The British defeat in prompted North to resign. In , North and the prominent Whig politician Fox formed a coalition government. Their plans to reform the East India Company gave George the chance to regain popularity. He forced the bill's defeat in Parliament, and the two resigned. In their place George appointed William Pitt the Younger. The combination of Pitt's skill and war with France in strengthened George's position, but disagreements over emancipation of the Catholics - Pitt was in favour and George vehemently opposed - led to Pitt's resignation in The American war, its political aftermath and family quarrels put great strain on George.
After serious bouts of illness in - and , thought now to be caused by porphyria, he became permanently deranged in George remained ill until his death at Windsor Castle on 29 January George was thus the first king of the new nation.
His year reign was the longest in English history up to that point and remains surpassed only by those of his granddaughter Victoria and the current monarch Elizabeth II.
The dynasty, the House of Hanover, had ascended to the British throne upon the death of childless Queen Anne Stuart in As men of German extraction, George I and his son George II made great attempts to win over the British people by patronizing the arts and sciences.
In order to secure an heir of his own, he married Princess Charlotte from the tiny German duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. He also purchased a property for his new wife in London called Buckingham House for her private residence. Queen Victoria later used it as her own official London Residence, and Buckingham Palace has remained so for every British monarch since. Outside of the pomp and circumstance in Westminster Abbey where George received his crown on September 22nd, , Great Britain itself was also in a state of turbulence, caught up in the Seven Years War that was ravaging Europe, North America, and South Asia.
Following a successful invasion of Canada, the capture of many French-held islands in the Caribbean, and the victory at Plassey which marked the beginning of British domination over India, the Whig-dominated government enjoyed immense popular support. But George, fearing the burden that present and future expenditures might place upon the populace, advocated for making peace with opposing France, which put him at loggerheads with the far more bellicose minister William Pitt the Elder, who advocated a preemptive strike against neutral Spain based on intelligence reports of secret talks between them and France.
The next year, George and Bute successfully negotiated the Treaty of Paris in , and though together they extracted significant territorial concessions from Spain and France, such as Canada and Florida, the peace proved immensely unpopular amongst the still-bellicose public, forcing Bute to resign shortly thereafter. In , George issued a Royal Proclamation forbidding any European settlement in British territories west of the Appalachians in North America, partly as a concession to allied Native American groups like the Iroquois Confederacy who fought with Britain against France.
Many American colonists who hoped to settle in the newly won territories protested, but King George had much more in store for them. George also looked towards North America to pay off the enormous war debt that the crown had incurred.
He shared this opinion with much of the English population, who felt that since the war started in North America, the English subjects living there should play a major role in paying for it. The force and intensity of the protests shocked both the King and Parliament, forcing a repeal and causing an extended period of political instability, with multiple men serving as Prime Minister until settling on Lord Frederick North, who managed to stabilize the situation in Though King and Parliament had been successfully cowed into repealing the Stamp Act, King George and Lord North stubbornly held on to the belief in their rights to tax the colonies.
As both Patriots and Loyalists continuously escalated confrontation between the two factions, open conflict erupted at Lexington and Concord in April of In New York City, angry colonists tore down a gilded statue to the King ironically erected in his honor due to the repeal of the Stamp Act.
Even the Declaration of Independence included no less than twenty-seven grievances addressed directly towards the King, showing how much he had become a symbol of tyranny to the colonists. Ironically, during the course of the Revolutionary War, the King played little direct role in the war effort, but he remained invested all the same. He entrusted Lord North, with whom he regularly corresponded with, to give him constant updates about the state of the army and other news from the colonies.
In spite of his impressive educational accomplishments, George was reserved as a child. She was overbearing, and imbued the young prince with rigid moral values.
Again in , when George was madly in love with Lady Sarah Lennox, Bute advised him against the marriage, and George begrudgingly took his advice. But as King George II aged, it became apparent that an heir to the throne would have to be selected. If George, Prince of Wales was to be the heir apparent, he would have to learn how to overcome his inhibitions, and make meaningful decisions without the counsel of his mother, or favorite tutor.
Now, King George III was the monarch of Great Britain and Ireland, and he would be forced to deal with the wars, religious struggles, and societal issues which plagued the empire. In order to understand the reign of King George III, it is important to conceptualize the world prior to his ascension. The revolutionary developments of the Enlightenment, lingering religious antagonisms from the seventeenth century, and global conflict were all deciding factors in the way George governed his empire.
But ultimately, he allowed his ministers to govern the empire at his advice, and this was what made him most effective. Throughout his reign, he would always share his opinion with his ministers, but in the end, he generally trusted their judgment.
Do you choose it should be so? Then let it be. When George, Prince of Wales, assumed the British throne in , he inherited a troubled empire in the throes of a world war.
Great Britain had been fighting a war on many fronts against a French, Austrian and Russian entente. In , a skirmish at Fort Duquesne involving the Virginian George Washington sparked the conflict along the frontier in North America.
But the more serious challenge to Britain came in the form of the European alliance. Strategically, Britain leaned on the tried and tested tactic of relying on the land armies of continental European allies to do the bulk of the fighting, while the vastly superior Royal Navy would bottle up the ports of the adversary with crippling blockades. In spite of Prussian military prowess, Frederick had his hands full, as the Austrians, Russians and French had the Prussians vastly outnumbered.
Having superior land forces at their disposal on the continent, and with an exposed eastern frontier, French commanders maintained a massive army on the home front to protect against hostile European powers.
