Backstage after a performance of Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III, Princess Margaret asked Nigel Hawthorne, who played the lead, what caused her ancestor’s sad derangement. The Queen’s sister, not usually taciturn, received in silence the reply: “It is hereditary, Ma’am.” The common diagnosis of porphyria has more recently been disputed by a study of the Royal College of Surgeons, which attributes the king’s alleged madness to a bipolar disorder and dementia due to the neurotoxicity of recurring mania.
Howbeit, the king who reigned for six decades, and who was anything but the tyrant the Declaration of Independence portrayed him to be, is known less for his majesty and more for his madness, even to the absurd extent of the ridiculous caricature in the musical Hamilton. Jeremy Black, the astonishingly prolific author of a lengthy biography of “America’s Last King,” corrects many misperceptions in this small volume, a worthy part of the Penguin Monarchs series, which Black rightly calls “superb.”
From an American perspective, it is worth remembering that the king told his Philadelphia court painter, Benjamin West, at the end of the Revolution, that if Washington returned to his farm rather than taking a crown, he would be “the greatest man in the world.” (The king had first contradicted his advisors in wanting to keep fighting after Yorktown.) Nonetheless, Washington desired to be something like the “Patriot King” that the Hanoverian king really was, although at times this was compromised, as