The real George III

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. They destroy things. Napoleon destroys everything. George III makes everything secure and safe.’

Robert Hardman inside the Royal Archives with George III’s private papers

God, I would have found him dull to study at school. Yet would Britain have become half so great, in the ensuing century or so,without this genial cove who ran the country like a benign chief executive? An obsessive letter writer and micro-manager, he’d dash off screeds at all hours of the day (timed to the minute, so as to guarantee a prompt response), advising on everything from the sum required to buy off his dreadful eldest son’s latest unsuitable mistress (£5,000 — about £750,000 in today’s money) to the way Captain Cook should behave on his travels (‘treat any locals you find with respect’, ‘make presents of such trinkets as you may have on board’).