Wrong About King George III

King George III, painted by the American expatriate Benjamin West in 1779

(ARTGEN / Alamy Stock Photo)

By William B. Allen

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.

In early 2024 I published a translation of and commentary on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1750). As I completed that project, I discovered that George III of England had translated the work himself. King George’s extensive paraphrase of The Spirit of the Laws—nearly a translation—had gone unheralded because the Royal Archives did not open the Georgian Papers until 2019. As I consulted the king’s notes, and the long list of other writings by George III, I encountered an intellect and a spirit quite unknown to us as we have portrayed him from the American Revolution.

In fact, I discovered that, far from being a tyrant, George III was a liberal reformer.

Patriot King

George III ascended to the throne in 1760, and the next few decades marked a period of constitutional reform in Britain. The king, in fact, participated in that entire process. George resolved to cure what he regarded as pernicious constitutional practices. His aim was not to change the British Constitution but to save it.

One influence on George III was Bolingbroke’s idea of a “patriot king” who rose above party politics. Bolingbroke wrote during the reign of King George II, George III’s grandfather and predecessor. In his Dissertation upon Parties (1733–34), Bolingbroke argued that the Whigs had evolved from an era in which they could be called high-minded to an era in which what came to exist could be called the Whig oligarchy. These Whigs functioned as a “Court Party,” the storehouse for rent-seeking practices that came to dominate the British government.

It was a Whig oligarchy that prevailed at the end of George II’s reign, and a Whig oligarchy against which the young George III reacted with great vehemence.

George III set out as king by announcing that he wanted a government of measures, not men. He proclaimed his intention to put an end to faction. George III believed that doing so meant putting an end to political parties. In fact, the Whig-Tory distinction played little role in the political events to which King George was reacting. The real actors were members of various Whig rump factions.

Beginning with the first Rockingham ministry of 1765–66, the strongest liberal Whigs expressed their opposition to the Crown’s resolve to reform. They attempted to assert the supremacy of the House of Commons—not the equality but the supremacy.

No liberal Whig spoke out more openly or with greater effect than Edmund Burke, who had served as Rockingham’s private secretary before entering Parliament. Burke’s 1770 pamphlet “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents” offers a remarkable view of what was taking place in Britain at the time.

What was taking place was a constitutional crisis. “We are grown out of humour with the English Constitution itself,” Burke wrote. The crisis would last into the 1780s, until the transition under the ministries of Lord Shelburne and William Pitt the Younger. In other words, this constitutional debate and reform was happening even as America moved toward independence and then broke from Britain.

But the Americans remained innocent of Britain’s constitutional crisis. As such, they could not see that the environment in Britain led to the incidents that sparked the American Revolution.

A By-Blow of England’s Revolution

What the Americans didn’t see was that the imprudent steps the House of Commons undertook with regard to the colonies arose as part of the attempt to assert the supremacy of Commons. The discretion of the monarch had to be eliminated with regard to the ministry, executive authority, executive administration. All must emerge upon the nomination of the Commons. This tremendous change brought into being the principle of popular rule. The liberals signed on to government by consent of the people.

So we find ourselves very close to the point of having to acknowledge that the American Revolution was a by-blow of what was effectively a revolution in England. British reform resulted not from tyranny but from political instability. To overcome the political instability, the British produced dramatic modern innovations, which were paralleled subsequently and indigenously in America.

One of the modern innovations was the invention of the programmatic political party. In responding to King George III, Burke argued that parties did not have to be factions. In his analysis, the party must be an association of people committed in advance to an explicit program to be approved by voters, and from that source would spring legitimacy.

Burke’s defense of the programmatic political party included the proposition that the party must also preserve opposition, allowing for divergence of opinion within society at large. By contrast, the ideological political party stamps out dissent. Think of what happened in the French Revolution—the attempts to purify French culture of nonapproved references, whether religious or otherwise. That is what the ideological party looks like.

But in Britain, popular rule became the foundation of government and shaped the future course of constitutional development, just as it would—in different institutional form—in the United States.

Greatness on Greatness

A final note on George III: When the king called George Washington “the most distinguished of any man living,” that was not the grudging sentiment of a sore loser. That was the assessment of a man of high elevation who recognized Washington’s comparable elevation.

I take George III’s evaluation of Washington’s leadership as a decisive commentary, much as I do Winston Churchill’s appreciation of Rommel’s tactics in the deserts of North Africa in World War II. You go to greatness to identify greatness. You don’t take an opinion poll. And so if we lean on greatness, we say Washington was a great leader.

William B. Allen is emeritus professor of political science and dean of James Madison College at Michigan State University. His latest publication is Montesquieu’s “The Spirit of the Laws”: A Critical Edition.

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.