King Charles III visits the United States this week to honor Britain’s former colonies on the 250th anniversary of their violent separation from the monarchy.
This prompts one of those “what if” questions that runs through history: What if King George III had done the same? Would a royal visit in the early 1770s have made colonists more predisposed toward the crown and, more importantly, would it have made the king more predisposed toward the complaints his subjects across the Atlantic were voicing?
The British historian Andrew Roberts explored these questions in his sympathetic account of the king we revolted against, “The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III.”
Roberts finds George III’s lack of interest in his North American domains out of character.
Americans have come to regard George III as an out-of-touch dullard. In Britain, he was neither, Robert writes. George III was deeply interested in science. He was the first British monarch to have studied the subject. He collected scientific instruments. He commissioned astronomical observations and funded the astronomer William Herschel, who tried to repay the favor by naming the newly discovered planet Uranus “the Georgian Star.” George III loved maps and collected more than 55,000 of them. However, the inquisitive young monarch (he was just 38 in the decisive year of 1776) had one unusual fault for someone so otherwise fascinated by the world around him: He did not like to travel.
He never visited Scotland. Nor Wales. Nor Ireland. Nor his possessions in Germany, the Electorate of Hanover, where his family came from. “He was the first monarch since Elizabeth I who never visited the Continent of Europe,” Robert writes. Descended from German royalty, George III fancied himself an Englishman but knew little of England itself. He never ventured into the Midlands or the north of England — “never to Manchester, Birmingham or Leeds, where later in his reign innovation and industry were fundamentally changing Britain,” Roberts writes. George III’s head was in the stars (he was fascinated by new astronomical discoveries), but not in some of his lands on earth.
The notion of visiting North America never occurred to him. “For a man with so inquisitive a mind in so many areas to be quite so personally insular was an extraordinary lacuna: if the King had through personal experience been able to gain an inkling of America’s potential and her discontents, the story of the next twenty years might well have been very different,” Roberts writes.
The trip would have been long, but not impossible. Merchants, the military, future settlers made the trip between Britain and North America quite routinely in George’s time. Britain at the time was accustomed to kings not being in residence (which is not to say that the British were happy about the king going abroad). George III’s grandfather and immediate predecessor, George II, preferred Hanover to London. “For the amount of time that George II spent in Hanover in 1736 alone, his grandson could have easily travelled to Boston, New York and Philadelphia and back,” Roberts writes. If George III could have foreseen that someday his North American empire would outpace Britain in wealth, perhaps he could have even moved across the Atlantic permanently. “Yet this seems never even to have been considered,” Roberts writes.
There was a brief time when establishing the royal line across the Atlantic was an actual plan. George II’s son, Frederick, was in line to be king but died before he could ascend to the throne. (He suffered a pulmonary embolism at age 44, although at the time his death was attributed to a blow to the chest during a cricket match.) Had Frederick lived, things might have been different. He died in 1751, decades before conflicts between the American colonies and Britain occupied center stage, so it’s hard to know how a potential King Frederick might have reacted. However, he did seem to have some ideas on how to manage the colonies. He envisioned designating his fourth son, Henry, as “Duke of Virginia” and installing him on Antigua or some other Caribbean island to look over North America. Henry was 4 years old at the time, and Frederick’s premature death ended that line of thought. Of note: Frederick intended to tax the colonists to raise the money to support this future Duke of Virginia. “His transatlantic subjects might not have seen the wisdom of this,” writes another British historian, Ged Martin.
Roberts notes that when Queen Anne died without a direct heir in 1714 and the crown of Britain came to George I — George III’s great-grandfather — that George was reluctant to leave his native Hanover for damp and distant England. However, “it was represented to him that if he did not come he would run the risk of losing the crown,” Roberts writes, so George I made what he considered a sacrifice to decamp to London. “In the 1770s there was no analogous courtier or politician to suggest to George [III] that if he did not make the journey to America he ran the risk of losing thirteen of his colonies,” Roberts writes. “It is of course by no means certain that he would have been able to stave off the rebellion by doing so, but he should surely have made the effort, just as his great-grandfather did.”
