The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III Review

Publishers Weekly described the book as a revisionist biography and noted that Roberts treats the king as almost the opposite of the tyrant portrayed by figures such as Thomas Paine. PublishersWeekly.com

That reassessment is useful, especially for readers whose image of George III comes mostly from schoolbook shorthand or Hamilton. But this is also where I occasionally felt Roberts's determination to rescue his subject becoming too visible.

There is a difference between showing that George III was not a bloodthirsty despot and minimizing the degree to which British policy helped create the conflict. David O. Stewart's review in The Washington Post makes this point well: Roberts succeeds in dismantling the caricature of the tyrant, but gives too little weight to the deliberate tightening of imperial control and to how foreseeable American resistance had become. The Washington Post

That criticism stayed in my mind while reading the book's larger argument. Roberts is strongest when he complicates history. He is less convincing when rehabilitation begins to look like acquittal.

The biography becomes much more affecting when it moves away from America and into George's private life, particularly his illness. The king's later mental collapse has often been reduced to another part of the caricature: "Mad King George." Roberts treats it as prolonged human suffering instead. The episodes of mania, the brutal medical treatments, the loss of control over his own body and speech, and eventually his blindness and deafness change the tone of the book considerably.

Those sections made the historical figure feel most vulnerable to me. The politics remain important, but the experience of a man losing his ability to govern, communicate normally, and recognize the world around him is difficult to reduce to political argument. Stewart's review similarly identifies the descriptions of George's mental suffering as some of the biography's most powerful material. The Washington Post

Roberts also gives substantial attention to the development of Britain's constitutional monarchy. This may be less immediately dramatic than the American Revolution, but it is one of the more valuable parts of the book. George had influence, patronage, and formal powers, yet his reign also witnessed political practices that increasingly strengthened ministers, cabinet government, and the office of prime minister. One of the paradoxes surrounding him is that the man remembered in America as a symbol of arbitrary monarchy ruled during a period when the British monarchy was becoming less capable of arbitrary personal government. Star Tribune

The scale of the biography is both a strength and a weakness. George III reigned from 1760 until 1820, which means Roberts has to move through the Seven Years' War's aftermath, the American Revolution, major domestic political struggles, Catholic emancipation, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, royal family problems, and repeated episodes of illness. That is a lot of history even before George's private life is considered.

Roberts handles the political material with confidence, but the amount of names, ministries, parliamentary maneuvers, royal appointments, and diplomatic crises can become heavy. This is not the kind of biography I would recommend to someone looking only for a quick introduction to George III. It rewards patience and at least some interest in eighteenth-century British politics.

At the same time, the length allows Roberts to do something a shorter biography could not. George stops being "the king who lost America" because losing America eventually becomes only one chapter in a sixty-year reign. That change in proportion may be the book's most useful achievement.

The family material contributes to the same effect. George was a husband, father of fifteen children, monarch, political actor, religious believer, and man repeatedly defeated by his own health. Roberts is clearly sympathetic to him, sometimes very sympathetic, but the accumulation of detail makes it impossible to keep viewing George only through the American Revolution.

I also appreciated the attention given to the limits of historical reputation. Political enemies are often excellent writers because persuasion is part of their work. Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson helped create a version of George III capable of supporting the revolutionary case. That does not automatically make their political complaints false, but it should remind us that some of the language through which we remember historical figures was produced by people actively trying to defeat them.

Roberts is particularly effective at making the reader conscious of that problem.

Where I remain less convinced is in some of the moral balancing. For instance, Roberts stresses George's personal opposition to slavery, but George did not become an active political champion of abolition. That distinction matters. It is possible to credit private moral discomfort without turning it into public courage. The same caution should apply throughout a biography explicitly attempting to repair a reputation. Star Tribune

This is why I would not call The Last King of America a neutral biography. It has an argument, and Roberts makes that argument openly. I actually prefer that to a book pretending to have no interpretive position at all. The reader simply needs to remain aware of the direction in which Roberts is pushing.

That push produces some of the book's liveliest history. George III emerges as considerably more intelligent, disciplined, cultured, and constitutionally aware than his popular reputation suggests. He also emerges as stubborn, conservative, capable of serious political misjudgment, and trapped at times by the limits of his own worldview.

That version of George is far more interesting than either a patriotic villain or a completely rehabilitated hero.

For me, The Last King of America succeeds less because it proves Roberts's entire case than because it makes the familiar case against George III feel incomplete. I finished with more sympathy for the king, but not with the sense that every criticism of him had been overturned.

That is probably a healthier result.

A good revisionist biography should make the reader reconsider what they thought they knew without simply replacing one cartoon with another. Roberts occasionally comes close to overcorrecting, yet the research, scale, and clarity of his portrait make the reassessment worthwhile.