While Washington came to be viewed as the embodiment of the American republic, he, like George III, began his life as a subject of Britain’s King George II. Growing up in Colonial Virginia, Washington showed no sign of the revolutionary he would later become. Instead, he took advantage of Colonial ladders of power, and he actively promoted British expansion in North America as a surveyor and as an officer in the French and Indian War.
Like other Virginia tobacco planters, he sold his crop to British merchants and with the proceeds outfitted himself as a fashionable London gentleman — at least until 1769, when he took his place as a leader of Virginia’s movement to boycott British goods to protest the imposition of British taxes.
But even in 1776, when Washington abandoned his identification as a British subject and adopted a new identity as an American, he had something in common with the other George.
George III had also, years earlier, made a deliberate assertion of national identity. His great-grandparents, grandparents and parents all were born in Germany and spoke German as a first language. In a speech to Parliament after his accession to the crown in 1760, he reassured his subjects: “Born and educated in this country, I glory in the Name of Britain.”
In private, the two Georges also had something in common: They were both the eldest sons of widowed mothers. Mary Ball Washington became a widow in 1743 when her husband, Augustine Washington, died. Her son George was 11. Princess Augusta of Wales lost her husband, Frederick, Prince of Wales, in 1751, when her George was 12.
Widowhood granted both women power that neither law nor custom allowed them when their husbands were alive. Mary Ball Washington became her family’s head, in charge of managing its property. Princess Augusta closely controlled her George’s upbringing and education. In claiming power for themselves, they attracted the scorn of men, both in their lifetimes and afterward. Only recently have historians and biographers begun a reassessment of Mary Washington and Princess Augusta that takes into account the prejudices and disadvantages they faced as women. Both Georges later formed marriages according to an Enlightenment model of virtuous family life in which women were granted an increasingly respectful, if still not equal, place.