School of War - Ep. 3: Andrew Roberts on King George III

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

Biography Andrew Roberts is a professor, author, and military historian. He's written or edited nearly 20 books, including biographies of Sir Winston Churchill and Napoleon, as well as his latest title, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. Roberts is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the War Studies Department at King’s College, London. Times 03:02- Introduction 04:05 - Why King George? 06:20 - How Britain wages war 13:39 - Party and class politics 15:44 - Britain's military strategy during the Revolutionary War 19:10 - Comparisons between the Revolution and World War II 20:30 - Fabian strategy in the Revolution 23:15 - George III's role in the War 25:52 - Forming new regiments 28:01 - What the British learn from their defeat 31:32 - Modern American portrayals of King George III 33:23 - Critiquing King George III's leadership and performance Recorded September 17, 2021

It's fair to say that the American Revolution did not turn out the way that King George III had hoped. Lampooned in popular culture today. Just check out the musical Hamilton or the movie The Madness of King George to see what I mean. And despised by the American Revolutionaries and leaders of the early republic, there's no denying that George was unsuccessful in holding his empire together. But when the fighting started in 1775, this outcome was not what the world expected. Indeed, there was a critical window between Lexington and Concord on the one hand and the entry of the French and Spanish into the war a few years later,

when the British had the upper hand. How did they squander it? What role did George play in the failure of his generals and ministers? Was he really a madman and a tyrant? My guest, the biographer and historian Andrew Roberts, doesn't think so. In the spirit of transatlantic unity, we'll hear him out. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in.

infamate. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. And the people who knock these buildings down. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. I'm Aaron McLean, the host of School of War. On this podcast, we talk about strategy and military history, diplomatic history, and ask ourselves, What can we learn from the words and deeds of significant battlefield commanders and statesmen and others that's relevant to policymakers and engaged citizens today? Have we forgotten things that are important? Is our forgetfulness putting us at risk?

To help us with this, today I am delighted to welcome Andrew Roberts. Andrew, thank you for joining us. Andrew, for those in the audience who don't know, which won't be that many of you, is a phenomenally talented and prolific writer, the author most recently of a new biography of George III, which we'll get to in just a moment. But of many books before that as well, focusing on questions of military history. The first book I read of yours was actually a magnificent first, but one volume history of the Second World War, the Storm of War, which came out, gosh, about 10 years ago. And if you can really only read one, one volume about the war, I think I would recommend that

one. You've written a marvelous biography of Churchill, recently a biography of Napoleon, which I have not read, but I intend to. And now we're on to George III. It's in some ways to an American audience, and I may give you a hard time about this, a bit of a shocking book. You are a relentless advocate for the reputation of King George, and we can talk about that. But before we get to the, to the subject at hand, you know, I like to ask guests on the show to tell us a bit about themselves. You know, how you grew up, where you're from, how did you become a writer, a scholar, or a military historian and biographer.

Give us some sense of how you got into this whole business. Thank you very much indeed, Aaron, for that, very generous and, if anything, rather over the top. A commendation of my works. I appreciate every word of it. I'm not going to believe necessarily every word of it. It's a great honor to be on the show. So thanks again. How did I become a military historian?

Really, I read history at Cambridge University, and I had some very good teachers. there, Norman Stone, Professor Norman Stone, who's written lots of great books on strategy, was one of them. And then I left Cambridge and went into the city of London and discovered fairly soon that I was enumerate, really, to all intents and purposes, functionally enumerate anyhow. And so I chucked it and started to write history books. It was the best decision I ever made. I really so pleased. I've never spent a minute regretting having taken that decision. Marvelous. And so why George III? How did you come to this project? Well, I've written books about Napoleon and Wellington and the Battle of Waterloo.

