Revolutionary War

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: When he was a child, the parents of King George III doted on George’s brother, Edward. This experience created a shy, insecure prince with a rather inflexible personality who had little respect for the opinions of others when they disagreed with his own. His tutor and guide after the age of 17 was John Stuart, Earl of Bute, advisor to George’s mother. Bute suffered the same personal rigidity and reinforced the future king’s already deficient understanding of how people operate, too often getting personal strength confused with intransigence or stubbornness.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: In August 1765, at the height of the Stamp Act crisis, the citizens of Boston waked to a revolting, but all-too-familiar spectacle. Hanging in effigy was Andrew Oliver, appointed by the Crown to collect the hated Stamp Tax. Hanging beside his effigial corpse was a boot out of which was crawling a representation of the devil. This boot was a play on the name of and represented John Stuart, Scottish Earl of Bute, seen as an evil enemy of colonial rights and liberties, in large measure because of what the patriots considered his perverse influence over the young King George.

Content: He was the first monarch of his kin to be born in England – Norfolk House, London in 1738 – and the first Hanoverian monarch to speak English. The prince who would become King George III was raised in obscurity by parents who clearly doted on his brother Edward. When he managed to get a word in edge-wise during family conversations he was too often admonished, “Do hold your tongue, George: don’t talk like a fool.” Therefore, the young man who would grow up to command and lose an empire developed into a quiet, shy, modest introvert who loved the British Constitution but only too slowly grew effectively to learn his role as a sovereign in a time of growing crisis.