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.

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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.”

George was that kind of king, inspiring both admiration and regicidal contempt. As the British monarch during the American Revolution, he has, for two and a half centuries, symbolized haughty intransigence and been portrayed as a reactionary dolt incapable of grasping the fervor for liberty that animated his American subjects. On Broadway, he minces through Hamilton as a foppish, sinister clown, singing to the estranged rebels, “You’ll be back” and adding, “I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.”

In truth, the public opening by the British Crown of George III’s papers in the past decade reveals him to be a far more complex, accomplished, and even estimable figure than the prevailing caricature. He could also be ruthless, self-righteous, and so mulish that he threatened abdication unless his government maintained a hard line against American independence. The struggle with America, which he considered “the most serious in which any country was ever engaged,” was lost on his watch, at an estimated cost to his kingdom of £128 million, plus tens of thousands of British casualties and a reduction of the empire on which the sun supposedly never set by half a million square miles. Not long after the British defeat at Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781 all but ended the war, George asked “that Posterity may not lay the downfall of this once respectable Empire at my door.” Yet posterity has indeed blamed him for what his biographer Andrew Roberts called “the colossal disaster, the worst in British history until the loss of India in 1947.”

As bloodshed in America intensified following the initial gunplay at Lexington and Concord in 1775, George chose as his country seat Windsor, “a place I love best in the world.” In this redoubt, with its stout stone walls overlooking the Thames, away from the nattering courtiers and importunate government ministers in London, he could play the country squire with his growing family. A military band tootled martial airs every evening when the King was in residence, and in 1777 he personally designed the so-called Windsor uniform, a tunic of dark blue with red cuffs that George—his nation’s captain-general—wore