So I've long been interested in the King of England at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. But really, as all you Americans will know, his true claim to fame is that his so-called obstinacy lost the colonies and that he ruled as well as reigned, and he had an authoritarian side that's lampooned so brilliantly in Hamilton the Musical, and that he went mad with Porphyria, none of which I believe, I think that that's all rot. And I think that the papers, the Her Majesty the Queen, has allowed since 2015, over 100,000,000 pages, of George III's papers to become available. And these show quite what a enlightened figure he was, or a cultured man who was,

and how he had absolutely no plans to try and tyrannize your country whatsoever. So, yes, he's a very interesting, and in my view, completely misunderstood and underestimated person. Yeah, the book is called The Last King of America, the Misunderstood reign of George III. you know, and I have to say reading through it, the relentlessness of your advocacy for George reminded me a bit of Churchill in Marlborough and his relentless advocacy for his much maligned ancestor, John Churchill.

You can acquaint me to Winston Churchill as much as you might have. It was a complicated compliment if you think about it, but there you go. So let's set the stage a bit to get into the subject matter of the book and talk about the American Revolution generally, but what I'm really interested in is, of course, George's role in it. And before we get to him personally, talk to us a bit about, if you like, the British Constitution and the way in which this country, Great Britain, waged war at the end of the 18th century. King George, obviously, you know, at the top of the structure, but not in charge in a direct or absolute way. You have a parliament, you have a cabinet. Looking back on the whole thing from a

21st century perspective, it all seems a bit jumbled and complicated, kind of kind of help us understand how the British nation wages war. Yes. Well, it waged war quite successfully in 1756 to 63 in the seven years war, which obviously started in America, but a good deed of it was fought all around the world. And then suddenly, a few years later, 12 years later, it wages war incredibly badly and stupidly and ultimately, of course, unsuccessfully. Partly this is due to the fact that in the Seven Years War, what you call French and Indian War, we had William Pitt the Elder as the driving force. And in the American War of Independence, there was nobody like that. Lord North didn't consider himself to be a war minister.

Lord George Sackville, known at that stage as Lord George German, was hated by at least half the cabinet. certainly he didn't get on with the First Law of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich. We took our leaders from an incredibly small social circle. They were pretty much all at school or university with one another, that school being eaten. And it was really a series of extremely difficult logistical problems, needless to say, trying to arm and clothe and feed and reinforce an army 3,000-plus.

miles away, on top of your extremely successful and brilliant and, you know, wonderful generals. The leadership of George Washington was something that was sublime. And frankly, we had absolutely nothing in terms of our generals that could equate to it. So I think that although the American Revolution took on what was the largest empire in the world, of course, Nonetheless, that does slightly hide the fact that that empire had enormous logistical and other problems. And also, as you were hinting, I think, organizational problems in the way that the ministries all seem to fall out with one another. And the army itself was far too small to try to vanquish a continent, essentially. Well, you know, you talk about the largest empire in the world.

And obviously, you know, as seemed to be the general attitude. in London in 1775, 1776, comparing just on paper the prospects of the rebellious colonists with the prospects of Britain militarily, it looks pretty grim for the colonists. But then you start realizing some things that I think in retrospect are quite surprising. The British have 48,000 men under arms in 1775, you're right, total. And that's clearly nothing like enough, not least because the great empire is actually overstretched already. It tends to get bigger after the American War of Independence needless say. But that's because they've grown up enough during the war, learned the lessons of war,

and appreciate they have to put a much higher degree of GDP into the Army and Navy than they did before. You have also, of course, at the key moment after the disaster at Saratoga, the French get involved and then the year after that the Spanish and the year after that the Dutch. So Britain is therefore having to fight on a truly global war. And essentially what they do is to put the American War of Defendants on hold until they can deal with the existential crisis, which cropped up in 1779, where we are very seriously concerned about an invasion of the British mainland by the by France. So, so partly due to America's, the communist's great success in, in the early stages, in not being defeated at Bunker Hill, Washington being able to escape from Manhattan,

