These days, most news stories about public statues consider them as objects of destructive rather than constructive acts, but 250 years ago, subscribers to the Maryland Gazette read about the recent installation of a statue of King George III in New York City. No one could know it at the time, but that statue of the British monarch would be pulled down less than six years later by American revolutionaries.
To mark the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766, New York’s colonial legislature commissioned London sculptor Joseph Wilton to create statues of George III and William Pitt, a prominent English politician who had opposed the stamp taxes. Wilton’s composition for the king was inspired by the ancient Roman statue of Emperor Marcus Aurelius sitting astride a horse. It was made of a metallic alloy and finished with gleaming gilt. The less pretentious standing figure of Pitt was made of marble.
Golden George was set atop a pedestal on New York’s Bowling Green, a park near the southern end of Manhattan, on August 16, 1770, the seventh birthday of Prince Frederick, the king’s second eldest son. The Lieutenant Governor invited the city’s movers and shakers to join him at nearby Fort George, where they drank loyal toasts to His Majesty’s good health, listened to music by a military band, and enjoyed a thunderous discharge of cannon. The statue of Pitt would soon be erected at the intersection of William and Wall Streets, most likely to a bit less fanfare.
As colonial tensions with the Mother Country rose through the next few years, the king’s statue became a target of abuse by disgruntled New Yorkers. In 1773, the city constructed a cast-iron fence around the park’s perimeter to discourage vandalism.
In the summer of 1776, with the Revolutionary War now underway for more than a year, General George Washington ordered that the newly adopted Declaration of Independence be read to troops stationed in New York on July 9th. Many civilians, including leaders of the local Sons of Liberty, also witnessed the rousing proclamation. Afterward, fired-up Patriots streamed down Broadway to Bowling Green, where they knocked off the crown-shaped finials of the protective fence, toppled the statue from its pedestal, and cut off the leaden king’s head.
The 18th-century fence (minus its decorative finials) still encircles Bowling Green, making it the oldest extant fence in the Big Apple. As interesting a factoid as that might be, Glitzy George’s curious fate is even more fascinating.
The Patriot mob disfigured the statue’s head by cutting off its nose, clipping away its crowning laurels, and firing a bullet into it. In September 1776, British Captain John Montresor got wind of the head’s whereabouts and arranged for a Loyalist tavern-keeper to liberate it from its Patriot custodians. With help from General Thomas Gage’s American wife Margaret, Montresor sent the head to English politician Charles Townshend, mastermind of the ill-fated Townshend Duties, as evidence of the “Infamous Disposition of the Ungrateful people of this distressed Country.” Where it ended up after 1777 is anyone’s guess.
The rest of the statue was chopped into smaller pieces and transported to a foundry in Litchfield, Connecticut, where it was melted and recast into musket balls—42,088 of them. New York postmaster Ebenezer Howard wrote General Horatio Gates that the king’s “statue here has been pulled down to make musket ball of, so that his troops will probably have melted Majesty fired at them.” But at 20 bullets per pound of metal, the numbers simply didn’t add up to a 4,000-pound statue. So what happened to the rest of it?
Decades after the end of the Revolutionary War, fragments of the statue started turning up in yards and fields and swampy ground near Wilton, Connecticut—the horse’s flowing tail here, a bit of patterned sash there, part of the saddle upon which the royal rump sat somewhere else. Apparently, Connecticut Tories had managed to spirit away some chunks of the statue before they could reach the foundry and be recast into rebel ammunition. Several pieces are now in museum collections, and others are in private hands. The king’s left hand, reportedly dug up in 1991, sold at auction in 2019 for $207,000.
Some of the “melted Majesty” bullets also may have been found. X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) analysis of nine musket balls recovered at the Monmouth battlefield in New Jersey indicates a close match to the metallurgical composition of the surviving museum artifacts.
For those who wonder how the original equestrian statue of King George III might have looked, the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia displays a carefully researched recreation designed and fabricated by StudioEIS in 2016. It seems fitting that the sculpture and design studio is located in Brooklyn, New York, a little over three miles south of Bowling Green, where the saga of Gleaming George began with celebration of his installation 250 years ago.
Read the August 30, 1770 issue of the Maryland Gazette starting here: https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc4800/sc4872/001281/html/m1281-1104.html.
Glenn E. Campbell
HA Senior Historian
