King George bought books about America, quizzed Native American chiefs about their customs, and showed precisely the kind of paternal attitude that one might expect from a constitutional monarch of the day. Of any sinister plan to oppress his colonists there is not a word in his very extensive private archive. Yet this is the man of whom Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence: “A prince, whose character is marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
After two centuries of deliberate political misrepresentation, people on both sides of the Atlantic still believe that it was because George was a tyrant king and mad with porphyria that Britain lost the American War of Independence. Yet, firstly he didn’t have porphyria, secondly he wasn’t a tyrant, thirdly he was perfectly sane throughout the American Revolution, and lastly he wasn’t responsible for Britain’s defeat. So here are four major errors, all in one commonly uttered sentence.
I have no wish to be a wasp at America’s semiquincentennial picnic, conscious that wasps get swatted, but it is fair for a Tory like me to point out that the very large degree of self-government that Americans enjoyed in the thirteen colonies between 1620 and when the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 delivered overall peace and prosperity for the vast majority of free people for the vast majority of the time.
Even in the so-called tyrannical 1770s, the thirteen colonies enjoyed negligible inflation and 7 percent year-on-year growth, had an income-tax rate of around 2 percent, and employed virtually no civil servants beyond a handful of revenue inspectors. There were no government shutdowns, and George III sent troops to only one American city in peacetime—Boston in 1768. The British largely fought and financed the French and Indian War, protecting the colonists from the depredations of both enemies, yet no sooner was final victory won, and the French threat ended, than a group of activists attempted to foment trouble. This dissident action focused on denouncing the reasonable and limited attempt of the Stamp Act to defray about 20 percent of the overall cost of the war, with the British taxpayer picking up the rest of the tab for a conflict four thousand miles away. Because the Stamp Act most affected journalists and lawyers—the two most radicalized and noisy groups in those days (as in ours)—opposition grew to its light impositions.