King George III’s Bizarre Obsessions That Had Nothing To Do With America

George loved farming so much that he became known as ‘Farmer George.’ Yep, Bridgerton was right! His nickname came from his interest in scientific agriculture. He thought that he should be using his land to produce more food for the country, even conducting agricultural experiments at Windsor and Kew.

And George wasn’t kidding, as he literally walked his fields and plowed the ground! No wonder some people think he’s a farmer when they meet him in person. Think about it: what if you walked up to someone covered in mud and found out that he runs the entire British Empire? Awesome!

George was so taken with farming that he even wrote a book with his own suggestions, which was published in the name of Ralph Robinson. The King of England was also a columnist for a magazine run by the agricultural writer Arthur Young, Annals of Agriculture.

George was big on wool, but wanted better wool. To do this, he enlisted the help of a naturalist named Joseph Banks to smuggle some Merino sheep out of Spain to be bred with British stock. Yeah, he ran a sheep-smuggling operation to procure better quality wool.

The merino sheep George had smuggled out of Spain were put out to graze directly beneath the Great Pagoda at Kew. The pagoda was a Chinese-style building and at the time was the tallest such structure in all of Europe. So our royal science sheep were eating grass at the base of a huge decorative tower.

George grew up with science unusually woven into his royal education, and he never abandoned his interest in it. He even had a collection of scientific instruments, some of which you can still see in museums today.

George also had something to do with the discovery of the planet Uranus, though indirectly. William Herschel discovered the planet himself (with his sister Caroline assisting him) before George hired them both as his royal astronomers and funded their work.

George was also involved with a second planet, Venus, though not in the discovery sense. George built an observatory on his Richmond estate in 1769 so he could witness the Transit of Venus, one of many signs of his fascination with astronomy.

George took a personal interest in the Transit of Venus. His astronomer, Dr. Stephen Demainbray, recorded the 1769 observation and predicted future transits in 1874 and 2004, which came to pass!

In 1762 George purchased a large art collection from Consul Joseph Smith, a Venice-based collector closely tied to Canaletto. The collection included gems, drawings, and nearly 200 works by Canaletto. In short, George was a major art collector as well. If anything is certain about George III, he certainly did not half-engage in his interests.

George was an avid reader and spent a fortune assembling a massive private library. When he passed away, 65,000 of his books went to the British Museum and were the nucleus of what eventually became the British Library. And for that alone we salute George.

And what a gentleman George was! He, in all his benevolence, opened his vast library to academics to use and study. I love that he obviously valued knowledge as something to be pursued for its own sake and genuinely wanted it to be accessible to people.

George successfully attracted many scientists from far and wide to work with him at Kew. Plants new to science were often shipped to his garden, giving him a massive collection of exotic specimens to study.

George’s interest in foreign wildlife peaked in the 1790s, when the first kangaroos to be brought to England were kept in the paddock behind Queen Charlotte’s Cottage at Kew. To most Britons of the day (and still today), these creatures were from a totally alien world (namely, Australia).

George, curious though he may have been (it would’ve been quite funny had he been named Curious George rather than Farmer George), was also a big fan of exploration, and gave his consent and state support for Captain Cook’s initial trips to Australia and the South Pacific. The king wanted the world mapped and its flora and fauna brought back to Britain. His inquisitiveness literally helped send ships around the globe. Yet, such expeditions paved the way for colonization and significant suffering for Indigenous people.

And away from all the science and farming, George had another hobby. This was a “softer” one. He and Queen Charlotte used to play music together, with Queen Charlotte playing the harpsichord and George playing the flute.

Despite being king, George had an unusual humility. George and Charlotte were of the opinion that members of the royal family ought to live modestly, with one visitor remarking that they did so “like the simplest gentlefolks.” King George even bathed in the kitchen at Kew rather than his palace to avoid forcing his staff to carry hot water from one building to the other.

There were a few attacks on George during his lifetime, but he was anything but cruel towards his attackers. In 1786, he told onlookers not to hurt a woman who jumped at him with a knife, saying, “Do not hurt her, the poor creature is mad; she has not hurt me!” and had her sent to a hospital.

All that aside, George has a serious claim to fame. Between 1760 and 1820, he ruled the country for almost 60 years. That is the longest reign of any king in Britain, second only to two queens, Victoria and Elizabeth II. He died less than a year before what would have been his Diamond Jubilee.

George gets called “the Mad King” pretty relentlessly, but I don’t think that’s fair to him. He was sickly at times, and his treatments were horrific no matter how you look at it. There’s actually quite a lot of pushback against that name among historians. They say the “madness” name distracts from George’s accomplishments and stigmatizes mental illness. Hamilton and Bridgerton are definitely helping with this!

This content was created with the help of AI.