George III has a bad reputation in the United States, because he is thought of as the king who caused the War of Independence. Were this true (which it isn’t), then he could be said to have earned America’s gratitude: if without him there would have been no war, there would also have been no United States (or they would at least have been postponed). By the same token I always feel Judas deserves some sort of slap on the back, because without him Christianity would never have got off the ground.

By 1788, as Pitt says in one version of the stage play, ‘America is over,’ meaning not merely the war but the relevance of America as a factor in English politics. In the shake-up of parliamentary allegiances brought about by the war, Pitt had sided with Fox against the King and Lord North. This so rankled with George III that he would not leave the subject alone, to the extent that when at the King’s request Pitt formed a ministry in 1784 he made it a condition the King would not mention America. So when at the outset of his illness the King starts to ‘harp on about America’, it is a sign that the royal self-control is beginning to break down.

Fox was temperamentally drawn to the colonists, Pitt less so, but neither was in sympathy with the King’s view that the colonies were an inalienable estate and part of his royal patrimony. The King’s attitude has echoes today, with the monarch much more wedded to the idea of the Commonwealth than is the Prime Minister; it was one of the points of difference between the Queen and Mrs Thatcher, who probably found Her Majesty every bit as intractable on the subject as Pitt did George III. In the language of the higher Civil Service, George III was ‘a bit of a loose cannon’; one never knew what he would be up to (and into) next. At the end of the eighteenth century the monarch was, of course, less circumscribed than today, and constitutional practice still permitted the Crown a good deal of freedom, and it wasn’t a freedom George III was prepared to share.

KING  When people in Parliament oppose, go against my wishes, I still find it very vexing. Try as I can, it seems to me disloyalty.

PITT  Your Majesty should not take it so personally.

KING  Not take it personally? But I’m King. This is my government. How else should I take it but personally?

PITT  The Whigs believe it is their duty to oppose you, sir.

KING  Duty? Duty? What sort of duty is that?