The King's Three Faces

Brendan McConville. The King's Three Faces: The Rise & Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press (for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA), 2006.

This book is a cultural history of a colonial America which has been completely forgotten, and which most Americans have no idea ever existed. The “Royal America” that the subtitle refers to was a colonial society which defined its relationship to the British Empire (the first British Empire, as McConville repeatedly stresses) through a primarily emotional attachment to the monarchy. This royal attachment grew stronger in America even as society in England itself was developing a greater attachment to Parliament as the locus of British sovereignty and the defender of British liberties. It did not break until the very eve of the American Revolution.

This view of colonists as arch-monarchists in an Empire formally committed to legislative supremacy contrasted sharply with the generally accepted view of an eighteenth-century proto-America drifting away from the British system and developing its own republican traditions and values. Because this is a history of a mentalitie McConville focuses on a cultural history of what colonial Americans were reading, hearing, and seeing—in an attempt to recreate what they were feeling. Their tie to the King was primarily an emotional one; it had to be, as their understanding was at odds with British constitutional theory and practice as it was developing in the mother country.

This came to be because the empire early on relied on such emotional bonds, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, to hold the disparate and multi-cultural empire together in the absence of a robust administrative infrastructure. Emotional bonds replaced institutional ones. This system might have worked in the long run, but in the American colonies demographic realities mitigated against that possibility—the population grew much too fast for the halting growth of the imperial administration to provide opportunities for ambitious young colonials. As a result, the colonies developed a sizeable “ruling class” which wasn’t allowed to rule—a colonial elite which was increasingly shut out of the sort of offices which provided precious social status.

The break between colonists and the distant King whom they mistakenly identified as the protector of their liberties and their ally against what they perceived as Parliamentary tyranny was much-delayed, and all the more anguished and violent when it came. The destruction of royal iconography destroyed much of the material culture which might otherwise have survived to remind us of this history, but depth of that emotional purging can still be seen in the angry and defiant wording of the Declaration of Independence