in Saratoga, of course, you know, you have, you change the entire global balance of power effectively against the British. Right. And you have a, this modestly sized army. in 1775. The Brits have a navy that's actually set to shrink. It's on a, it's on a glide path to get smaller. That obviously changes as well. And there's talk to us a bit about there's a, there's a tension and an ongoing debate as pertains to the revolution, but this is a longstanding kind of debate in British strategic thinking goes back at least a century or more. The distinction between a kind of a land strategy and a sea strategy, often expressed in terms of a continental strategy. Well, it's been going on, as you say, for a long time, because the king, Georgia Third is also elector of Hanover and has

these lands in Germany that need to be defended, be defended against France, essentially. And you either have to become friendly with the Russians, Austrians or the Prussians. And we choose the Prussians, even though they're the weakest power or seem to be at the start of the seven years war. But then Frederick the Great turns out to be one of the great captains of history and obviously manages to deal with most of the problems that he has on the Austrian and Russian frontiers. And this creates the kind of sense during the seven years war that Britain could become a or could be in alliance with others, of course, a coalition partner that could have a presence on the continent. And this is completely opposed. This is a sort of Whig view that

that is taken very much by King George II, who was the last King of England, to command troops in battle in 1743. But his grandson, George III, is very much of the opposed blue water concept, whereby Hanover doesn't matter that much, that the amount of money spent on the army is wasted, that what you really need is a strong Royal Navy

that's going to be able to extend British, power, especially in Asia and India and so on, but also will be able to beat the French fleet if it ever came to another war. And these two hate each other. There are moments when they clash and George the second of one point wants Lord George domain to be found guilty of Cowardis at the Battle of Mindan and executed. We always hear of two different competing schools of strategic thought in pretty much every great power, you know, throughout his history. But at this point, in British history, they are so daggers drawn that they actually want to execute each other. Talk through, there is a party politics, or at least, you know,

proto-party politics quality to this debate. You talk about how the Whigs favor the more continental or land-oriented approach. And the Tories, thus we should understand the other direction. Why is that? Why does this become a party political issue? Well, the wigs have been in power for 80 years. They've been in power since the glorious revolution in 1688. And so they very much, they're a group of oligarchs. They are married to each other and cousins to each other. They are the most tiny group of incredibly powerful.

And it must be said, altruistic in their own way, aristocrats in British history. And they hate the idea that any newcovers, especially the squirearchy Tories, who they socially despise, might have a different view about the way that grand strategy should be applied. And so there's a sort of, as ever in British politics, there's a class element to this as well as a political and ideological one. And you have a situation where George II's son, Frederick Prince of Wales, George of the Third's father, takes a diametrically opposed view of strategy than his father the king. And so you have two competing courts, and one of them is what's called the reversionary interest, because, of course, ultimately we all know, or at least think we know, that the Prince of Wales is going to become king one day,

and therefore all of the power is going to go to the people around him. What nobody did know was that in 1751, he was going to die suddenly and leave no reversionary interest apart from the very young 13-year-old Prince George, later George III. And so let's talk about a land-oriented strategy and a naval-oriented strategy as far as America is concerned. So the shooting starts in 1775. Things escalate quickly. Obviously, we have the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

And then there's this window. You made reference to this earlier. There's a sort of strategic window from the beginning of hostilities through to the entry of the French into the war in 1778. And this is the greatest period of opportunity for the British. It obviously doesn't go well. Well, the first strategy is obviously to try and destroy the continental army there and then at Bunker Hill and prove that the regulars can't stand up against regulars,

which at the back of Bunker Hill is proved to be completely wrong. Then you have a split in the British High Command, essentially, where the Blue Water people believe that the American colonies can be strangled by destroying their trade, overseas trade. And they are, especially once Washington escapes from New York, from General Howe's attack on Manhattan. They seem to be in the ascendant, upon which Lord George German comes up with the plan,

which is really the only actual proper strategic plan that the British put into operation at the pre-Saritoga part of the war, whereby we try to have General Burgoyne come down from Canada to Albany and then a force also come up from New York to Albany, splitting, taking the Hudson River essentially and splitting the

New England part of the colonies off from the whole of the rest of the colonies. And that's the plan. And had General Howe stuck to it rather than going off to capture Philadelphia, then it might have had a chance of success although some military historians think that it had no chance of success whatsoever

because it was too extravagant and also because it required too much coordination of people who were too far away and with not enough good communications between them. But nonetheless, even given the idea that it might have worked, it certainly couldn't have worked once, how, as basically almost on his own ripped up the plan and left Bagoine stranded far too far south at Saratogauga. and capable of being surrounded by the American militiamer and captured. And from the moment he's captured, the central part of my thesis really is that from the moment that we lose Saratoga and the French come into the war, it's over.

