The American Revolution: A History Read Online Free PDF Page A

But he was stubbornly determined to rule personally, in a manner distinctly different from that of the Hanoverians George I and George II, his German-born great-grandfather and grandfather. With the disastrous failure of the Stuart heir, “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” to reclaim the English throne in 1745–46, George, who was the first of the Hanoverian kings to be British-born, was much more confident of his hold on the throne than his Hanoverian predecessors had been. Hence he felt freer to ignore the advice of the Whig ministers, who had guided the first two Georges, and to become his own ruler. Influenced by his inept Scottish tutor and “dearest friend,” Lord Bute, he aimed to purify English public life of its corruption and factionalism. He wanted to replace former Whig-Tory squabbling and party intrigue with duty to crown and country. These were the best of intentions, but the results of them were the greatest and most bewildering fluctuations in English politics in a half century—all at the very moment the long-postponed reforms of the empire were to take place.
    Historians no longer depict George III as a tyrant seeking to undermine the English constitution by choosing his ministers against Parliament’s wishes. But there can be little doubt that men of the time felt that George III, whether he meant to or not, was violating the political conventions of the day. When he chose Lord Bute, his Scottish favorite, who had little strength in Parliament, to head his government, thereby excluding such Whig ministers as William Pitt and the Duke of Newcastle, who did have political support in Parliament, the new king may not have been acting unconstitutionally, but he certainly was violating customary political realities. Bute’s retirement in 1763 did little to ease the opposition’s fears that the king was seeking the advice of Tory favorites “behind the curtain” and was attempting to impose decisions on the leading political groups in Parliament rather than governing through them. By diligently attempting to shoulder what he thought was his constitutional responsibility for governing in his own stubborn, peculiar way, George III helped to increase the political confusion of the 1760s.
    A decade of short-lived ministries in the 1760s contrasted sharply with the stable and long-lasting Whig governments of the previous generation. It almost seemed as if the stubborn king trusted no one who had Parliament’s support. After Pitt and Newcastle had been dismissed, and after Bute had faded, the king in 1763 turned to George Grenville, Bute’s protégé, only because he found no one else acceptable to be his chief minister. Although Grenville was responsible for the first wave of colonial reforms, his resignation in 1765 resulted from a personal quarrel with the king and had nothing to do with colonial policy. Next, a government was formed by Whigs who were connected with the Marquess of Rockingham and for whom the great orator and political thinker Edmund Burke was a spokesman; but this Whig coalition never had the king’s confidence, and it lasted scarcely a year. In 1766, George at last called on the aging Pitt, now Lord Chatham, to head the government. But Chatham’s illness (gout in the head, critics said) and the bewildering parliamentary factionalism of the late 1760s turned his ministry into such a hodgepodge that Chatham scarcely ruled at all.
    By 1767 no one seemed to be in charge. Ministers shuffled in and out of offices, exchanging positions and following their own inclinations even against their colleagues’ wishes. Amid this confusion only Charles Townshend, chancellor of the exchequer, gave any direction to colonial policy, and he died in 1767. Not until the appointment of Lord North as prime minister in 1770 did George find a politician whom he trusted and who also had Parliament’s support.
    Outside of Parliament, the huge portion of the British nation that was excluded from active participation in