Told by his tutor, and later prime minister, Lord Bute, that marrying a subject was just not possible, George accepted Bute’s advice. It is a measure of how seriously King George III took his job that even before he came to the throne, when the 21-year-old fell in love with Lady Sarah Lennox, the exquisitely beautiful daughter of the Duke of Richmond, he gave her up. In fact, he was constitutionally scrupulous to a fault and, unlike most monarchs of his age, lived according to the principle that duty always comes first. But as Andrew Roberts shows in his magisterial new book, The Last King of America, George III was certainly no tyrant. He did indeed go mad, more than once in fact. Most Americans know only two things about King George III: that he was the British tyrant Thomas Jefferson denounced in the Declaration of Independence and that he went mad.
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