If the early years of George III's reign have given birth to a flourishing body of historical work, they have also engendered a historiographical controversy which has affected almost every historian of modern British politics. I do not propose, in this brief discussion of previous historiography, to explore in any great depth the body of work which began well within George III's own lifetime and has continued, in a somewhat prolix and tedious form, to the present day. The more flippant or facetious historian might well argue (and there would be more than a grain of truth in the observation) that, for all the archival exploration and exhibition of historical expertise, the polemic over the politics of George's reign has advanced little beyond the contemporary controversy that was found in speech, pamphlet, letter and newspaper. (It is interesting to speculate on the place which historians might have occupied if they had sat in the eighteenth-century House of Commons: Namier and Butterfield facing each other across the dispatch box as Pitts and Foxes had done before them.) Yet the historiography demands attention: a large intractable body of literature whose very description and classification has sparked off further debate.