George was well educated and did not have the wayward streak of his father. The only skeleton in his youthful cupboard was his relationship with Hannah Lightfoot, the daughter of a shoemaker from Wapping. George allegedly married Hannah in secret in 1757 (or 1759, records vary) and she was supposed to have borne him three children. Although documentation exists which purportedly proves the marriage, it has been kept in the Royal Archives since 1866 and its authenticity has not been proven. The likelihood of three children is remote. Although Hannah may have been a momentary infatuation, George soon fell in love with Lady Sarah Lennox, a daughter of the duke of Richmond and great-granddaughter of Charles II by his mistress, the duchess of Portsmouth. George was advised that he should not marry a British subject but should look to the eligible German princesses. The final choice was the charming seventeen-year old Charlotte of Mecklenburg. The coronation was delayed until after their wedding on 8 September 1761, so that a joint coronation could be held two weeks later.

George was twenty-two when he was proclaimed king. He was keen to do what was right and one of his first actions was to put out a proclamation against immorality. He also wanted to get control back over the Government which had gradually leeched power from the monarch over the last sixty years. George did not like Pitt or the Whig philosophy. His preferred premier was John Stuart, Earl of Bute, who had been a close friend of his mother's and had assisted in his education. Bute was a Whig, but being of Scottish descent, had Jacobite sympathies and was a staunch royalist. He was not a good administrator so that while George got his way, the country turned against Bute and he resigned in 1763. Bute remained in the king's confidence for two more years, but in the meantime the king suffered a long series of tedious prime ministers until he eventually found his man in Frederick, Lord North, who became premier in 1770.

The first ten years of George's reign were thus difficult ones for him in getting to grips with the reins of government. Issues, which in hindsight seem positive, such as securing peace with France and Spain in 1763, at the time were seen in a darker light. Bute was accused of receiving bribes from France, and the king was accused of selling out to the enemy. The Stamp Act introduced in 1765 met with considerable opposition and had to be repealed the following year. Throughout this period the king was subjected to constant abuse and libel from the renegade politician John Wilkes who published material, which in previous generations would have led to his execution for treason. The strain on the king told and in early 1765 he suffered a physical collapse, which may have been a precursor of his later mental affliction. Though not as severe as the bout of 1788 or the final decline of 1810, it was sufficient for Parliament to rush through a Regency Act. It was further fodder to George's opponents to denigrate him, and so much stigma has attached to him as king that it becomes difficult to see the real man and his achievements.

Lord North has likewise been criticised and is regarded by some as the worst of all prime ministers. To his premiership belongs the American War of Independence. The American revolution had its roots before North's administration. The colonies had been free of taxation, but also had no parliamentary representation. When a tax was re-imposed on molasses in 1764 and the stamp duty on legal documents and newspapers in 1765 there was an outcry. Although both of these measures were subsequently repealed, a new tax on tea, introduced in 1773, sparked off more antagonism and led to the Boston Tea Party in December 1773, when tea held in Boston Harbour was thrown overboard. The British closed the port at Boston and sent in troops, with the inevitable consequence that hostilities broke out on 19 April 1775 with battles at Lexington and Concord. The US Congress issued its Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776 and thereafter George III became the figurehead for American hostility. George was intent upon bringing America to its knees and approved any measure that would cause the Americans the utmost distress, though the allegation that he would make them all slaves is an exaggeration. The worst defeat for Britain came at Saratoga on 17 October 1777, when General John Burgoyne was forced to surrender his entire army. This action turned the balance of the war, as France now recognized the independence of the colonies and sent support. The last major battle was at Yorktown where George Washington, with the aid of the French, defeated Lord Cornwallis, who surrendered on 19 October 1781. The Treaty of Paris was signed on 3 September 1783. Whereas peace might have been concluded earlier and the colonies saved, George insisted on fighting to the bitter end and took the consequences. George's reputation suffered irreparably while Lord North resigned. It was some years before George again found a minister with whom he could work, William Pitt the Younger.

George clashed with Pitt over Catholic Emancipation. Such measures had been the downfall of past kings, especially James II, and even the merest hint of equality had resulted in the Gordon Riots of June 1780 when the MP, Lord George Gordon, incited disorder throughout London, leading to widespread destruction of property and about three hundred deaths. The king remained remarkably calm during the riots and through his own resoluteness restored order. The memory of the riots burned bright for many years so that when Pitt tried to issue a Catholic Emancipation Act in 1801, George violently opposed it and Pitt resigned. Pitt's measure had been his way of controlling the Irish rebellion, which erupted in 1798, encouraged by the success of the French Revolution. There had been unrest generally throughout Britain since 1795 and the king's popularity declined. Pitt introduced several repressive measures, including suspending habeus corpus, and sought to negotiate with France in 1797, which angered George. Despite efforts by later ministers George refused to entertain any consideration of emancipation for Catholics. For an exceedingly pious and generally good-natured man, this obstinacy verged on bigotry. Pitt was, however, able to force through the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland, which came into force on I January 1801. On the same day George relinquished the anachronistic title of king of France, which all English kings had maintained since 1340.