What might have happened if King George III had journeyed to America? The answer might be found in a document called the Olive Branch Petition that the Second Continental Congress sent to the monarch in July 1775. As the name suggests, the petition was intended to seek a rapprochement with Britain after a year of turmoil that had been marked by “the shot heard ’round the world” at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, and a second confrontation in Virginia where colonists had chased the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, out to sea. The Congress had called upon George Washington to lead the nascent Continental Army in open warfare against the British in Massachusetts, yet still, the Congress sought peace. Among the signers of this document were Patrick Henry, who had already thundered “Give me liberty or give me death,” and Thomas Jefferson, who a year later would write a more famous document. By 1776, those American leaders were describing George III as a tyrant. In 1775, though, they were signing a petition that wished “That your Majesty may enjoy long and prosperous reign, and that your descendents may govern your dominions with honor to themselves and happiness to their subjects.”
George III never bothered to read the Olive Branch Petition. Instead, he declared the colonies in open revolt. Had George III been more familiar with the colonies, perhaps he’d have been more sympathetic to the colonists’ concerns — or not.
Revolution was not inevitable — Canada and various British possessions in the Caribbean stand as evidence of that. Britain had 19 colonies on the North American mainland in 1776; more than 20 if you add various islands such as the Bahamas, Bermuda, and Jamaica and elsewhere. Only 13 of them rebelled.
Broadly speaking, the rift between the colonies and Britain began opening after the French and Indian War, which ended in 1763. Britain’s debt had doubled; Parliament thought it only natural that Americans should pay more to support their own defense. Americans saw things quite differently. They felt the war ended the French threat (by the British acquiring Quebec) and at least delayed the Native American threat by pushing indigenous tribes further west, so they saw little need for British regulars in their midst — and they certainly didn’t want to pay more taxes to support them or much of anything else. They were particularly aggrieved that these taxes were being laid by a distant Parliament they had no role in choosing — the whole “taxation without representation” thing.
Roberts notes that there were options theoretically available to resolve these differences. The king could have established a separate kingdom in North America, with its own parliament — this is essentially how Canada was founded in 1867. There would have been precedent for this. George III held separate crowns as king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as well as Prince-Elector (and eventually king) of Hanover. He could have become King of America, as well.
Who was the first to call for American independence?
It might have been Virginia’s Cumberland County. See the story about Cumberland’s role in our Cardinal 250 series of stories about little-known aspects of Virginia’s role in independence.
Benjamin Franklin floated a rough version of this — the Albany Plan — way back in 1754. In 1774, Thomas Jefferson set down his thoughts in “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” in which he held that colonists had no legal ties to parliament, only the crown. “Settlements having been thus effected in the wilds of America, the emigrants thought proper to adopt that system of laws under which they had hitherto lived in the mother country, and to continue their union with her by submitting themselves to the same common sovereign, who was thereby made the central link connecting the several parts of the empire thus newly multiplied,” Jefferson wrote.
In that view, Parliament was the problem, not the crown. Had George III been more familiar with his North American subjects, and had he acted soon enough, perhaps the American Revolution might have been avoided. However, he was not and did not, and history unfolded as it did.
Part of the problem, Roberts writes, is that George III did not feel he could separate himself from Parliament. The reasons are complicated but are rooted in the political turmoil of the previous century that had seen a civil war, a king beheaded (Charles I), the rule of Oliver Cromwell, the restoration of the monarchy (Charles II), the ouster of another king (James II), the installation of William and Mary in James II’s place and the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1689 that was intended to assert the primacy of Parliament (plus the occasional attempts by the descendents of James II to reclaim the throne). The short version: The Hanoverian kings owed their throne to parliament, so George III saw his role as defending the authority of parliament. Parliament could not conceive of the North American colonies being anything but subservient to its will, so neither could George III.
As late as 1775, even with war breaking out, colonial leaders clung to the notion that the king might see reason from their point of view. He did not. Then came Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” in January 1776. After that, the notion of independence began to achieve widespread support, culminating in Jefferson inking another treatise that was definitely not an olive branch petition. Before the American Revolution was won on the field of battle at Yorktown, it was won in the minds of colonists who came to the view that they needed neither Parliament nor the crown.
Maybe a break from the crown would have come anyway. If not, King Charles today could be addressing his American subjects on the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Kingdom of America — with the Duke of Virginia behind him on the dais.
If you want a King of America . . .
. . . then I recommend the 1986 album of that name by Elvis Costello. The opening song, “Brilliant Mistake,” begins: “He thought he was the King of America /
Where they pour Coca Cola just like vintage wine.”
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