For thirty-one days this July, this series told the story of the American founding from the inside. That story had a villain, at least officially. Twenty-seven grievances in the Declaration of Independence were addressed directly to him. The document called him unfit to rule. His statues were torn down in the streets.

His name was George William Frederick. He was twenty-one years old when he became King of Great Britain. He would reign for fifty-nine years. He founded the Royal Academy of Arts out of his own pocket. He built an astronomical observatory on his estate to personally observe the transit of Venus. He tilled his own fields at Windsor and Kew, earning the affectionate nickname "Farmer George" from a public that loved him for it. He and his wife Charlotte had fifteen children and a genuinely devoted marriage of nearly fifty years. He may have donated more than half of his personal income to charity.

He also suffered, from the age of twenty-seven onward, from recurring episodes of a devastating mental illness that modern medical researchers, after decades of study and computer analysis of his full medical records, have now identified as bipolar disorder Type I — a condition that grew worse with age, eventually leaving him blind, deaf, and permanently lost to dementia in the last decade of his life.

The Broadway musical Hamilton plays his illness for laughs. It always gets a big reaction.

This episode goes to the documented record of who George III actually was — not the villain the Declaration needed, not the buffoon the musical invented, but the specific, complicated, suffering human being the historical evidence actually describes. After thirty-one days of the American side of this story, the case file deserves to be opened from the other direction.

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