I can see what you’re getting at and don’t doubt that that was why the change was made in 1801. (The title ‘King of France’ was dropped at the same time as part of the same tidying-up process.) However, there is a huge difference between ‘united kingdom’ (weak sense) and ‘United Kingdom’ (strong sense). Someone hearing the phrase ‘united kingdom’ between 1707 and 1800 might well have been able to get the gist of what the speaker meant, but I’m pretty sure that it would have sounded a very affected turn of phrase, partly because no one else was using it (the OED dates ‘United Kingdom’ to the 1800 Act) and partly because that was not its name. To everyone in Britain in 1801 the only possible answer to the question ‘who was the first Monarch of the United Kingdom?’ would have been ‘George III’.
Then I’d have to accept that, at the time, the term was not used in respect of the kingdom of Great Britain, and the use of the term with respect to that kingdom (which a google search shows is now widespread) is a modern practice.
So, yes, in 1801 the answer to the question was “George III”. Nowadays the answer could be modified by adding “but, if you mean the established in 1707 which we now frequently call the United Kingdom, Anne.”
You mean like the right wingers in the 1950s who demanded that we “unleash Chiang Kai-Chek” there are folks demanding that Tony Blair unleash the Dame of Sark? :eek:
APB, I thought that the Brits dropped their claim to the title “King of France” in 1814 or 1815, as part of the peace treaties that recognized Louis XVIII as King of France?
Either way, aldiboronti, I think that the last British King who claimed to be King of France would have been George III, not George IV. Of course, if it was done in 1814 or 1815, any actual consultation on the point with the Crown would have been with the Prince of Wales, as Regent, not with George III.
The title “King of France” was dropped in 1801, in the context of the revision of the Royal style which followed the Act of Union. As the UK was actively engaged at the time in a war to restore the Bourbons to the throne of France, to be maintaining a claim to it themselves would have seemed not merely silly but positively perverse.