George III was not a tyrant
And why that matters…
It would seem that, in general U.S. political and national legend, the third Hanoverian king is singled out as a capricious absolute monarch against whose abuses of power our ancestors (some of them, anyway—a lot of others didn’t) rebelled, culminating in the event this country observes every 4th of July (today, as I’m writing this).
The fact that this legend is wrong brings up interesting things about propaganda and the technologies of communication and information—as well as, of course, what was actually happening—and what would happen later.
It isn’t that those who vehemently objected to rule without representation didn’t have a valid and important concern—they did, and the majority of politically-informed people, regardless of where they came down on independence versus loyalty, agreed that reforms were necessary. That was also widely true in Britain. But the elites understood how the British government worked, and they knew that the power they had to convince to work with them was the Parliament at Westminster. When that proved elusive, the leaders of the Continental Congress—whose political legitimacy the British government did not recognize, and had no reason to recognize—appealed directly to the King for his support. They did this knowing full well that the King had no constitutional authority to do that. He could not openly disavow the stated policy of his own government, nor could he, by fiat, order a change in that policy. The Americans were using him for what he was—a figurehead, a symbol, an incarnation, of the British state.
To be sure, he was more than that; Queen Elizabeth’s father was telling an important truth in that fireside conversation with FDR at the White House, when the President asked him if he could do something he couldn’t do: “I’m George VI, not George III.” The King in 1775 had real influence in politics and government. If you wanted political power, the last thing you wanted to do was get on the King’s bad side. He could make his wishes known, and expect that those in power would pay attention—but he could not expect that his wishes would be taken as orders, much less become law. This was nowhere near absolute monarchy. It was rule by the traditional landowning class and a newer business elite.
It is also true, though, that the King had no sympathy whatsoever for what he and those who agreed with him called the American “radicals.” For that reason, he played into the hands of the American propagandists who wanted to further the cause of independence. His response to the American petition was haughty and harsh. It was also genuine. He did not plead his constitutional constraints. He did not urge good-faith negotiation with Parliament. He was not a tyrant, but he wrote back as if he were. And that was all the “patriots” needed from him. There would be little to stand in the way of pulling his statues down.
How did anyone find out about any of this?
First, the documents had to cross the Atlantic on a ship. It would likely not be the fastest available, because those were smaller and more vulnerable to the worst of the ocean, so not as suited for a transatlantic as they would be for, say, running dispatches from Boston to Halifax. For most of the year, sailing west from England was the “wrong way,” given winds and currents. It could easily take two months. It could, in better circumstances, take five or six weeks.
Meanwhile, articles would appear in the newspapers, most speculative, some based at least in part on inside information—letters from correspondents, which had managed to beat the official dispatches. Word-of-mouth was fast and effective—in spreading news, if not in spreading accurate news. We rightly bemoan the scourge of misinformation in our society right now. They had it too—plenty of it. It just worked in different media.
Once the documents arrived, they would be dispatched as quickly as possible to the Continental Congress. Once they had them, they had the power to decide what to do with them. They had the King’s response printed, published in the newspapers, and thus ensured it would be the hot topic of conversation in the pubs and meeting houses up and down the Seaboard—and in the colonial assemblies.
Editorials would have appeared in all the newspapers, along with letters to the editor, carefully-composed and usually submitted under pseudonyms, frequently because their authors were well-known political and/or business figures in their communities. These letters were a more important feature of newspapers then than later, though it would seem that some version of them—curated comments—have lately risen in prominence in the online printed media.
Newspapers, not to mention letter-writers, had opinions and biases. One would need to read more than one to approach a comprehensive understanding of attitudes toward the issue in a given city (or town, as we would think of what are now our big coastal cities). Whoever could best-control “the messaging,” as we might say, could sway public opinion far enough in that side’s direction to give that side more power than it had before—at the expense of the other.
When Jefferson and his editors wrote the Declaration of Independence, they took advantage of the King-as-symbol by pinning their grievances on him, and this no doubt contributed the bulk of the perception passed down ever since that the “radicals” were rebelling literally, rather than figuratively, against the King.
Today (literally), I’m reading op-eds that mention how on this day in 1776 we rebelled against a King; the context is the strenuous objection to this week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that attempted to clarify the issue of Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. Opponents of that ruling claim that it paves the way for a new King at the same time we’re supposed to be celebrating emancipation from an old one.
This is a history series; it’s worth pointing out what I’ve pointed out about the power that the King did and did not have. A twenty-first century dictator would have powers no eighteenth-century King could imagine—let alone a constitutional monarch like George III. I get the symmetrical symbolism, which always appeals to us writers. But in 1776 those who were running the independence push were rebelling against rule by the Westminster Parliament without representation—representation of them, and their interests. They were rebelling against being governed by a government that, in their view, was not interested in their interests, did not reflect their interests, and was in no way obligated to be responsive to their interests. Their way ahead would be hard and bloody, but there was really not much George III could do, himself, to stop them. Britain’s rivals—every other imperial European power—saw a chance to take the dominant naval power down a notch—a chance provided by the tenacious American rebels—and they took it. Britain, and the sizable contingent of Americans loyal to the King, couldn’t fight everybody—not indefinitely. The war grew long, more and more costly, and was more and more seen as pointless—which made it increasingly unpopular. Sound familiar?
So, a confederation of colonies supported by great powers (for their own interests) made it difficult enough for the British that they decided to end the war after six years. They then seriously tightened their grip on their remaining colonies.
Meanwhile, the newly-independent former colonies set about trying to craft a form of government around a written document (something the British had never done, even taking into account Magna Carta, because it had centuries of precedent to obviate the necessity of it). The second one of those documents is the one we by which we have been governed since 1789. Britain’s King, on the other hand, is bound by an unwritten constitution consisting of precedent and convention. In writing, he has sweeping powers. In fact, he has almost none.
Our written Constitution is remarkable for its longevity and its continued relevance (and also, unfortunately, for its present fetishizing). It has not, of course, kept us from massive upheavals and thorny questions of law and governance. But it has, except for once, kept us from descending into fractious violent chaos. And even then, the U.S. government survived, persisted, and fought a terrible war to a successful conclusion.
But the precedents and conventions that constrained the non-tyrant George III, and constrain Charles III, are more important to our system than the written Constitution we have might lead us to believe. We are learning, the hard way, that there is no infallible authority that will inevitably correct us, that will inevitably protect us, that is so powerful that we can count on it to subvert the desires of those who want to wield power in novel ways. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was not happy about observing that the Court never before had occasion to consider the matter then before it. But when powerful people care not for precedent and convention, but instead see how far they can get by violating them, they expose the weaknesses of our laws—or, put another way, they expose the importance of precedent and convention. This applies to any stable, reasonable form of government. Some shared sense of convention, some common set of values and beliefs, must exist to hold that body politic together. If not, then no King—or tyrant—has the power to stop its disintegration.