Even after George Washington defeated George’s armies in the War of Independence, the king referred to Washington in March 1797 as “the greatest character of the age,” and when George met John Adams in London in June 1785, he told him, “I will be very frank with you. George III’s generosity of spirit came as a surprise to me as I researched in the Royal Archives, which are housed in the Round Tower at Windsor Castle. He never vetoed a single Act of Parliament, nor did he have any hopes or plans to establish anything approaching tyranny over his American colonies, which were among the freest societies in the world at the time of the Revolution: Newspapers were uncensored, there were rarely troops in the streets and the subjects of the 13 colonies enjoyed greater rights and liberties under the law than any comparable European country of the day. Yet George was the epitome of a constitutional monarch, deeply conscientious about the limits of his power. It was the Declaration that established the myth that George III was a tyrant. By contrast, no fewer than 41 of the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence were slave owners. George never owned slaves himself, and he gave his assent to the legislation that abolished the slave trade in England in 1807.
“The pretexts used by the Spaniards for enslaving the New World were extremely curious,” George notes “the propagation of the Christian religion was the first reason, the next was the Americans differing from them in colour, manners and customs, all of which are too absurd to take the trouble of refuting.” As for the European practice of enslaving Africans, he wrote, “the very reasons urged for it will be perhaps sufficient to make us hold such practice in execration.”
Indeed, George’s comments go even further than Montesquieu’s own opposition to the practice.
We can now see, for example, George’s fervent denunciation of slavery in an essay he wrote as Prince of Wales in the late 1750s, after reading Charles de Montesquieu’s classic enlightenment text, The Spirit of the Laws (1748). They reveal a startlingly new picture of the last king of America-one about as far removed as possible from the description of George in the Declaration of Independence: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” Since 2015, Queen Elizabeth II has released more than 100,000 pages of documents in the Royal Archives relating to King George III.
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