- Historic Sites Our Last King Cursed by ancestry,bedeviled by
his posterity, beset by forces he could not grasp, George III is
usually remembered as the ogre of Jefferson’s Declaration. An
eminent English historian reassesses that strange and pathetic
personality June 1960 | Volume 11, Issue 4 The first twenty
years of George III’s reign were a public and a personal
failure. He had done his duty conscientiously. He had tried,
according to his lights, to put the government in the hands of
tried and able men. The ills which assailed his country, he
sincerely believed, were not of his making. Scarcely a man
pitied him; the majority thought he had only himself to blame
when disaster came. Yorktown ended his hopes that the tide might
turn, and finished North. During the long years of British
defeat, the Old Corps of Whigs, now led by the Marquis of
Rockingham, had developed a new view of the role of kingship;
and their great publicist and philosopher, Edmund Burke, had
persuasively pleaded for a new attitude to p