A measure of the times is reflected in the two assassination attempts upon George by the public. Margaret Nicholson, a house-maid, threatened him with a dessert knife on 2 August 1786, while James Hadfield fired a shot at the king at Drury Lane on 15 May 1800. Both would-be assassins were pronounced insane. George's reign was not short of its scandals. There was the trial of Warren Hastings for corruption and cruelty in the Indian administration, which ran from 1788 to 1795. There was the private and illegal first marriage of his son (the future George IV) to a commoner in 1785, followed by the immoral conduct of his legal daughter-inlaw, Caroline of Brunswick, the wife he had forced upon his son, who deserted her in 1796. A committee of enquiry was set up in 1806 to undertake the "delicate investigation", as it was called, into Caroline's affairs. Caroline was eventually sent on a grand tour of Europe. There was the duel between the war secretary, viscount Castelreagh, and the foreign secretary, George Canning, in September 1809, in which Canning was wounded. Finally there was the assassination of the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, in May 1812, by John Bellingham. To set against this were the great victories of Horatio Nelson in the Napoleonic Wars, especially at Copenhagen in April 1801 and Trafalgar in October 1805, and the victories of Wellington in the Peninsular War, leading to the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in June 1815. These victories abroad helped raise the morale of a country where the nobility and middle classes were clearly benefitting from the nation's commercial prosperity, but where the ordinary man and woman were discovering how repressed and neglected they were. Most of the angst, however, was aimed at the Government and not directly at George who, despite his obstinacy and occasional lapse of judgement, remained popular amongst his subjects. In fact he was often viewed, especially by the middle classes, as their champion against the Government. He gave the royal assent to William Wilberforce's act to abolish the slave trade, which became law in 1807 (though it was another twenty-six years before slaves in the British colonies were granted their freedom).

George was a man of wide interests and intellect. He became fascinated in agriculture and botany, giving some of the land at Windsor over to farming, hence his nickname of "Farmer George". It was an appropriate epithet since the name George means "farmer" or "landworker", so George genuinely lived up (or down!) to his name. He wrote pamphlets on agriculture under the pseudonym of Ralph Robinson. He became more tolerant in his later years about the moral state of the nation, especially in the theatre and literature, just as the most sensational literature emerged. The gothic horror novel The Castle of Otranto (I 764) by Horace Walpole and the salacious The Monk (I 795) by M.G. Lewis, could never have been published in earlier times. Literature flourished during George's reign - this was the era of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. There were many scientific advances during this period, which was the dawn of the age of invention. The best remembered were the perfection of the steam engine by James Watt in 1769 and the use of the steam engine by Richard Arkwright to perfect his spinning machine in 1790. These inventions laid the foundations of the Industrial Revolution but also led to such outbursts as the Luddite riots of 1811, a culmination of considerable unrest amongst textile workers to the new machines which would rob them of their livelihood, but which also ushered in a new class of industralists.

The last ten years of George's reign, however, were spent in sad decline. His recurrent bouts of "madness" became more severe. In November 1788 he suffered a particularly violent bout where he attacked the Prince of Wales and began talking incessantly. He was forcibly restrained and removed to Kew where he underwent humiliating treatment by ignorant and not altogether well meaning doctors. Remarkably he had recovered by April 1789, but there were further bouts in 1801 and 1804 and the final decline in November 1810, precipitated by the death of his youngest daughter Amelia. By then the king was also blind. His son was made "Prince Regent" with powers of sovereignty from 5 February 181 1. The old king was confined to Windsor Castle, where he was more or less neglected, his hair and beard growing long and white. Just what lucid moments he had during these years is not known. Recent assessments have judged that George was not mad in the psychological sense but suffered from porphyria, a blood disease which upsets the body's chemical balance and can produce symptoms akin to madness. It has been called "the royal malady" and may have affected George's predecessors as far back as Charles VI of France. Charles's daughter, Katherine, married Henry V and through her it passed on to Henry VI. There are even suggestions that it may have afflicted the Saxon kings.

The two "facts" that most people remember about King George was that he was mad and that he ruled longer than any other monarch besides Victoria. In fact neither are true, as George's reign effectively ended when his son was made regent. What fewer people recall was that he had a genuine desire to do the best for his country during an especially violent period. The fact that he remained king, while the French monarchy was abolished, is some testament to how he was regarded and that he had learned how to manipulate the system of government.