So instead, British commanders concentrated their armies in the North American theatre. While the British Amy ultimately proved successful in the French and Indian War, by , Prussia was on the brink of collapse. To make matters worse, in , French military strategists shifted their gaze from the continent to the British Isles.
They amassed nearly , troops—an overwhelming force— in preparation for an invasion of Britain. French commanders planned to wait for a strong wind so they could quickly maneuver around the superior Royal Navy stationed in the English Channel.
Fortunately for the British Army, the plan never hatched. If the French made it across the Channel, they would have quickly outmaneuvered British forces, and ended the war in favor of France and her allies. While this disaster was averted, it would not be the last time the French seriously considered an amphibious invasion of England. In spite of this, success in North America left Great Britain in a dominant position by the end of the war.
This left the British Empire with vast territorial acquisitions in North America that had to be governed and defended against future aggressors. His lineage hailed from the House of Hanover in modern day Germany. While there were several Catholics who had a stronger blood connection to Queen Anne, the Act of Settlement in prohibited Catholics from assuming the throne.
From the early years of his inheritance, George I faced an underground movement that wished to restore the Stuart monarchical line which had been deposed during the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution. Supporters of the Stuart line referred to themselves as Jacobites, and the more radical elements of this movement wished to rekindle the flames of the English Civil War by reversing the tide of anti-Catholic sentiment.
In , and again in , the Jacobites rebelled against the authority of the House of Hanover. But Catholic resentment simmered beneath the surface well into the eighteenth century. While there were English subjects who were dissatisfied with the Hanoverian monarchy, their grievances would advance from the religious to the secular realm. By the end of the seventeenth century, European philosophers were positing new, radical ideas on government. The Second Treatise was the most alarming to those kings who still clung to the concept of absolute monarchy.
This laid the bedrock for the Enlightenment which followed, as philosophes of the eighteenth century took the social contract to new heights. The Enlightenment redefined the relationship between subjects and their rulers. The Encyclopide , edited by Denis Diderot, advanced the claims of Locke, as many of the articles were aimed at advancing the theory of natural rights. The theory implied that ancient ancestors had at one point or another entered a social contract with a monarch. In other words, to join society, the individual was forced to sacrifice liberties in order to enjoy the full privileges society had to offer.
Locke referred to this as the state of nature, arguing that all men are created equal by God. With regard to the social contract, Locke asserted that subjects of a king possessed the right to rebel if the State was not governed according to the consent of the people.
These ideas from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century were truly revolutionary, and throughout his reign, King George III would have to grapple with the realization of Enlightenment ideals.
American colonists drew from Locke in their justifications for rebelling against the mother country, and establishing a republic in the wake of royal authority.
Less than a decade following American independence, French citizens would draw on the concepts advanced by philosophes such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu to rebel against their royal government.
The belief that all subjects possessed natural rights, and that a social contract defined their relationship to the king provided eighteenth century citizens with the intellectual fodder for revolution. For this, Bute was mistrusted by Parliament and the people of England. On April 23, , Wilkes published no.
For this, Wilkes was imprisoned for libel, and when Wilkes attempted to reprint the issue he was forced into exile, leaving for France in Bute could not take the pressure, and due to widespread public criticism, he resigned in Since Bute introduced the unpopular Cider Tax in England; Grenville instead looked to raise revenue from abroad. The North American colonies were an untapped source of funds—colonial legislatures only raised taxes locally to support provincial governments.
Moreover, the average colonist only paid six pence in taxes per year compared with the yearly contribution of twenty five schillings from an average English taxpayer.
Without much debate, the Sugar Act was passed through Parliament in as an improvement on the Molasses Act of The Sugar Act reduced the tax of the Molasses Act from six pence per gallon, to three pence per gallon. By reducing the tax by half, Grenville believed the new act would reduce smuggling, and generate more revenue from the colonies.
Instead, it did the opposite. The tax hit colonists during a period of economic recession, and while the tax was indirect, it was still felt by distilleries throughout North America. In flagrant violation of the Sugar Act, colonial merchants continued to smuggle molasses into the North American colonies from other parts of the world.
Following close on the heels of the Sugar Act was the passage of the Stamp Act in Printed goods such as legal documents, newspapers and pamphlets required a stamp in order to be valid. The King supported the passage of the Stamp Act, as did the general public.
It seemed like an obvious solution: the colonies needed the British Army to protect them from their adversaries, and therefore the colonists should pay to support the British regulars stationed on the continent. Even British newspapers made little, if any mention of the Stamp Act. In the North American colonies, news of the impending Stamp Act was met with violence.
In Boston, leaders of the Loyal Nine encouraged a mob to destroy property belonging to government officials. By noon that day, Ebenezer Mackintosh led the mob to a warehouse owned by Oliver. Later that day, the effigy of Oliver was burned in a bonfire atop Fort Hill, and shortly after, the mob attacked the residence of Andrew Oliver, not quitting until the early morning hours of August Two weeks later, the house of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson met the same fate.
In England, King George and Parliament faced opposition from government officials. It seemed impractical to collect revenue from a land over three thousand miles distant. In North America, colonists compared King George to Charles I for indiscriminately taxing the colonies without their consent. The implication was made by both parties that Britain could not keep the North American colonies in submission for much longer.
As the protests in North America intensified, Parliament continued to assert its authority over the colonies. In , Lord Charles Townshend proposed to tax the colonies indirectly by placing a duty on goods such as lead, paint, glass, lead and tea.
King George sanctioned the Act by royal assent on June 29, with barely a murmur of dissent in Parliament.
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