He never held any position outside of government, and eventually he became head of state. As his term wore on, he exhibited increasing signs of mental decline and instability and placed limits on his opponents’ right to assemble. In an event that would become notorious, a massive crowd gathered to protest against the actions of the government and ended up being punished in his name with a severity that was widely considered to be at odds with his nation’s guiding principles. At the age of 81, nearing the end of his life, he was known to speak utter gibberish. 

It may sound as though I’m talking about Joe Biden, but this description, as it happens, also applies to George III, the British king who lost America and who, by 1819, the year before his death, was, as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley put it in a famous poem, “old, mad, blind, despised.” Like Biden, George hung on to power for a hell of a long time: He reigned for six decades; Biden — senator for 36 years, vice president for eight, and a piece of Oval Office furniture for three — has racked up just under five decades in D.C. During some periods in the early and middle parts of his reign, George was popular, but in his third act, not unlike Biden, he came to be, as Shelley put it, “despised” by more and more of his countrymen.

As for the mass protest mentioned above — which came to be a defining event of George’s reign — it took place on Aug. 16, 1819, in Manchester. About 60,000 people gathered peacefully to call for reform in parliamentary representation; in response, cavalry units from were summoned to the site and ordered to charge into the crowd. Eighteen people were killed and hundreds were injured. This atrocity, which came to be known as the Peterloo Massacre, was the proximate inspiration for Shelley’s poem, which is entitled “England in 1819” and which, in its entirety, reads as follows: 

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,—
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring,—
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,—
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,—
An army which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,—
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless, a book sealed,—
A Senate—Time’s worst statute unrepealed,—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

Running across this poem the other day in an anthology, I recognized at once the similarities between England in 1819 — as perceived by Shelley, anyway — and America under Joe Biden. Yes, there are important differences between George III and Biden, and between the Peterloo Massacre and Jan. 6. George was a king, and Joe is (supposedly) a president; only one of the protesters on Capitol Hill was killed, but hundreds have been harassed, arrested, prosecuted, and/or imprisoned. 

But oh, the parallels between Shelley’s indictment of the British establishment under George III and the accusations that a reasonable observer could hurl at the powers behind Biden’s own throne! As Shelley writes, the men who surrounded George, and who in his last, doddering years were Britain’s actual rulers, were, like Biden’s current handlers, ignorant and uncaring mediocrities, hated by the people (or, at least, by the people who were sufficiently well informed to grasp what was going on); the economy, during George’s last years as during Biden’s presidency, was squeezing the people dry; then as now, the military (as demonstrated by its actions in the Peterloo Massacre) was morally compromised, as were the judiciary and mainstream religious institutions. 

Shelley’s poem is a cry of outrage and despair. In its closing lines, however, he shifts suddenly from anger to hope — namely, the hope that “a glorious Phantom” might emerge in the midst of all this morass and set all things aright. In fact, upon George’s death in 1820, he was succeeded by his son George IV, who ruled for 10 years, after which the crown passed to another son, William IV, who lasted for seven years. 

Neither of these brief reigns was particularly glorious. But after they were over, Queen Victoria ascended to the throne and proceeded to preside for a record-smashing 63 years over what may fairly be called Britain’s Golden Age — an era during which the U.K. became the planet’s unrivaled superpower and its foremost engine of industrial, scientific, and technical growth. Under Victoria, the Empire expanded greatly, peace and prosperity prevailed, and a series of parliamentary reforms accorded her subjects unprecedented freedom, equality, and educational opportunities.  

Can you say “glorious Phantom”? Now, I haven’t seen Donald Trump compared very frequently to Queen Victoria (the differences between the two are, admittedly, quite considerable), but just as Victoria embodied, to a remarkable degree, deliverance from the systemic ignominy described by Shelley, so Trump — ah, but is it really necessary for me to complete that thought?