Synopsis
Bolt-eyed, addle-witted, the royal bully-boy of caricature and legend, George III, for sixty years King of Great Britain and Ireland and last king of America, has come down to us as a fumbling reactionary who only confirmed everyone's worst suspicions of his capacities (or lack of them) by finally going mad. Now, in this elegant, warmly sympathetic biography, Stanley Ayling gives us an unrefracted view of this maligned and complex man. It is a new portrait, both political and personal, that is long overdue.
This book intertwines the threads of George's life in public and private, from childhood on . . . his over-mothered upbringing and his starry-eyed attachment to his tutor and favorite, Lord Bute, which landed him on the throne in 1760 "bigoted, young and chaste," as the great Walpole tartly remarked . . . his gradual learning of the art of kingship through all of the constitutional struggles of his reign and the (fascinating) unbridled political in-fighting that accompanied them . . . his complex relations with his ministers and the policies that led to the war with the American colonies . . . his unflinching refusal to make advantageous political and personal compromises that might undermine the Church of England . . . and his protection of his country's very existence in the face of the French Revolution and the armies of Napoleon. Here is the domestic George . . . his life as husband and father, with its private joys and all-too-public family schisms, especially the famous and bitter conflict with his son and heir . . . the shadows that darkened his later days, as the dread "royal malady" of porphyria prostrated him and finally destroyed his mind. Tenacious, courageous, uxorious, this idiosyncratic Hanoverian who was more passionately devoted to Britain than any other of his line emerges here as a man of kindness, dry wit, and essential goodness, an oddly captivating man, and a monarch of pivotal importance to his country's history.
The biographer makes rich use of George's private papers and those of his family and ministers; he draws on the vast array of contemporary diaries and memoirs, on newspapers and journals, official parliamentary records and scurrilous broadsheet satires and cartoons. His book is an act of loving restitution, breaking through two centuries of libel to bring back the human and royal George, whom his own subjects ultimately held in deepest affection as "The Good Old King."
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