‘I’m only here for you.’Īntonia Romeo, the permanent secretary at the UK’s Ministry of Justice, is enthusiastic about my History in Prisons project, which was so rudely interrupted by COVID. ‘I hate your beard,’ David Starkey told me at a drinks party recently. There was a time when I was as pogonophobic as the next man, but no longer. I grew a beard during lockdown, which I’m now going to keep because my wife Susan has called it ‘piratical’. But at least he hasn’t been called a racist.
‘More and more of it, funnily enough,’ he replied. As ‘Winston’ and I walked to the tent, a lady dressed as a suffragette - complete with purple-and-green sash and big hat - shouted angrily: ‘When are you going to give women the franchise, you old bastard?’ ‘Do you get much of that kind of thing?’ I asked Stan. With the typical panache that has gained her a quarter of a million Instagram followers, Fiona Carnarvon arranged for a Winston Churchill lookalike called Stan Streather to introduce me to the audience at the Highclere Castle History Festival on October 9, which was packed with hundreds of re-enactors. Of course they are referring to its clause about Native Americans, but I’m going to try to persuade Americans that it’s also true of 26 out of the 28 clauses lambasting the poor old king. The National Archives in Washington is threatening to put up a sign next to the Declaration of Independence stating that some of its views are ‘outdated, biased, and offensive’. I’m a lot kinder about their Founding Fathers than the woke crowd in the States, though. I suspect the second part will be tougher than the first, as Americans understandably hold a less charitable view of King George III. Roberts also explains in great detail the dynamics between the British parliament and the nascent American government, including a fascinating account of the writing of and subsequent British reaction to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.I’m on a book tour which involves 65 speeches in 60 days in Britain, Washington, Philadelphia, Virginia, Mexico, California and New York. In this interview and in his book, Roberts goes to great lengths to deconstruct that distortion and, in the process, give us an extremely nuanced and detailed portrait of the man who created the conditions for America’s independence. Roberts’s new book is The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, a biography of the monarch who led England during the American Revolution and who has been made into something of a caricature by Americans, most recently by his portrayal in the musical Hamilton as a preening, stuck-up (but funny) king of England. In his long and distinguished career, British historian Andrew Roberts has produced world-class biographies of Winston Churchill, and Napoleon, several histories of World War II and the men who led the countries who fought that war, and other great conflicts in world history.
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