King George III

Born in 1738 England—the first of five Hanoverian British monarchs to be born on English soil—George the 3rd was crowned king of Great Britain in 1760, upon the death of his grandfather, King George the 2nd. Ascending to the thrown at just 22 years of age, a year later, he met for the first time and married on the same day Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, in a political yet loving union that bore the couple 15 children.

War Debts Lead to Colonial Taxation

After working tirelessly to bring an expedited end to The Seven Years’ War, in 1764, in an effort to pay down war debts caused by Britain’s latest conflict with the French, prime minister George Grenville introduced the Stamp Act upon Britain’s colonial subjects in North America, igniting rising discontent in the 13 colonies over the issue of taxation without representation in Parliament. Nearly a decade later, Prime Minister Frederick North—with King George’s firm backing—imposed the Tea Act on the colonies, which led to the Boston Tea Party on December 16th,1773, followed by the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19th, 1775, which marked the opening hostilities of the American Revolutionary War.

An Inflexible Tyrant

Perceived as an inflexible tyrant by American colonials, in truth, British Parliament, not the crown, was ultimately responsible for colonial policies, although King George clearly had direct and indirect means of influence over Parliament’s governance of its American subjects. Upon Britain’s defeat at the Battle of Yorktown, a disbelieving King George went so far as to draft his abdication speech, before deferring to Parliament’s peace negotiations with its former colonies, resulting in the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which formerly recognized the United States as a sovereign nation, at the same time ceding Florida to Spain.

Striken by Insanity

As war with the colonies raged on, in 1778, King George spiraled into a months-long bout of violent insanity, where doctors restrained him in a straightjacket and forced the king to undergo an assortment of treatments, until he recovered the following year as a renewed symbol of English stability during the Napoleonic Wars. He lapsed into a second round of insanity in 1804, recovering yet again until he slipped into his final and prolonged madness in 1810, passing away a decade later, both deaf, blind and mad.

Poisoned by Arsenic

While historians at first attributed his madness to an inherited metabolic disorder known as porphyria, a 2005 analysis of King George’s surviving hair samples pointed to arsenic poisoning, which was commonly used in medicines and cosmetics of the day, making the life and madness of King George the 3rd, a trying time for the British crown.