GEORGE III. A.D. 1760--1785.
After George II. reigned his grandson, George III., the son of
Frederick, Prince of Wales, who had died before his father. The
Princess of Wales was a good woman, who tried to bring up her
children well; and George III. was a dutiful son to her, and a good,
faithful man--always caring more to do right than for anything else.
He had been born in England, and did not feel as if Hanover were his
home, as his father and grandfather had done, but loved England, and
English people, and ways. When he was at Windsor, he used to ride or
walk about like a country squire, and he had a ruddy, hearty face and
manner, that made him sometimes be called Farmer George; and he had
an odd way of saying "What? what?" when he was spoken to, which made
him be laughed at; but he was as good and true as any man who ever
lived: and when he thought a thing was right, he was as firm as a
rock in holding to it. He married a German princess named Charlotte,
and they did their utmost to make all those about them good. They
had a very large family--no less than fourteen children--and some old
people still remember what a beautiful sight it was when, after church
on Sunday, the king and queen and their children used to walk up and
down the stately terrace at Windsor Castle, with a band playing, and
everyone who was respectably dressed allowed to come in and look at
them.
Just after George III. came to the crown, a great war broke out in the
English colonies in America. A new tax had been made. A tax means
the money that has to be given to the Government of a country to pay
the judges and their officers, the soldiers and sailors, to keep up
ships and buy weapons, and do all that is wanted to protect us and
keep us in order. Taxes are sometimes made by calling on everybody to
pay money in proportion to what they have--say threepence for every
hundred pounds; sometimes they are made by putting what is called a
duty on something that is bought and sold--making it sell for more
than its natural price--so that the Government gets the money above
the right cost. This is generally done with things that people could
live without, and had better not buy too much of--such as spirits,
tobacco, and hair powder. And as tea was still a new thing in England,
which only fine ladies drank, it was thought useless, and there was a
heavy duty laid upon it when the king wanted money. Now, the Americans
got their tea straight from China, and thought it was unfair that they
should pay tax on it. So, though they used it much more than the
English then did, they gave it up, threw whole ship-loads of it into
the harbor at Boston, and resisted the soldiers. A gentleman named
George Washington took the command, and they declared they would fight
for freedom from the mother country. The French were beginning to
think freedom was a fine thing, and at first a few French gentlemen
came over to fight among the Americans, and then the king Louis XVI.,
quarreled with George III., and helped them openly.
There was a very clever man among the Americans named Benjamin
Franklin, a printer by trade, but who made very curious discoveries.
One of them was that lightning comes from the strange power men call
electricity, and that there are some substances which it will run
along, so that it came be brought down to the ground without doing any
mischief--especially metallic wires. He made sure of it by flying a
kite, with such an iron wire up to the clouds when there was a thunder-
storm. The lightning was attracted by the wire, ran down the wet
string of the kite, and only glanced off when it came to a silk ribbon
--because electricity will not go along silk. After this, such wires
were fastened to buildings, and carried down into the ground, to
convey away the force of the lightning. Perhaps you have seen them
on the tops of churches or tall buildings; they are called conductors.
Franklin was a plain-spoken, homely dressing man; and when he was sent
to Paris on the affairs of the Americans, all the great ladies and
gentlemen went into raptures about his beautiful simplicity, and began
to imitate him, in a very affected, ridiculous way.
In the meantime, the war went on between America and England, year
after year; and the Americans became trained soldiers and got the
better, so that George III. was advised to give up his rights over
them. Old Lord Chatham, his grandfather's minister, who had long
been too sick and feeble to undertake any public business, thought
it so bad for the country to give anything up, that he came down to
the House of Lords to make a speech against doing so; but he was not
strong enough for the exertion, and had only just done speaking when
he fainted away, and his son, William Pitt, was called out of the
House of Commons to help carry him away to his coach. He was taken
home, and died in a few day's time.
The war went on, but when it had lasted seven years, the English felt
that peace must be made; and so George III. gave up his rights to all
that country that is called the United States of America. The United
States set up a Government of their own, which has gone on ever since,
without a king, but with a President who is freshly chosen every four
years, and for whom every citizen has a vote.
As if to make up for what was lost in the West, the English were
winning a great deal in the East Indies, chiefly from a great prince
called Tipoo Sahib, who was very powerful, and at one time took a
number of English officers prisoners and drove them to his city of
Seringapatam, chained together in pairs, and kept them half starved
in a prison, where several died; but he was defeated and killed.
They were set free by their countrymen, after nearly two years of
grievous hardship.