History of the Four Georges, and of William IV, Volume 3

The third volume of Justin McCarthy's sweeping history turns to the most turbulent decades of the Hanoverian dynasty: the reign of George III, whose stubbornness and descent into madness shadowed an empire in crisis. Here unfold the extraordinary stories of John Wilkes, the radical journalist who twice won and lost a seat in Parliament and became a symbol of liberty against governmental corruption; of the American colonies slipping away into rebellion despite the best efforts of Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox; of the Gordon Riots that set London ablaze with anti-Catholic fury; and of the boy Prime Minister William Pitt, facing the existential terror of revolutionary France across the Channel. McCarthy, writing with the immediacy of an eyewitness to the Victorian age looking back at a world that shaped our own, renders these decades not as distant dates and treaties but as flesh-and-blood drama: ambition, principle, madness, and the slow forging of the modern British state. This is history written with the urgency of fiction and the weight of scholarship.