Though Roberts occasionally forgoes nuance in favor of salvaging his subject’s reputation, this is an eye-opening portrait of the man and his times. Roberts blames policy mistakes such as the repeal of the Stamp Act on parliament’s factious politics contrasts George’s “staunchly conservative” economic views with those of Prime Minister William Pitt, who oversaw “millions spent on an ever expanding theatre of conflict” and alleges that the king suffered from “recurrent manic-depressive psychosis,” rather than a hereditary blood disorder, as was commonly believed. In Roberts’s view, George III was a loving husband and father, a champion of the Enlightenment, and a constitutional monarchist who ruled in a tumultuous era when America was reaching “political maturity” and Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War brought uncertainty about how the empire would be run and who would pay for it. Author and award-winning investigative historian Andrew Roberts, on his book, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, the first biography of King George III in fifty years, and the definitive one for our generation, offering a cradle to grave biography in one volume.

Historian Roberts ( Churchill: Walking with Destiny) paints the British monarch, who ruled from 1760 until his death in 1820, as “well-meaning, hard-working, decent, dutiful, moral, cultured and kind,” the near-polar opposite of the “wicked tyrannical brute” described by Thomas Paine and other American patriots. Roberts also explains in great detail the dynamics between the British parliament and the nascent American government, including a fascinating account of the writing of and subsequent British reaction to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.“The American Revolution is a testament not to George III’s tyranny, which was fictitious, but to Americans’ yearning for autonomy,” according to this meticulously researched revisionist biography. In this interview and in his book, Roberts goes to great lengths to deconstruct that distortion and, in the process, give us an extremely nuanced and detailed portrait of the man who created the conditions for America’s independence. Historian Andrew Roberts urges us not to think of actor Jonathan Groff’s exaggerated portrayal of George III in the musical Hamilton when judging the monarch who was, indeed, America’s last king. Roberts’s new book is The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, a biography of the monarch who led England during the American Revolution and who has been made into something of a caricature by Americans, most recently by his portrayal in the musical Hamilton as a preening, stuck-up (but funny) king of England. In his long and distinguished career, British historian Andrew Roberts has produced world-class biographies of Winston Churchill, and Napoleon, several histories of World War II and the men who led the countries who fought that war, and other great conflicts in world history.

George iii by andrew roberts