King George III(1738–1820)

George William Frederick was born at Norfolk House in St James's Square, London, on the fourth of June 1738, eldest son of Frederick, Prince of Wales (the son of George II), and Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. He was the first Hanoverian monarch to be born in Britain and the first to speak English as his native language (his great-grandfather George I had never learned the language; his grandfather George II spoke it with a strong Hanoverian accent). He was educated at home by his tutors Lord Bute and Bishop Hayter on the broad eighteenth-century syllabus of mathematics, philosophy, history, French, Latin and the practical arts of agriculture, astronomy and architecture, the unusually wide intellectual formation that became the foundation of his later patronage of science, music and the arts.

He succeeded to the throne on the twenty-fifth of October 1760 in his twenty-third year on the death of his grandfather George II, was crowned at Westminster Abbey on the twenty-second of September 1761, and four days before the coronation married Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, with whom he produced fifteen children across the next twenty-three years. The marriage was one of the closest royal marriages of the period and remained without scandal across the next fifty-seven years. The royal household at Kew, at Windsor and at Buckingham House (the foundation of the present Buckingham Palace, bought by him in 1761) became the model of the bourgeois-domestic constitutional monarchy that his Victorian great-granddaughter would crystallise into permanence.

His sixty-year reign saw the rise of Britain from a leading European power to the largest empire in human history. Across the period the constitutional sovereignty of Parliament was consolidated through the long Pitt the Younger ministries (1783 to 1801 and 1804 to 1806), the foundation of the modern cabinet system was settled, the Royal Navy reached its early-nineteenth-century supremacy at Trafalgar (1805), the Wellington army defeated Napoleon at Waterloo (1815), and the Act of Union with Ireland (1801) consolidated the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the form it took for the next century. He was the founder-patron of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 (which he funded out of the civil list at Somerset House), the founder of the King's Library that became the foundation of the British Museum's printed-book collection (donated by his son George IV in 1823, the largest single book gift in British history), and the patron of William Herschel's Royal Astronomical Observatory at Slough.

He was the central public-life sovereign of his age. The 1762 acquisition of Buckingham House for the royal household, the 1768 foundation of the Royal Academy, the 1801 Act of Union and the 1809 Golden Jubilee (the first Jubilee of an English monarch) all sit on his account. He spent the last decade of his reign in retirement at Windsor under the Regency of his eldest son George (the future George IV), the Regency Period in which the high cultural moment of late-Georgian Britain (Jane Austen, Lord Byron, the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, the architectural reshaping of London by John Nash) ran its course. He died at Windsor Castle on the twenty-ninth of January 1820 in his eighty-second year and was buried at St George's Chapel. The Hanoverian name in modern British constitutional history carries the weight of his sixty years on the throne.