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WE WANT TO LIKE YOU, KING GEORGE . . . BUT COME ON!
By Douglas Niles
Once vigorous measures appear to be the only means left of bringing the Americans to a due submission to the mother country, the colonies will submit.
—KING GEORGE III TO PARLIAMENT, 1775
With the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Great Britain stood alone as the most powerful empire in the world, possessor of profitable colonies in North America, Africa, and Asia. The defeat of France in that conflict—which in the American colonies was known as the French and Indian War—had eliminated French power on the American continent, with the French ceding Canada, most of Florida, several Caribbean Islands, and much of the middle of what would become the United States to the British Crown.
In 1763, that crown rested on the bewigged and obstinate head of King George III, who had ascended to the throne only three years earlier. Stubborn and insecure, George distrusted some of the advisers who had guided England to victory in the war against France. He had detested his late grandfather, George II, and when the old king died, the new king determined to chart a new path. He was a man of strong passions, George III, but his intellect was not a match for those impulses of emotion.
In particular, George III determined to cast out the lords and advisers who had served his predecessor so well. Most notably, he disliked William Pitt the Elder, aka “the Great Commoner,” who was a gifted politician and diplomat, with keen insight into the affairs of the British Empire, and a particular understanding of her relationship with her colonies. Pitt was the brain behind the strategy that had resulted in England’s triumph during the Seven Years’ War.
But George III had forced Pitt to resign in 1761, and instead placed his trust in the Earl of Bute, John Stuart, employing Bute as a mentor and adviser. Sensing a mistake, the king recalled Pitt to service in 1763, but by that time the Great Commoner’s health had begun to fail, and he would be unable to make his mark on the history that would play out so violently and catastrophically over the next two decades. Furthermore, Bute proved to be every bit as stubborn, shortsighted, and abrasive as his king, and together the two men held firm against the counsels of wiser men.
Beyond the vast increase in territorial holdings, the other legacy left to England in the wake of the Seven Years’ War was a mountain of debt. Britain’s expenditures had more than doubled as the nation borrowed heavily to pay for the far-flung conflict. Some in England, including the king and a number of powerful mercantile interests and lords, felt that it was only fair that the colonies be taxed to help make up the deficit. After all, they had surely been beneficiaries of the British victory, had they not?
However, the colonists took a different view. They regarded themselves as loyal subjects of the king, but distrusted a Parliament from whose ranks they were sternly excluded. Feeling themselves to be English citizens, they expected, and soon demanded, the rights of other Englishmen. These grievances swelled in the late 1760s as Pitt the Elder’s former underling Charles Townshend took over for the great man and began to mercilessly squeeze the colonies for every farthing he could extract.
The Stamp Act, in 1765, imposed a tax on the colonies that was protested so strongly that it was repealed a year later, only to be followed by the Townshend Acts in 1767, which imposed a whole series of import and export taxes on the American colonies. These decrees increased colonial resentment and also hampered trade, as the Americans began to boycott (taxed) English imports. British troops were dispatched to New England and New York to keep order, and the colonists were often required to billet these soldiers in their homes, a fact that contributed to growing American resentment.
Still, the colonists remained mostly loyal to the king, and a few symbolic olive branches extended by the Crown could have defused the rebellion before it began. Though most of the Townshend taxes were soon suspended, the tax on tea remained, and it would become an extraordinary flash point. In 1770, the king appointed Lord North as his prime minister, and that nobleman was more determined than even George III to put the rambunctious Americans in their place. In that same year, British soldiers fired on an angry group of Massachusetts citizens, killing five of them in the so-called Boston Massacre. The Boston Tea Party, in December of 1773, further derailed relations, as the king imposed more punitive measures and the colonists grew more restive.
By 1775, when battle erupted at Lexington and Concord, it was too late to heal the relationship. But there had been plenty of opportunities during the 1760s, when a ruler with a more long-term view could have worked out a compromise that would have allowed the Crown’s richest and most vibrant colony to remain as a reasonably content partner in the empire—much as happened later with Canada and Australia, after England had been forced to come to terms with the mistakes that led to the American Revolution.
And how might the future have played out, if the United States of America had not declared and fought for independence? In many ways, a lot of future bloodshed could have been avoided. Well before the end of the eighteenth century, England would have stood alone as the great power in the world, supported by her robust American colony that spanned the North American coast from Georgia to Hudson Bay. Neither France nor the dying Spanish Empire would have been any match for the United Kingdom economically or militarily.
Almost certainly there would have been no French Revolution—or only a significantly less effective rebellion, since that event was heavily inspired by the American revolt across the ocean—and that would mean no Reign of Terror, no Emperor Napoleon, and an avoidance of the countless wars and deaths that were the result of the emperor’s ambitions. The Pax Brittanica, which historically began after Waterloo in 1815, might have commenced forty or fifty years earlier.
And consider the effect on American history as well. The American Civil War would probably not have been fought. Great Britain outlawed the buying and selling of slaves in 1807, and banned slavery altogether in 1833. The southern American economy would have been forced to adjust to abolition sooner than it did historically, and it is unlikely that the Confederate states would have even tried to stand against the force of a British Empire that also included the populous, industrial northern colonies. Also, the genocidal removal of Native Americans from their ancestral homes would have been considerably diminished by English restraint. In fact, the Crown’s ban on westward expansion past the Appalachians played at least a small part in stirring up colonial resentment of the mother country, but that in and of itself would not have been sufficient to provoke revolution.
It is well-known that disease rendered King George III almost completely insane by the time of his death in 1820. But it is just possible that the greatest manifestations of the “Mad King’s” effect on history occurred before he became ill, when he was merely a stubborn and prideful young man who held the future of the world in his hands, and let it slip away.