A congress in Philadelphia publishes a list of grievances against a king and declares thirteen colonies independent (1776)
The Declaration of Independence; the Treaty of Paris recognised the United States in 1783
Monarchs · Hanoverian
George III
1738–1820
House of Hanover — the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars
In office: 1760–1820
The longest-reigning British king, George III was the first Hanoverian born in Britain and the first to speak English as his native tongue. He lost the American colonies, gained an empire in India, defeated Napoleon and united Britain with Ireland; he also suffered recurrent bouts of derangement which from 1811 left his son ruling as Regent. He died blind, deaf and mad at Windsor in 1820.
How to spot them
- ▸Farmer George; the king who lost America; a byword for royal madness
- ▸Porphyria was the twentieth-century diagnosis, though bipolar disorder is now widely argued instead
- ▸Married Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz; fifteen children
- ▸Prime ministers from Bute and Lord North to Pitt the Younger; the Regency from 1811
In the reign
A king buys a London townhouse for his new queen, and it grows into a palace (1762)
Buckingham House, bought for Queen Charlotte and later remodelled into Buckingham Palace
A royal charter founds a school and annual exhibition of painting, with Joshua Reynolds as first president (1768)
The Royal Academy of Arts
Anti-Catholic riots led by a Scottish lord leave hundreds dead and Newgate prison burnt (1780)
The Gordon Riots, after Lord George Gordon
An act abolishing the Dublin parliament and creating a single kingdom of two islands (1801)
The Act of Union with Ireland, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
A victory off a Spanish cape at the cost of the admiral who won it (1805)
Trafalgar, 21 October 1805; Nelson was shot on the quarterdeck of HMS Victory
A trade in human beings is made illegal throughout the empire after twenty years of campaigning (1807)
The Slave Trade Act, the fruit of Wilberforce and the abolitionists
Parliament hands the powers of the crown to the heir after a final relapse into insanity (1811)
The Regency Act; the Prince of Wales ruled as Regent until 1820
Quick-fire facts
- •Grandson of George II; the first Hanoverian sovereign born in Britain, and the first whose first language was English
- •Married Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1761; they had fifteen children, of whom two became king
- •He reigned 59 years and 96 days, the longest of any British king
- •He was Elector of Hanover from 1760 and King of Hanover from 1814
- •Two assassination attempts were made on him in 1786 and 1800, the second by James Hadfield at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
- •He was a serious agriculturalist, hence 'Farmer George', and a great collector: his King's Library went to the British Museum in 1823
- •Catholic emancipation, promised with the Irish Union, was blocked by his conscience as head of the Church of England; Pitt the Younger resigned over it in 1801
- •He died at Windsor Castle on 29 January 1820 and is buried in St George's Chapel
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Sources
- The Royal Household — George III (r. 1760-1820)
- Andrew Roberts — George III: The Life and Reign of Britain's Most Misunderstood Monarch