There were other plans, there were other successes. Charleston, of course, falling in 1780 was a great victory and so on. The British actually win more battles in the American War of Independence than the Americans do. do, but that doesn't matter. Because ultimately, the resources of the British Empire have to be spread out to the Mediterranean, to Gibraltar, to Ireland, India, of course, down into South, into Africa, but primarily to the West Indies, because otherwise we lose the Caribbean sugar islands. It's similar to a point one here's made about the Second World War.

Victor Hansen just made it very aggressively in his recent book about the war, that for all of the drama and all the tremendous suffering and bloodshed and the number of significant campaigns from 1942 on, in a way, the war is over, or rather the war is decided from the moment that Germany declares war on the United States, that that puts the respective GDPs of global powers in such a place that the fate of the axis is inevitable. I think possibly, though, you can go, you can take it a few days earlier than the 12th of December, 1941, when Hitler makes that, in this case, literally suicidal decisions to get to war against the United States. But actually, I think you can possibly go just a month earlier when the Germans are turned back from Moscow. because at that point, when Germans move off to the right to take Kiev and the breadbasket in the Ukraine and fail to capture Moscow, then you get drawn into the battles like Stalingrad and Kursk that ultimately they lose. So I do go ahead with, agree with 95% of a victim. But then I always do agree with 95% of victory.

It's a very great map. So let's bring it back to the 18th century. And before we get to George himself, one last question about the overall strategic picture of the war. So in the book, as you're describing the British scheme for destroying the continental army in the field, you describe the Americans, on the other hand, as having recourse to a classic Fabian strategy. What's a Fabian strategy and how do the Americans go about executing it? It's Maximus Fabius, isn't it? who refuses to fight a battle he's not going to win,

which is an extremely sensible way of going about it. Kutuzov did pretty much exactly the same thing. Obviously, you could argue that he did ultimately lose Barodino. Otherwise, he fell back, you know, and refused to fight battles that he was going to lose against Napoleon. Similarly, when Washington has a chance at, you know, Delaware and crossing the Delaware and so on. He takes that chance, but he's not caught in Manhattan

in the way that Howard had he been a bit less cautious, loved to have actually captured the Washington's army. So that having failed, he falls back on this German plan that I was mentioning earlier, which also fails again. And we are left really just hanging on to those parts of the eastern seaboard that we can hang on to because of resupplied by the Royal Navy. But what really was never expected by the Admiralty or by the King or by Lord Samuage or by anybody else was that actually the French Navy or under DeGras is going to be able to defeat the Royal Navy off the coast of North America. America as well. And that just is an absolute disaster that you ultimately wind up, therefore, with Yorktown, where Cornwallis shouldn't have been anyway, because he came far too far north,

and that wasn't part of the plan either. And that was largely due to the Fabian operations of Nathaniel Green. So, you know, we've beaten strategically. We don't have enough men. At no point did they changed the system of recruitment in Britain, a little bit in 1779, but far too late. The GDP that we're willing to spend on trying to win the American War of Independence is hardly higher than in pre-war periods. There's no central need, it seems, or demand or will to victory. There's no Churchill, there's no Pitt the Elder, there's no Francis Drake figure, who's will. willing to really change Britain in order to try and keep the columns. Let's get to George, then. You're the author of a book called Leadership in War. You don't profile

George III, though he is, of course, a kind of leader in war. Talk about his attitude towards the war, his role in the British system towards waging it. Well, he was the first Prince of Wales for a very long time not to have seen any kind of conflict, I think 250 years. But he certainly he did not see himself as being a leader in war in that he had to decide strategy. He very much left that up to generals, and generals, in fact, who had fought in America in the French and Indian wars. They were clearly going to be the right people to choose, but it turned out that they weren't. His ministers also, in particular, Lord North, who didn't see himself as a leader so much as a sort of chairman of the board in the cabinet.

