The Royalist Revolution

Monarchy and the American Founding

Eric Nelson

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780674979772, 9780674735347
• eBook ISBN: 9780674744639
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Winner of the Society of the Cincinnati History Prize, Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey
Finalist, George Washington Prize
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2015

Generations of students have been taught that the American Revolution was a revolt against royal tyranny. In this revisionist account, Eric Nelson argues that a great many of our "founding fathers" saw themselves as rebels against the British Parliament, not the Crown. The Royalist Revolution interprets the patriot campaign of the 1770s as an insurrection in favor of royal power—driven by the conviction that the Lords and Commons had usurped the just prerogatives of the monarch.

"The Royalist Revolution is a thought-provoking book, and Nelson is to be commended for reviving discussion of the complex ideology of the American Revolution. He reminds us that there was a spectrum of opinion even among the most ardent patriots and a deep British influence on the political institutions of the new country."
—Andrew O'Shaughnessy, Wall Street Journal

"A scrupulous archaeology of American revolutionary thought."
—Thomas Meaney, The Nation

"A powerful double-barrelled challenge to historiographical orthodoxy."
—Colin Kidd, London Review of Books

"[A] brilliant and provocative analysis of the American Revolution."
—John Brewer, New York Review of Books

CHAPTER 1

Patriot Royalism

The Stuart Monarchy and the Turn to Prerogative, 1768–1775

One of the more ironic moments in the decade-long conflict between Great Britain and her American colonies occurred on January 26, 1775. In the midst of an acrimonious debate over the wisdom of the Coercive Acts, the House of Commons paused to consider a very different question: whether to instruct its chaplain to preach a sermon on the occasion of “King Charles’s Martyrdom on the 30th of January.”¹ Proponents of the motion argued that they were simply abiding by the terms of an act of Parliament that required such an observance. They pointedly declined to offer a defense of the observance itself. As for the eighty-three MPs who voted against the motion, their sentiments seem to have been perfectly captured by the remarks of the radical whig John Wilkes, lord mayor of London and MP for Middlesex:

The Lord Mayor, Mr. Wilkes, said, that he was for the observance of the day, not in the usual manner by fasting and prayer to deprecate the pretended wrath of heaven, but in a very different way from what some other gentlemen had proposed; that it should be celebrated as a festival, as a day of triumph, not kept as a fast; that the death of the first Charles, a determined enemy of the liberties of his country, who made war on his people, and murdered many thousands of his innocent subjects—an odious, hypocritical tyrant, who was, in the great Milton’s words, ipso Nerone neronior—should be considered as a sacrifice to the public justice of the nation, as highly approved by heaven, and ought to be had in solemn remembrance as the most glorious deed ever done in this, or any country, without which we should at this hour have had no constitution, degenerated into the most abject slaves on the face of the earth, not governed by the known and equal laws of a limited monarchy, but subject to the imperious will of an arbitrary sovereign.²

For Wilkes and the other whigs who voted with him, Charles Stuart was the embodiment of arbitrary and absolute monarchy, a latter-day Nero who had laid waste to his own country. Far from producing a “martyr,” the regicide of 1649 had instead offered up “a sacrifice to the public justice of the nation.”

Wilkes returned to this theme on October 26th of the same year, when he rose in the House to deliver his famous speech advocating conciliation with America. His primary argument on that occasion was that war should be avoided on pragmatic grounds, lest “the grandeur of the British Empire pass away.”³ But he also dwelt at length on the “injustice” of the campaign then being contemplated: “I call the war with our brethren in America an unjust, felonious war, because the primary cause and confessed origin of it is, to attempt to take their money from them without their consent, contrary to the common rights of all mankind, and those great fundamental principles of the English constitution, for which Hampden bled.” John Hampden was the plaintiff in the ship money case—that great symbol of Caroline tyranny and the evil of prerogative powers—who had been mortally wounded while fighting the Stuarts on Charlgrove Field in 1643. In Wilkes’s telling, the American colonists were straightforwardly defending the parliamentarian principles of the 1640s: the Petition of Right, the rejection of prerogative rule, and popular sovereignty.⁴ And Wilkes found their specific demands eminently reasonable: “They justly expect to be put on an equal footing with the other subjects of the empire, and are willing to come into any fair agreement with you in commercial concerns.”⁵

