What
Americans learn about England's King George III are the big themes: his
mental and physical illnesses, his struggles with Napoleon, and most of
all, how he lost the American colonies. But George III was also a
hard-working monarch who had 15 children and left a library of 350,000
pages of writings over his 60-year reign, most of which never saw the
light of day until recently. In April of 2015, Queen Elizabeth granted
scholars access to study the archive. Jim Ambuske of the University of
Virginia School of Law Library was one of them.
“Coming
out of the perspective of studying the Revolution, you have a sense of
the George whose statues are pulled down in New York and whose
proclamations are read. I guess I thought of him as a political figure,
never as someone you might relate to on more than a regal level,”
Ambuske says. Reading the king’s lengthy letters to his sons marked a
turning point in his research. “He was also a guy who was capable of a
great deal of empathy. He was very concerned, as any parent would be,
about the well-being of his children and their education,” says Ambuske.
“He was well aware that he was raising potential future sovereigns, but
he also wanted them to be good people.”
As Atkinson traced how
the American Revolution’s battles played out, he began to see George III
as a man who was both “very much a domestic fellow,” and a ruler who
was “the driving force behind the hard line that the British had taken”
in the war. “What comes across to me, looking at him via the papers,”
Atkinson says, “is someone who is puzzling through an extraordinarily
complex problem for which he does not really have a vocabulary.”
You'll
soon be able to read those documents yourself. The Georgian Papers
Program is digitizing George III's writings, from official documents
to family letters, for a website to be launched in January of 2017.
You can bookmark it here. Read about the program and
what scholars have to say about the king at Smithsonian.
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