Also totally failed to rise to the occasion. So this was the problem, really. If he was a tyrant, if he had been a cruel, despotic and severe master, which is the dictionary, Samuel Johnson's dictionary definition of a tyrant, he might have actually done a bit better in America. But the fact that he was just a constitutional monarch who gave so much time to his generals and his admirals and his ministers. to try and deal with this issue, we came to complete disaster.

Is it too far to take out of what you're saying right now that the essential difference between Britain's performance in the Seven Years' War where, of course, it's successful, and in some ways that success seems to breed a kind of complacency and its failure with the American Revolution and with the broader war with France and Spain that results from it is leadership? That and also what you mentioned earlier is this whole concept which I think is absolutely central to this, just resting on your laurels. The country that lost the last time does an awful lot better. Look at France in 1763, utterly crushed and defeated.

By the time of Napoleon, it has completely changed its whole attitude to war. It's changed the entire outlook. And so even though actually the muskets they fight with and the cannons they fight with are much the same, the actual theories of war, the grand strategy, the overarching principles of how corps move and regiments move and so on, are so completely different because they have the spur of defeat. There's no better teacher than defeat. And there is this argument or disagreement about the raising of new regiments. that occurs during the early years of the war.

Absolutely. I mean, this is this, again, this goes back to, I'm afraid, to the British class system, which whereby you have these regiments that obviously new regiments need to be formed, or at least new companies of old regiments need to be formed in order to create enough trained men to get over the Atlantic and fight the Americans. However, the king does not want lots of aristocrats, basically, who are just paying for their commissions to be given control of troops, not because he didn't think they were competent or anything,

but because he thought it would undermine the value of the commissions of the people who were over in America fighting the Americans anyhow. And so that the actual monetary value, but also the prestige value of a commission. commission in a regiment would collapse if you just let anybody join the army. Of course, these aristocrats were not about to join as second lieutenant. They wanted to be, you know, captains and majors and colonels. So this extraordinary system pertains all the way up, as I mentioned, until 1779. And finally, he recognizes that there's such a crisis now with

the Americans and Spanish in the war, that they have to just kick over the traces and, and and accept whatever offer they're given. So you have this great line in the book to the effect of, you know, the Battle of Waterloo may have been won on the plain fields of Eaton, but some 20 years earlier. It had been lost there as well, sort of making reference to the generally low. 40 years, 40 years. 40 years.

40 years. 40 years. Yeah. The generally dismal standard of leadership that we're discussing here. But, you know, there's a crisis generated. There's a recognition that on both the revenue front, and on the related manpower front, Britain is not up to waging this war successfully. And then it goes on, of course, to deal with Napoleon more effectively.

Talk about how the pendulum swings back. What does George learn from this experience? What did the British learn? As we mentioned earlier with the, you know, there's no greater teacher than defeat. Once we had been defeated in the American War of Independence, the lessons were learned. you have this fantastic period where Frederick Duke of York becomes the commander-in-chief of the British Army and stays there for many years and institutes huge reforms that, frankly, had he not been the son of the King, he probably wouldn't have been able to have pulled off against the aristocracy and the army.

The purchase, although it's retained, is tempered with merit in the selection of officers. And we undertake endless reforms that make the army that goes to the peninsula under Wellington, a completely different body than the one that was surrendering at Yorktown. So, yes, we learn from our mistakes, but it has cost 13. colonies that later turn into the most powerful nation in the world. Indeed. But it is interesting, you know, of course, the resolution of the revolution, the preservation of American independence, you know, it alters the global balance of power in a way that is,

you know, epic. But it does take a century or more for the shift to really be apparent. Well, that's right. And that's because, you know, you've got an enormous continent. Actually, that's another aspect of this book that I think might interest people is the is the sort of conscious decision not to do what a lot of tyrants might do, might have done in the final analysis in the American War of Independence, which was to try to arm the enslaved people of the black people of the South.

