IT IS Alan Bennett, and his “The Madness of King George”, who is to blame for the image of George III as a cartoon of inherited malady, all purple urine and verbal spasm. So Stella Tillyard’s book comes as a timely reminder that, long before the king screamed down the corridors at Windsor or chased ladies-in-waiting at Kew, he was a working monarch who steered Britain through decades of choppy waters.
Ms Tillyard’s interest, however, lies not so much with the big upsets of George’s long reign—the endless Whig infighting, economic jitteriness and, of course, the loss of America—but with a parallel set of dramas within the king’s own family. For while George was a husband and father of earnest strenuousness, the majority of his eight siblings turned out to be a giddy and ill-behaved crew.
http://www.economist.com/node/5436773