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By Root 1013 0

was not widely admired in these years. On George Ill’s accession to the throne in 1760 at the age of 21, Horace Walpole found him tall, florid, dignified and “amiable,” but the amiability was painfully assumed. Fatherless since the age of twelve, George had been brought up in an atmosphere of the harshest rancor between his grandfather George II and his father, Frederick, Prince of Wales. While common among royalty, the paternal-filial hatred in this case was extreme, leaving young George inimical to all who had served his grandfather and persuaded that the world whose rule he inherited was deeply wicked and its moral improvement his duty. In the narrow family circle at Leicester House, he was poorly educated with no contacts with the outside world and grew up obstinate, limited, troubled and unsure of himself. He liked to retire to his study, reported his tutor, Lord Waldegrave, “to indulge the melancholy enjoyment of his own ill humor.” He would seldom do wrong, “except when he mistakes wrong for right” and, when this happens, “it will be difficult to undeceive him because he is uncommonly indolent and has strong prejudices.”

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so. In a boyhood essay on King Alfred, George wrote that when Alfred came to the throne, “there was scarce a man in office that was not totally unfit for it and generally extremely corrupt in the execution of it.” Removing the incorrigibles, “reclaiming” the others, Alfred had “raised the glory and happiness of his country” with the help of the Almighty Power that “wrecks the cunning of proud, ambitious and deceitful men.” Such was George’s view of his ministers and such his own program. He must clean out the system, restore righteous rule—his own—and carry out his mother’s injunction, “George, be a King.” His efforts from the first day of his reign to unseat the Whig grandees who complacently ruled through a pervasive distribution of patronage, by acquiring control of the patronage in his own hands, not unnaturally convinced many of his intention to restore the royal absolutism defeated at such cost in the previous century.

In need of a father substitute, George had fixed on the Earl of Bute with a neurotic adoration that was bound to—and did—end in disillusion. Thereafter, until he found the comfortable Lord North, he either disliked or despised every First Minister, or swung over into dependence, and since he had power to appoint and dismiss within certain limits, his swings kept government unstable. Because Pitt had left the Prince of Wales’ circle to serve under George II, George called him “the blackest of hearts” and a “true snake in the grass,” and vowed to make other ministers “smart for their ingratitude.” Often confessing to Bute the torture of his self-distrust and irresolution, he was convinced at the same time of his own righteousness, which had as its basic assumption that because he wished nothing but good, everyone who did not agree with him was a scoundrel. This was not a sovereign likely to understand or try to understand insubordinate colonials.

A weakness of England’s government was lack of cohesion or of a concept of collective responsibility. Ministers were appointed by the Crown as individuals and pursued their own ideas of policy often without consulting their colleagues. Because government derived from the Crown, aspirants to office had to find favor and work in partnership with the King, which proved a more ticklish job under George III than it had been under the thick-witted, foreign-born first Hanoverians. The sovereign was, within limits, chief of the executive with the right to choose his own ministers although not on the basis of royal favor alone. The First Minister and his associates had to have the support of the electorate in the sense that, even without a political party, they had to muster a majority of Parliament and rely on it to enact and approve their policies. Even when this was achieved, George Ill’s erratic and emotional exercise