This last statement summarizes the position that scholars have come to know as “the dominion theory.”⁶ In the wake of the Townshend Acts, the patriots had jettisoned their previous insistence that Parliament possessed substantial jurisdiction over the colonies but simply lacked authority to legislate for them in particular respects and had come to argue instead that America was juridically “outside the realm” of Great Britain and that Parliament accordingly lacked any jurisdiction over it whatsoever. What connected the American colonies to Great Britain, on this account, was simply the person of the king, who served the same constitutional role in each part of his dominions and who had granted charters to the various colonizing companies and proprietors by his grace and at his pleasure. The king’s prerogative crossed the ocean, but Parliament’s authority ended at Britain’s shore. The only issue open for discussion concerned the regulation of North American trade, which most patriots were prepared to entrust to Parliament as a concession, but not as a matter of right. It was, as we shall see, an extraordinary position, but it was not without precedent. Indeed, the argument that America was “outside the realm” and therefore to be governed by prerogative had famously been made once before in English constitutional history, by the Stuart monarchs, James I and Charles I, in their acrimonious disputes with Parliament over colonial affairs in the 1620s. The stunning irony of witnessing a radical whig such as Wilkes endorsing the Stuart position on the royal prerogative was not lost on the prime minister. Responding to Wilkes and to Charles Fox (who had likewise cast the Americans as defenders of “Whig” principles), Lord North replied that “if he understood the meaning of the words Whig and Tory, which the last speaker had mentioned, he conceived that it was characteristic of Whiggism to gain as much for the people as possible, while the aim of Toryism was to increase the prerogative. That in the present case, the administration contended for the right of parliament, while the Americans talked of their belonging to the crown. Their language therefore was that of Toryism.”⁷

In fact, as numerous contemporaries observed, Lord North did not go far enough. The constitutional position embraced by most patriots between 1769 and 1775 was not “Tory” in any recognizable sense. No English tory had advocated anything like it for nearly a century. It represented instead a return to the Royalism of the Jacobean and Caroline courts and it accordingly forced patriots to develop a radical, revisionist account of seventeenth-century English history. Having spent the better part of the decade envisioning themselves as heirs to the parliamentary struggle against Stuart absolutism and popery, they now became the last Atlantic defenders of the Stuart monarchy and, as their critics noted, found themselves drifting perilously close to Jacobitism. Nor should we dismiss this volte-face as a mere display of forensic opportunism. Patriots of the period did not simply cite Stuart precedents “in passing,” without addressing or acknowledging the ideological stakes involved. Quite the contrary, they were in most cases only too happy to emphasize the Stuart pedigree of their new commitments and to reconsider the legacy of the two English Revolutions accordingly. Only when we have recognized this fact will we be able to appreciate the true drama and character of the republican turn in 1776.

I

In his Massachusettensis letters of 1774, the loyalist Daniel Leonard offered a cogent, if partisan, account of the manner in which the patriot position had evolved during the course of the 1760s:

When the stamp-act was made, the authority of parliament to impose internal taxes was denied, but their right to impose external ones; or, in other words, to lay duties upon goods and merchandise was admitted. When the act was made imposing duties upon tea, &c. a new distinction was set up, that the parliament had a right to lay duties upon merchandise for the purpose of regulating trade, but not for the purpose of raising a revenue: That is, the parliament had good right and lawful authority, to lay the former duty of a shilling on the pound, but had none to lay the present duty of three pence. Having got thus far safe, it was only taking one step more to extricate ourselves entirely from their fangs, and become independent states; that our patriots most heroically resolved upon, and flatly denied that parliament had a right to make any laws whatsoever, that should be binding upon the colonies.⁸

