By God... I will see you righted!

George III (George William Frederick) (June 4, 1738 – January 29, 1820) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 25 October 1760 until the union of the two countries on 1 January 1801, after which he was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death. He was concurrently Duke and prince-elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg ("Hanover") in the Holy Roman Empire until his promotion to King of Hanover on 12 October 1814.

Quotes

  • Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Britain.
    • Speech to Parliament (18 November 1760), quoted in P. D. G. Thomas, George III: King and Politicians, 1760–1770 (Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 33
  • By God, Harrison, I will see you righted!
    • Said ca. 1772, speaking to John Harrison's son William. Quoted in Dava Sobel, "Longitude" (1995, Fourth Estate Limited. London. Printed 1998. ISBN 1-85702-571-7), p. 147
  • Once vigorous measures appear to be the only means left of bringing the Americans to a due submission to the mother country, the colonies will submit.
    • From George III's letter of February 15, 1775 to Lord North, quoted in the Edinburgh Review (July 1867) from the originals at Windsor.[1]
  • When the unhappy and deluded multitude, against whom this force will be directed, shall become sensible of their error, I shall be ready to receive the misled with tenderness and mercy!
  • I was the last to consent to the separation; but the separation having been made and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.
    • To John Adams, as quoted in Adams, C.F. (editor) (1850–56), The works of John Adams, second president of the United States, vol. VIII, pp. 255–257, quoted in Ayling, p. 323 and Hibbert, p. 165.


Misattributed

  • Nothing important happened today.
    • It is widely believed that George III wrote this in his diary on July 4, 1776, the day the American Revolution began. In fact, this was made up by the scriptwriters of the series The X Files, as George III did not write a diary.

Quotes about George III

  • The temper of the new ruler was adverse. George III had very clear ideas of what he wanted and where he was going. He meant to be King, such a King as all his countrymen would follow and revere. Under the long Whig regime the House of Commons had become an irresponsible autocracy. Would not the liberties of the country be safer in the hands of a monarch, young, honourable, virtuous, and appearing thoroughly English, than a faction governing the land through a packed and corrupt House of Commons? Let him make an end of government by families, choose his own ministers and stand by them, and end once and for all the corruption of political life. But in such a monarchy what was the place for a man like Pitt, who owed nothing to corruption, nothing to the Crown, and everything to the people and to his personal domination of the House of Commons? So long as he was in power he would divide the kingdom with Caesar. He could not help it. His profound reverence for the person and office of George III could not conceal from either of them the fact that Pitt was a very great man and the King a very limited man.
    • Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume Three: The Age of Revolution, "The First World War", p. 158-159
  • The personality of George III was now exercising a preponderant influence upon events. He was one of the most conscientious sovereigns who ever sat upon the English throne. Simple in his tastes and unpretentious in manner, he had the superficial appearance of a typical yeoman. But his mind was Hanoverian, with an infinite capacity for mastering main principles. He possessed great moral courage and an inveterate obstinacy, and his stubbornness lent weight to the stiffening attitude of his Government. His responsibility for the final breach is a high one.
    • Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume Three: The Age of Revolution (1957), "The Quarrel With America", p. 172
  • Not all the Opposition Members were so foolish or extreme, but in the King's mind all were traitors. George III grew stubborn and even more intent. He closed his ears to moderate counsel and refused to admit into his Government those men of both parties who, like many American Loyalists, foresaw and condemned the disasters into which his policy was tottering and were horrified at the civil war between the Mother Country and her colonies. Even Lord North was half-hearted, and only his loyalty to the King and his sincere old-fashioned belief, shared by many politicians of the day, that a Minister's duty was to carry out the personal wishes of the sovereign stopped him from resigning much sooner than he did. Though technically responsible as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had no grip on the conduct of affairs and allowed the King and the departmental Ministers to control the day-to-day work of government. George III tirelessly struggled to superintend the details of the war organisation, but he was incapable of co-ordinating the activities of his Ministers. These were of poor quality. The Admiralty was headed by Wilke's comrade in debauch, the Earl of Sandwich. His reputation has been mauled, but recent research has shown that at least the Fleet was in much better condition than the Army. Rarely has British strategy fallen into such a multitude of errors. Every maxim and principle of war was either violated or disregarded.
    • Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume Three: The Age of Revolution (1957), "The Quarrel With America", p. 193
  • The United States, for example, has never had a President as bad as George III, but neither has Britain had a king as admirable as George Washington (of whom William Thackeray rightly said that 'his glory will descend to remotest ages' while the memory of the sovereign went the other way). However, George was not too bad.Still, even to concede this obvious argument is to make it plain that a bad monarch is at least as likely as a bad president even given the caprice of random selection by the hereditary principle... We find that the presidency has become too secretive, too powerful, too trammelled, too ceremonial, too impotent or too complicated, depending on the president under discussion or the critic making the analysis. On one thing all are agreed - there is a danger of an 'imperial' or 'monarchical' presidency. An incumbent in Washington knows he is in trouble on the day that cartoonists begin to represent him as a king.
  • For the most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no conceivable reason at all, his majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the infranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. Yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty's negative: thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature deeply wounded by this infamous practice.
  • he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers; is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
    • Thomas Jefferson, Known as the "anti-slavery clause", this section drafted by Thomas Jefferson was removed from the Declaration at the behest of representatives of South Carolina.
  • We I hope shall be left free to avail ourselves of the advantages of neutrality: and yet much I fear the English, or rather their stupid king, will force us out of it. (...) Common sense dictates therefore that they should let us remain neuter: ergo they will not let us remain neuter. I never yet found any other general rule for foretelling what they will do, but that of examining what they ought not to do.
  • The British populace at home was not united behind the war because some people doubted its wisdom and justness. One result of the antiwar sentiment was difficulty in recruiting troops, a difficulty aggravated by George III's reluctance to incur the huge expenses necessary to expand the army. To fill the ranks, England hired German soldiers, collectively known as Hessians, and sent almost 30,000 of them to America. But Hessians alone were insufficient, and England also enlisted slaves, mobilized Indians, and depended on Loyalist soldiers. England still suffered manpower shortages, and these expedients were also partially counterproductive. Hiring mercenaries, using slaves, inciting "savages" and fomenting a civil war within a civil war heightened colonial disaffection.
    • Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski, and William B. Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States From 1607 to 2012 (2012), p. 49
  • The majority of men who took up arms during the "popular uprising" phase of the war in 1775-1776 were not fighting for independence, but for their rights as Englishmen within the Empire. Although a growing number believed independence inevitable, most maintained allegiance to George III, who, they assumed, was being misled by corrupt ministers conspiring to enslave the colonies. Congress insisted that the colonies were only protecting themselves form these conspirators, that reconciliation would occur as soon as the King restrained his advisers.
    • Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski, and William B. Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States From 1607 to 2012 (2012), p. 58
  • His Majesty's character, then, after all the pains which have been taken to make him odious as well as contemptible remains unimpeached; and therefore cannot be in any degree the cause of the present commotions. His whole conduct both in public and private ever since he began his reign, the uniform tenor of his behaviour, the general course both of his words and actions, has been worthy of an Englishman, worthy of a Christian, and worthy of a King.
    • John Wesley, Letter to a Friend, on ‘The Present State of Public Affairs’ (December 1768), quoted in John Telford (ed.), The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M. Vol. V: February 28, 1766, to December 9, 1772 (Epworth Press, 1960), p. 376
  1. ↑ The Edinburgh Review volumes 126–126. Google Books. Retrieved on February 13, 2020.
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