On the King's Three Faces

This is a work of revisionist history on colonial North America. Unlike other works which clarify or dive into gaps in our knowledge of colonial British American society, McConville’s book represents a full break with earlier scholarship.

In it, he argues that those who look for the origins of republicanism and liberal politics in the colonial period are disseminating little more than Whig history—all of those studies begin with the American Revolution and raise questions about “why?” McConville here says, “let’s look at colonial America by imagining that the Revolution never happened, how would that change our view of the period?” His answer is that the reality of British North America is, in fact, the opposite of what Whig historians say. North America was likely the most royalist part of the British Empire, far more so than England, Wales, or Scotland. The narrative goes something like this.

When the first English settlers, they felt ambivalence toward the king, and this continued throughout the Stuart period—they believed that the Stuarts were too Catholic and, in many of the colonies, supported parliament in the English Civil War. They also supported Cromwell’s Commonwealth and were skeptical of the Restoration of the Tudors. However, with the Glorious Revolution, the monarch was a good Protestant who colonists felt a strong relationship with. While the ascent of the Hanoverians was viewed with skepticism by those in the British isles (“a German on the British throne?”), the Hanoverians were viewed positively in British North America—they were accustomed to a variety of cultures and deepened their personal, affective relationship with the king. In fact, most colonists did not really understand the British system of government and, while parliament was effectively supreme in Britain, sovereignty was seen as lying in the monarchy in America. This led to a divergence between British and “American” views of the British state. Nevertheless, colonists did see themselves as good Britons.

In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, parliamentary taxation was seen as an encroachment of colonists’ right, and they submitted appeals to the king. However, when he did not respond, they came to believe that there was a conspiracy within the king’s ministry, although King George III was personally ignorant of the state of affairs. The rebellions in America were not against the king as sovereign and individual, but against parliament and the royal ministry. Yet, the arrival of British troops and occupation of Atlantic cities made it apparent that the king understood what was taking place, and colonists felt personally betrayed. The transformation of America during and after the Revolution—the toppling of statues of the king, the renaming of streets and universities, and other actions—was nothing less than symbolic regicide.

One thing that this book does is offer a great deal of illumination to Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. After reading this, my questions remaining about Bailyn’s book found answers and everything clicked into place.

Yet, given the volume of scholarship on colonial America, the fact that I haven’t read anything resembling a similar argument does make me a bit of skeptical. While I am not personally familiar with the source material, the enormous divergence between McConville’s work and other scholarship makes me think the perhaps he overstates his case. Follow-up studies here are necessary to corroborate McConville’s findings, especially on the regional level. While I think McConville might be onto something in the case of Virginia and, perhaps, New York. Maryland was largely Catholic, and I wonder about the extent to which Marylanders would have viewed the monarch positively. Massachusetts, on the other hand, while profoundly Protestant, maintained tensions with the monarchy, especially after the re-establishment of Massachusetts as a royal colony in 1691—the British state also extended certain rights to non-Puritans, which is exactly what the Puritans had refused to do.

Nevertheless, McConville’s work is fluid, clear, and worth thinking about.