Review: George III
Mar. 4th, 2006 12:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mishalakWhy the heck am I getting in a review of the reign of George III nearly two hundred years since he died? Well I recently finished a book about him that started out promising to show that he was not the tyrant that he's made out to be, but a good king much beloved by his subjects and mostly maligned by the rebels in America.
Though the book tries to treat him with great affection, I remain cool to George III as a monarch. He was no worse than his times, but aside from becoming popular for reigning for a long time and arousing sympathy due to his mental illness I do not see where Christopher Hibbert came to like him so well. He certainly was quite monogamous and faithful in his orthodox way, but he was also a consistent foe of liberty. While he would be friends with Catholics (or at least as friendly as a monarch can be), he consistently opposed repeated attempts by some parliaments to get rid of the laws or even portions of the laws that oppressed them in the United Kingdom, even when that would have helped with recruiting a few more soldiers for armies to keep his empire together. I am struck by the parallels to that of the issue of gays in the military today.
Politically unwise in the era when parliament was beginning to emerge as the true supreme power in the land, rather than just a body the could reign in or replace a king who got too far out of line, he was clearly not up to the task of even being a constitutional monarch with some power. He reminded me of on of the ill informed American voters who have no better plans for reform than throwing out the people they do not like and totally fail to consider what comes next or how to prevent corruption. He also consistently made the wrong choices and pushed the government of his realm in the exact wrong direction. Over and over he would choose personal friendship and class over competence, despite his protestations to the contrary, and so picked the worst possible wife for his son, picked tutors that ruined all his children, and prime ministers who made a disaster of managing his realm. And when he was forced to do something he didn't want to that turned out to be the right thing eventually he would come around and act as if it was a good idea all along. More than anything else I see a pattern of being ill informed and isolated despite the flattering things written about him being so interested in science and literature.
While I will more than readily concede that he was not an evil minded man intent upon establishing himself as an absolute monarch, he certainly wanted to blunder in that direction without a plan or clue due to his class prejudices and unexamined belief that life was better in the past than in the present. Look, more parallels to the present.
Though the book tries to treat him with great affection, I remain cool to George III as a monarch. He was no worse than his times, but aside from becoming popular for reigning for a long time and arousing sympathy due to his mental illness I do not see where Christopher Hibbert came to like him so well. He certainly was quite monogamous and faithful in his orthodox way, but he was also a consistent foe of liberty. While he would be friends with Catholics (or at least as friendly as a monarch can be), he consistently opposed repeated attempts by some parliaments to get rid of the laws or even portions of the laws that oppressed them in the United Kingdom, even when that would have helped with recruiting a few more soldiers for armies to keep his empire together. I am struck by the parallels to that of the issue of gays in the military today.
Politically unwise in the era when parliament was beginning to emerge as the true supreme power in the land, rather than just a body the could reign in or replace a king who got too far out of line, he was clearly not up to the task of even being a constitutional monarch with some power. He reminded me of on of the ill informed American voters who have no better plans for reform than throwing out the people they do not like and totally fail to consider what comes next or how to prevent corruption. He also consistently made the wrong choices and pushed the government of his realm in the exact wrong direction. Over and over he would choose personal friendship and class over competence, despite his protestations to the contrary, and so picked the worst possible wife for his son, picked tutors that ruined all his children, and prime ministers who made a disaster of managing his realm. And when he was forced to do something he didn't want to that turned out to be the right thing eventually he would come around and act as if it was a good idea all along. More than anything else I see a pattern of being ill informed and isolated despite the flattering things written about him being so interested in science and literature.
While I will more than readily concede that he was not an evil minded man intent upon establishing himself as an absolute monarch, he certainly wanted to blunder in that direction without a plan or clue due to his class prejudices and unexamined belief that life was better in the past than in the present. Look, more parallels to the present.