George III does not appear in these excerpts as the subject of a biography. He appears as the political fact the American founders organized against: the absolute monarch whose power they had lived under and were determined not to reproduce. Across the episodes, the king serves as a fixed point of comparison — the measure of how much executive power the framers feared, and, in later episodes, the measure of how much power they failed to prevent.
The king as the framers’ warning
In the account given by Harlow Giles Unger, the Constitutional Convention created a figurehead as president precisely because its members had lived under the tyranny of an absolute monarch, King George III of England, for several decades and were not about to create a new King George in the executive power of the United States How Washington Invented the Presidency (2013). Unger notes that the Constitution vests the executive power in a President but never defines executive power, and that James Madison described the executive department as the weaker branch of the system. The convention, on this account, hoped the president would sit in his seat, smile, and do nothing.
Frank H. Buckley makes the same point from the direction of design. The framers, he says, all liked British government but could not have it because they could not have a king, so they tried to build something a little like the British parliamentary system, replacing a king with a president while mostly ensuring that the president would not have the kind of power George III had Has America Become an “Elective Monarchy”? (2014). What they designed, Buckley says, bears no resemblance whatever to what exists today; they expected something that would now be called congressional government, with the House of Representatives appointing the president, and they did not envision the modern media or a thick federal state in Washington.
Bob Zadek frames the same inheritance in the Stillman episode, describing the founders as living in fear of too powerful a federal government and of any concentration of power, with King George III and the kings of England generally in their minds as they determined that the chief executive should have nothing like the powers of the English king Sarah Stillman on Minors on the Sex-Offender List (2016).
Washington and the royal example
Thomas Fleming’s account of Washington’s presidency turns on the charge that Washington was imitating the king. Jefferson and his followers called Washington’s trips around the country “royal progresses,” saying he was acting like the king, because George III, his predecessors and successors made visits to different parts of the country to make people feel identified with the nation George Washington Was Our Guest (2011). Fleming’s response is that the president was a substitute for a king in many ways, and that this was what Washington was doing. The anecdote Fleming supplies — Washington’s exchange of messages with Governor John Hancock over who would call on whom first in Boston — is presented as the tough side of Washington, a determination not to let anybody denigrate the president.
Buckley supplies a different royal judgment. George III, he says, said that George Washington was the greatest man in the world because he did not become king when he could have Has America Become an “Elective Monarchy”? (2014). Buckley places Washington and Lincoln among those who had a sense that they should not do anything that looked king-like, and names Harry Truman as the last small-r republican president, with Zadek agreeing.
The king as a unit of measurement
Later episodes use George III less as a historical actor than as a yardstick for present power. Zadek, discussing standing and the separation of powers with Glenn Roper, describes an exercise of executive power lasting far longer than necessary, with the executive enjoying more power perhaps than King George III had over the colonies The Mini-Administrative State (2020). Roper’s contribution is about the mechanics of challenging such power: standing requires a concrete impact, and organizations like Pacific Legal Foundation cannot sue merely because they identify constitutional violations.
In the Stillman episode, Zadek extends the comparison past the executive altogether. Reflecting on the death of Justice Scalia and the resulting eight-justice Court, he says Scalia had so much power — more power than the president, more power than the king of England ever had over the life of his subjects — and asks how the country arrived at a point where one unelected individual has so much power Sarah Stillman on Minors on the Sex-Offender List (2016).
The accident of birth
George III also appears in the immigration episode, in a quotation Zadek reads from the Declaration of Independence. Among the complaints against the king, Zadek says, was that he had endeavored to prevent the population of the states, obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands American anxiety about immigration is unwarranted. Here’s why. (2023). Zadek’s argument is that the founding generation’s passionate abhorrence of peerage — of advantage from the accident of birth alone — is continuous with a rejection of immigration restrictions, and that Americans who enjoy privileges because they happened to be born here are continuing peerage in another form.
Across episodes
The same question — how much power the executive should hold, and whether the American system has reproduced the monarchy it was built against — is argued in the 2011, 2013 and 2014 episodes, and then reappears in 2016, 2020 and 2023. What changes is the object of comparison. In the earlier episodes, George III is the danger the framers designed against, and the question is whether Washington’s presidency honored that design; Fleming supplies the Jeffersonian charge of royal progresses, while Unger and Buckley describe a deliberately weak, undefined office. In the later episodes, the king becomes a unit of measurement for power that already exists: Zadek says the executive may enjoy more power than George III had over the colonies, and that Scalia had more power than the king of England ever had. The treatment thus shifts from the framers’ intention to the present-tense claim that the intention failed, with Buckley arguing that the separation of powers now concentrates power in a single person rather than preventing it.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no biography of George III: no dates, no account of his reign, no discussion of his ministers, policies or illness. They do not name the statutes, charters or colonial measures at issue beyond the language Zadek quotes from the Declaration of Independence. The excerpts also break off mid-sentence in several places, and no speaker in them addresses George III’s own views except through Buckley’s report of his remark about Washington.