough, the crown spins nicely in a musical number. But real life rarely has such neat choreography. George III was no tyrant. He was a constitutional monarch trapped in an age of upheaval, a ruler trying to preserve unity in a world increasingly allergic to it.

And if he talked to trees? Well, who among us hasn’t, at some point, thought a quiet oak might be more understanding than Parliament?