Poor George III still gets a bad press. In their famous television talk in London, the Prime Minister of Great Britain suggested to the President of the United States that the kind of colonial policy associated with the name of George III still distorted the American view of the nature and function of the British Empire, and Mr. Eisenhower smilingly agreed. It is not surprising. Since Jefferson’s great philippic in the Declaration of Independence, few historians, English or American, have had many good words to say for him. True, he has been excused direct responsibility for many items of the catalogue of enormities that Jefferson went on to lay at his door, but to the ordinary man he remains one of England’s disastrous kings, like John or the two Jameses.

Actually, as we shall see later on, toward the end of his life and immediately after it his reputation improved, and even the writers of American school textbooks did not at first hold him personally responsible for the disasters that led to independence. They held his ministers responsible. It was after the publication of Horace Walpole’s Memoirs in 1845 tnat George III began to be blamed. Walpole’s gossip appeared to give substance to Burke’s allegations that the King deliberately attempted to subvert the British constitution by packing ministries and Parliament with his personal party—the King’s friends—a collection of corrupt politicians bought with place and with pension.

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