THE MYTH OF MAD KING GEORGE

He was denounced by rebel propagandists as a tyrant and remembered by Americans as a reactionary dolt. Who was he really?

- BY RICK ATKINSON | ILLUSTRATION BY LOLA DUPRE

Three miles south of Windsor Castle, in the western exurbs of London, stands a 25-ton equestrian statue of King George III, cast from old cannons in the decade after his death in 1820. Dressed as Marcus Aurelius, in toga and laurel crown, he sits astride his charger, regal and oversize, honored if not revered for a reign that lasted almost 60 years, from the creation of the first British empire in the Seven Years' War through the final defeat of Napoleon.

A similar statue of George as a mounted Roman emperor once stood in New York City atop a marble plinth on Bowling Green, at the lower tip of Manhattan. Commissioned by grateful American colonists following the 1766 repeal of the detested Stamp Act—intended by Parliament to raise money from the lightly taxed colonials—the august figure lasted less than a decade. In July 1776, inflamed by a public reading of the newly adopted Declaration of Independence, Continental Army soldiers and other vandals broke through the iron fence surrounding the statue, lassoed George with ropes, and tugged him to the ground—‘levelled with ye dust,” as a witness reported.

The mob decapitated the King and whacked off his nose. Musket balls punctured his torso, and looters scraped away the 10 ounces of gold leaf that coated rider and horse. The severed head, initially impaled on a spike outside a tavern, would be recovered by a British Army officer and shipped to England to illustrate the “Disposition of the Ungrateful people.” Rebels carted the headless rider and mount in fragments to Connecticut, where Patriot women melted the lead, ladled it into molds, and soon sent George Washington's army 42,088 bullets. “It is hoped,” an American surgeon wrote in his journal, “that the Emanations of the Leaden George will make ... deep impressions in the Bodies of some of his red Coated and Torie subjects.”