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The greatest of them were the Comanche, an offshoot of the Shoshane, distant relatives of the Mexica, speaking a similar language and also worshipping the sun. Decisions of war and peace were made by assemblies at which the older men were the most influential, but younger bloods and women sat in an outer circle and could voice their views. They elected a paraibo, a warlord, to lead confederacies of warbands.

Their world had been changed by the arrival of the Spanish, who brought guns and horses that had never existed in the Americas: after an uprising by the peoples of the south-east, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the Spanish lost control of thousands of horses. The Comanche, using guns, bows and spears and wearing leather armour, mastered equestrianism, breeding as many as 80,000 of the small Arab horses, trained for heat and dust. The traditional narrative of indigenous peoples inevitably defeated by triumphant Europeans is belied by the rise of the Comanche, who over 150 years thrived in the south/south-west by adapting skilfully. The horses and guns allowed them to slaughter the bison herds, over 200,000 annually, and also to smash their rivals, the Apache, who were vulnerable because they farmed as well as raided, and to raid into Spanish territory, often on the night of the full moon – the Comanche Moon.

The Spanish controlled these territories on European maps, but their governors called this Comanchería, and negotiated deals with Comanche paraibos to desist from raids and instead trade: the Comanche traded in enslaved captives, fellow natives and Europeans. At the Taos fairs, the Spanish governors exchanged horses and guns for bison, beaver pelts and slaves, especially girls. Once sold, the Comanche ‘deflower and corrupt [the girls] in the sight of innumerable assemblies of barbarians and Catholics … saying to those who buy them, “Now you can take her – now she’s good.”’ On Comanche raids, men were usually killed, eyes gouged out, scalped, penises often stuffed in their mouths; if they were kept alive, they were taken back to the villages where the women tortured them. Girls were raped, but they and their children were kept as slaves.

There was another side to this ferocity: the Comanche and other Native Americans often adopted the European prisoners who survived these early torments. Once these prisoners had learned how to live and ride like them, their captors were colour-blind, incorporating Europeans and captured black slaves into their families. One of their greatest warlords would be half-European.

By the 1760s, the Comanche numbered around 40,000, each family owning around eight horses, and ruled much of New Mexico and Texas, which was virtually purged of European settlers. The nominal rule of Comanchería changed when the Europeans negotiated the end of the war, but it made little difference to the Comanche.

On 25 October 1760, the twenty-two-year-old George III, the first of his family to speak English without a guttural Germanic accent, inherited the throne. He was determined to be a ‘patriot king’, reinvigorating royal power by removing the venal Whig oligarchs who had ruled since 1688: the sovereign was still the head of government, appointing ministers who, although led by a premier, responsible for managing royal business in parliament, were accountable to the crown. Democracy was still far away. Full-lipped, small-headed with bulbous watery-blue eyes, industrious and sincere, George called Newcastle ‘a knave’ and Pitt ‘the snake’, while his views on slavery were radical. Slavery, he wrote in an essay for his mentor, the earl of Bute, was ‘as repugnant to the civil law as to the law of nature’.

The serpentine Pitt was mobbed by fans at George III’s coronation, but in the row over the peace he resigned, bursting into tears. Instead George appointed his unworldly mentor Bute, who so mismanaged parliamentary and diplomatic business that the king realized that he had to compromise. He and his new prime minister, George Grenville – brother-in-law of Pitt – agreed that the American colonists, 2.5 million of them (of whom a quarter were enslaved African-Americans), must contribute to the cost of the war. In 1765 they therefore imposed new taxes – a stamp tax – on colonial goods which provoked American resistance under the slogan ‘no taxation without representation’. George and his ministers blinked and after only a year repealed the Stamp Act, encouraged by Pitt, who declared, ‘I rejoice that America has resisted.’ But London also honoured promises to Native American allies by banning American expansion over the Alleghenies, which Washington and Jefferson, typical land-hungry magnates and members of the Virginian House of Burgesses, regarded as their right.