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. English historian and biographer Roberts, winner of the Wolfson History Prize and many other honors, draws on abundant archival sources to create a deeply textured portrait of George III (1738-1820), whom he calls the most unfairly traduced sovereign in the long history of the British monarchy. Roberts argues that George III was an intelligent, benevolent king who was devoted to the constitution and who navigated turbulent times.

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. Renowned biographer and historian Andrew Roberts overturns the traditional view of George III as a pompous tyrant, and a disastrous king. 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. 245 years after the end of George III’s American rule, it is time for Americans to look back on their last king with greater understanding: to see him. “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 George III: The Last King of America, Roberts paints a deft and nuanced portrait of the much-maligned monarch and outlines his accomplishments, which have been almost universally forgotten.

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