I mean, 200 or so fought in the British army, but when one considers that there was a large British army in Charleston, that was a policy, a possibility. And I know that although some Native Americans, indigenous peoples fought for British in the American Board of Independence, it wasn't a major strategic aspect. It wasn't, we didn't turn the whole sort of racial composition of the 13 colonies on their heads in a way that a truly revolutionally or truly cruel of despotic and severe master might have done. To what extent were these sorts of options discussed and then reject? Oh, they were discussed all right. Yes, exactly.

But George III was not a social revolutionary by any means. He was a, I argue in this book, he was a sort of closet Tory, or at least somebody he didn't mind having Tories in the government. He didn't have a radical bone in his body, really. You, of course, make reference to Hamilton, which it seems impossible to talk about George III without. referencing the musical Hamilton. The other great pop culture depiction of him in recent years is Alan Bennett's The Madness of King George,

in which it's set after the War of Independence and the character of George's portrayed as being disconsolate and unsettled and wounded by the loss of his colonies in ways that are generally portrayed comically. What was the actual effect on George of the outcome of the war? Well, actually, funny enough, he was he was relevant. you know, these are unfair these depictions. He was actually, it was surprisingly phlegmatic about it. I mean, the great meeting with John Adams, of course, when Adams is ambassador to Britain in June 1785, he says, I'll be very frank with you, I was the last to consent to the separation, but the separation having been made and having become inevitable,

I've always said, and I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power. And then a few years later, he says of George Washington that he's the greatest character of the age. I mean, these are these are not things that somebody who's constantly irritated, frustrated and angry about what had happened would have said he was able to pick himself up. And the interesting thing also about Adam Bennett's show, much as I enjoyed it, is that it got it got the madness side completely wrong. It went along in the 1960, with the 1960's concept that George III had porphyria, which he did not. He actually, as I think I prove without doubt in this book, had manic depression. He had bipolar disorder.

And I won't go into the rather disgusting details to do with his urine and feces that prove this. You can watch the movie. It's vividly. They do. Yeah, they go into it in the movie and get it wrong there as well. So all in all, the true stories are far more interesting and surprising one, frankly. In the spirit of your book, Leadership and War, give us a kind of top-level rating of George's performance in dealing with the American Revolution. What does he do well? What would he do differently as the king in his particular role? Well, this was the problem. His role had been changing. he didn't have powers that you would need to have if you were going to become a great national leader. He depended on the people who unfortunately there were only two great statesmen of his 60-year reign.

One was pit the elder who was dead and the other was pit the younger who was too young. So he didn't have a great statesman or genius to lead his country. But in every other respect, he did as well as he possibly could. He tried to prevent the war from breaking out as much as he could. What he recognised, and he recognised it far too late, was that it was going to require a massive national effort. And that was something really that the British were not ready for in 1775, even though you'd had years since the Stam Pact and the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party and so on.

It didn't take a genius to work out that it was possibly going to end in bloodshed. But what I try and argue in my book, and what I'd love to have just an opportunity to point out is that in my view, it's a tremendously pro-American book, this, because what it shows is that Americans are exceptional. there are any number of people in history who revolt against tyrannists, the Israelites against the Egyptians, the Dutch, of course, against the Spanish, the Greeks, against the Turks, you name it, Italians against the Austrians, it goes on and on. But what the Americans did actually was to demand at the correct stage in their historical development, their independence and sovereignty, even though they were not being tyrannized. they did not have, as Sandler-Donson put it, an absolute monarch governing imperiously. And I think that's what makes America an exceptional country, and therefore even greater than it thinks it is. Andrew Roberts, thank you so much for joining. Much appreciate it.

Thank you, Aaron. I really enjoyed it. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.