On this day, 261 years ago, George William Frederick ascended to the British throne, becoming King George the Third. In an country that was a constitutional monarchy, he insisted on acting as much as an absolute ruler as he possibly could.
It was his obstinancy, at every step in the way, that led to both the American Revolution and the defeat of the British Empire in the war. Up until the 1760s, England had let its American colonies run their own affairs, taxing their own citizens for internal reasons. Trade was made beneficial to the Empire by tariffs and shipping controls. But that wasn't good enough for King George, he insisted on the right to tax the colonists directly. Tariffs were imposed, not for regulating trade, but as naked taxation. As the disputes with the colonies intensified, King George supported measures to arrest people and try them in either Admiralty courts (denying the defendants the right to a jury) or to transport them to England for trial/conviction.
Once the war began, the King threw up every obstacle he could to reaching a conclusion other than on the battlefield. When his government recognized the futiity of continuing the war after the defeat at Yorktown and the prime minister (Lord North) sought to step down before losing a no-confidence vote, the King told Lord North that he'd abdicate and leave the country before conceding the loss of the American colonies. North had to politely point out to the King that England was not an absolute monarchy, that while the monarch reigned, he didn't rule, and he should shut the fuck up and read the writing on the wall.
Without King George, it's certainly plausible that the American colonies would have continued to govern themselves and grown towards becoming a British dominion. In that regard, it's also plausible that California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico would have remained part of Mexico and that much of what is now known as the upper Midwest would have stayed as Canadian territory.
It took another war to drive the point home to the British that the United States was an independent nation. By the time that the second war rolled around, though, the King was insane.
It would be over another century after that before the Department of War ceased having current war plans against the British and the British stopped planning for war with the U.S. The British government flirted with the idea of intervening in the American Civil War, but thought better of it.
[1] While the Brits did allow the Confederacy to build warships in English shipyards, that bit of meddling cost them the equivalent of a over a third of a billion dollars in today's money in order to settle claims against the Empire.
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[1] For one thing, the British people had turned against slavery. Intervening on the side of a nation whose sole reason for existence was to protect chattel slavery would have been a very hard sell.
(Yes, I know, Southern Apologists keep trying to rewrite history and claim that the Civil War was a "noble cause" and that the war was not about slavery. They are full of shit.)
