George III

 - King of Great Britain and Ireland -

( 1738 - 1820 )
 


* List of the stories he appears in :
- AR 145 : "His Majesty, McDuck", from 1989, by Don Rosa (by name only).

 

* His biography :
     William Frederick Hanover was born on June 4, 1738 in  Norfolk House, London, England, the son of Fredrick Prince of Wales, and Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, and grandson of King George II of Great Britain.
   In 1760, on the death of George II, he became King of Great Britain and Ireland.
   In 1761, he married Charlotte of Mecklinburg-Strelitz, with whom he had 15 children, althought he was in love with Sarah Lennox, and was crowned.
   He was afflicted with porphyria, a maddening disease, and was victim of several attacks of this illness, which debilitated him in the last years of his reign.
   In 1763, the Peace of Paris ended the Seven Years War against France, from which Great Britain emerged as the world's greatest colonial power, but George and Prime Minister Lord North wanted to tax the American colonies to pay for military protection, which led to the War of Independance, from 1775 to 1783.
   In 1788, he suffers his first attack of his illness and tries to kill his son, George Prince of Wales, but he carried on with his royal duties, said by doctors to have recovered from his madness.
   In 1793, a new war broke out with France, which stopped in 1802.
   Several assassination attempts have been made on him.
   In 1800, an act of union was passed between Great Britain and Ireland.
   In 1803 other hostilities against France, the Napoleonic wars,  lasted until 1814, taking several forms : Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, led the land attack, while the navy, commanded by Lord Horatio Nelson won the decisive battle off Cape Trafalgar, and imposed a blockade of Europe to offset Napoleon's " continental system" which was forbidden from importing British goods, and Pitt the younger guided the government through the hardships of total war.
   In 1810, he suffered a recurrence of his mental derangement, and so his son George Prince of Wales was made Regent in 1811.
   On January 29, 1920, George III died, blind, deaf and mad, at Windsor Castle.
 

* His place in the Barks/Rosa stories universe :
    In "His Majesty, McDuck", during a battle which takes place in 1818, American soldiers in Fort Drakeborough, attacked by the Spanish troops, receive an urgent dispatch from King George which says they have to leave the fort to the Spanish.
 

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