George III

Fülszöveg

To most Americans George III is the capricious King who levied unfair and burdensome taxes on hard-working colonists in a futile attempt to control an increasingly independent-minded colonial population. He is also seen as the Tyrant King who tried to frustrate the independence aspirations of a ragtag group of citizen-soldiers with his professional, experienced fighting force of Redcoats and German mercenaries during the Revolutionary War. More recently, in plays and movies, we have caught glimpses of the supposed Mad King George, confused and addled, running and shouting through palace halls in his nightshirt. Do any one of these schoolbook and popular culture images accurately depict King George III? Taken together do they form a rounded, complete portrait?
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In this new biography of the greatly misunderstood and misrepresented King, Christopher Hibbert answers both questions with a resounding "No!" The author offers us the most detailed, complex appraisal... Tovább

Fülszöveg

To most Americans George III is the capricious King who levied unfair and burdensome taxes on hard-working colonists in a futile attempt to control an increasingly independent-minded colonial population. He is also seen as the Tyrant King who tried to frustrate the independence aspirations of a ragtag group of citizen-soldiers with his professional, experienced fighting force of Redcoats and German mercenaries during the Revolutionary War. More recently, in plays and movies, we have caught glimpses of the supposed Mad King George, confused and addled, running and shouting through palace halls in his nightshirt. Do any one of these schoolbook and popular culture images accurately depict King George III? Taken together do they form a rounded, complete portrait?
• ¦ j! i ' ! ! ¦ ¦ I
In this new biography of the greatly misunderstood and misrepresented King, Christopher Hibbert answers both questions with a resounding "No!" The author offers us the most detailed, complex appraisal of George's character and actions. Hibbert reveals the surprising image of a King on his hands and knees, crawling under tables, playing affectionately with his fifteen children. He describes the tender love, fidelity, and genuine friendship that existed, in sickness and in health, between the King and Queen. Far from the absurd, bumbling "Farmer George" he became in the English popular imagination, Hibbert details the King's active involvement in all matters of state, trivial and important, and his inexhaustible intellectual curiosity which encompassed music, literature, art, equestrianism, agriculture, astronomy, architecture, and mechanics. More an aristocratic populist than a tyrant, George earnestly believed in the constitutional right and duty of the mother country to impose taxes on colonists to defray the costs of their own protection. Four years after the British surrender at Yorktown,
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the "tyrant" George greeted John Adams with the words "I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power." George's perceived eccentricities and caprice, his unpredictable volatility, are now partially explained by a rare hereditary disorder from which he suffered, and which led him, his loved ones, and his country on a harrovdng downward journey into what seemed like madness.
Teeming vnth court machinations, sexual intrigues, and familial conflicts, and peopled by such luminaries as Bach, Dr. Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Handel, Henry Fielding, Alexander Pope, Mozart, and the American Founding Fathers, George III opens a window on the tumultuous, rambunctious, revolutionary 18th century while stripping away the accrued layers of public pomp and popular misconceptions that have come to obscure King George. Hibbert's biography, both rollicking and scholarly, is sure to alter our understanding of this fascinating, complex, and very human King who so strongly shaped our own destiny.
Christopher Hibbert was born in 1924 and educated at Radley and Oriel College, Oxford. Described in the New Statesman as a "pearl of biographers," he is, in the words of The Times Educational Supplement, "perhaps the most gifted popular historian we have." His much-acclaimed books include The Destruction of Lord Raglan (which won the Heinemann Award for Literature in 1962); Garibaldi and His Enemies; The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall; The English: A Social History, 1066-1945; The Grand Tour; Redcoats and Rebels: The American Revolution Through British Eyes; The Dragon Wakes: China and the West, 1793-1911; The Great Mutiny, India 1857) lives of Samuel Johnson, Nelson and Wellington; and "biographies" of the cities London, Rome, Venice, and Florence.
Christopher Hibbert is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Hon. D. Litt. of Leicester University. He is married with two sons and a daughter, and lives in Henley-on-Thames.
JACKET DESIGN BY DAVID J. HIGH JACKET IMAGE OF KING GEORGE III C.1760 COURTESY OF THE GRANGER COLLECTION

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