Despite the sarcasm of the passage, Leonard’s summary was fairly accurate. The position of most American whigs at the start of the crisis was indeed that Parliament possessed extensive jurisdiction over the colonies but lacked the authority to impose direct, internal taxes. It was on these grounds that patriots denied the legitimacy of the Stamp Act. Some explained the restriction by asserting that taxation was distinct from legislation and required the direct consent of all those concerned (delivered through their representatives), while others argued more broadly that Parliament should be accorded jurisdiction only over the “external” affairs of the colonies. Taxation, on this latter account, was merely one important example of an “internal” power reserved to the various colonial legislatures.⁹ Once the Stamp Act was repealed and replaced with the Townshend Acts in 1767, however, the patriots found themselves in something of a quandary. From 1763 to 1766, they had explicitly conceded Parliament’s right to regulate imperial commerce and to impose duties on commercial products for that purpose (these were undeniably instances of “external” legislation).¹⁰ On what grounds, then, could they dispute the legitimacy of a parliamentary bill imposing duties on imports? As Leonard observed, patriots first attempted to address this challenge by endorsing a distinction—proposed by John Dickinson of Pennsylvania in his Farmer’s Letters (1768)—between parliamentary duties designed to regulate commerce and those designed to raise revenue. The former, Dickinson argued, were legitimate, whereas the latter were not.¹¹ In the course of the pamphlet wars of the late 1760s, however, it became clear that this was not a tenable position. In the first place, it seemed to require an impracticable degree of access to the intentions of those who imposed commercial duties, since both sorts of duties could look the same on paper. More fundamentally, it invited precisely the same challenge that had been leveled so effectively against patriot denials of a parliamentary right of taxation: How could it be that Parliament had the authority to pass laws regulating commerce, but lacked the authority to impose duties on trade? Was this not a distinction without a difference? As William Drayton of South Carolina put it, “I must confess, that it seems astonishing, at least to my very limited understanding, that any man should say … that altho’ consent by representation, is absolutely necessary to the taxation of America, yet, British legislation may legally operate over America, without, and even against her consent.”¹² The arguments offered on behalf of this “middle position,” as another commentator put it, had ended up “proving too much.”¹³

The patriots solved their dilemma by embracing the dominion theory, according to which Parliament possessed no jurisdiction whatsoever over the colonies.¹⁴ North America was now understood to be “outside the realm,” a separate dominion within the British Empire. It did not follow, pace Leonard, that the colonies were to be regarded as “independent states”; rather, they were to be understood as “dependent” solely on the person of the king, and not upon the “Legislature of Great Britain.” The first intimations of this revised view seem to have come from Benjamin Franklin in the early months of 1766, a period during which he was actively seeking to replace Pennsylvania’s proprietary government with a royal one (to move from “the chains of Proprietary Slavery to Royal Liberty,” as his protégé Joseph Galloway had put it), much to the chagrin of many prominent Pennsylvania whigs.¹⁵ In an essay dated January 11, Franklin observed that, when considering the merits of the colonial case against the Stamp Act, “it may be of use to recollect; that the colonies were planted in times when the powers of parliament were not supposed so extensive, as they are become since the Revolution.” Indeed, they “were planted in lands and countries w[h]ere the parliament had not then the least jurisdiction.”¹⁶ The first settlers launched their ventures “by permission from the crown” and the territories in which they settled “thus became new dominions of the crown, settled under royal charters, that formed their several governments and constitutions, on which the parliament was never consulted; or had the least participation.” But Franklin refused at this stage to argue that Parliament therefore possessed no legitimate jurisdiction over the colonies in the present day; he stated only that the colonies “have had, from their beginning, like Ireland, their separate parliaments, called modestly assemblies. … How far, and in what particulars, they are subordinate and subject to the British parliament; or whether they may not, if the King pleases, be governed as domains of the crown, without that parliament, are points newly agitated, never yet, but probably soon will be, thoroughly considered and settled.”¹⁷ He took precisel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction: “The War of Parliament”
• 1. Patriot Royalism: The Stuart Monarchy and the Turn to Prerogative, 1768–1775
• 2. “One Step Farther, and We Are Got Back to Where We Set Out From”: Patriots and the Royalist Theory of Representation
• 3. “The Lord Alone Shall Be King of America”: 1776, Common Sense, and the Republican Turn
• 4. “The Old Government, as Near as Possible”: Royalism in the Wilderness, 1776–1780
• 5. “All Know That a Single Magistrate Is Not a King”: Royalism and the Constitution of 1787
• Conclusion: “A New Monarchy in America”
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index