Before he died aged 44 (probably of a pulmonary embolism, poor chap), Frederick, Prince of Wales, compiled a list of precepts for his son, the future George III. ‘Employ all your hands, all your power, to live with economy,’ was one. ‘If you can be without war, let not your ambition draw you into it,’ was another.
The result of such sensible parentage is that today, about the only things we know about our third-longest-reigning monarch are that his nickname was ‘Farmer George’, that he lost America, and that he went bonkers, providing a lucrative franchise for the significantly more famous playwright Alan Bennett.
This — as Robert Hardman’s charming, moving and sensitive portrait Genius of the Mad King (BBC1, Monday) made clear — does him a great injustice. Apart from being a loving and, by Hanoverian standards, involved dad to his 15 children, he kept impressively up to date with all the advances in science and agriculture, was a patron of the arts and of exploration, popularised bathing and the seaside holiday, mingled with his people (barking pleasantries at them with his trademark ‘What what what?’) and, after a 59-year reign, left his country peaceful and prosperous.
‘It had been an age of bloodshed and revolution but not in George III’s Britain,’ concluded Hardman, while another historian noted: ‘His contemporaries — Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, these are revolutionary and damaging figures.
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