Royalist Revolution

In his 2014 study of The Royalist Revolution, Eric Nelson presents the counter-intuitive case that the American revolutionaries were not revolting against monarchy but against a legislature: “It was, indeed, a rebellion in favor of royal power” (2).

Nelson elaborates: “Colonial whigs who had long been ‘slumbering under the old prejudices in favour of Parliamentary power’ suddenly found themselves confronted in the 1760s and 1770s with a parliament that claimed the right to legislate for them ‘in all cases whatsoever.’ Those we call ‘patriots’ eventually responded to this challenge by developing the view that Parliament possessed no jurisdiction whatsoever over British North America. The colonies, they insisted, were connected to Britain solely through ‘the person and prerogative of the king’” (2).

The problem was that the revolutions of the preceding century had robbed the king of the ability to do what the colonists wanted him to do: “the late eighteenth- century British monarchy was in no position to function as the ‘pervading’ and ‘superintending’ power of the empire. The constitutional settlement that followed the Glorious Revolution had definitively subjected the king to Parliament, drastically curtailing his prerogatives and recasting him as a pure ‘executive.’ The powers of state that legally remained with the Crown were no longer in fact wielded by the person of the king, but rather by ministers who were required to command a parliamentary majority (and who themselves sat in one of the two houses).”

American patriots were conservatives, even reactionaries, who proposed “to turn back the clock on the English constitution by over a hundred years— to separate the king from his Parliament and his British ministers and to restore ancient prerogatives of the Crown that had been extinguished by the whig ascendancy. These theorists wanted more monarchy, not less. Their complaint, as summarized by Benjamin Franklin, was that the Lords and Commons ‘seem to have been long encroaching on the Rights of their and our Sovereign, assuming too much of his Authority, and betraying his Interests.’” 

Nelson observes, “Defenders of the British administration during the revolutionary period did not accuse patriots of being crypto- epublicans, but rather of being de facto Jacobites and absolutists” (2). This wasn’t accurate, but the fact that they made the charge is itself revealing.