Eric Nelson's The Royalist Revolution begins and ends with the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a moment of no small importance in any history of constitutionalism or the American founding. The book's opening lines recall James Wilson's proposal to create a new federal executive, one that would consist of a single person with sweeping prerogative powers, and one that earned Edmund Randolph's scorn as “the foetus of monarchy.” Many scholars have regarded Wilson's proposals and the subsequent Constitution as a rejection of American Revolutionary principles. According to the traditional narrative about 1787, conservative, aristocratic-leaning politicians capitalized on a combination of government weakness and anxiety about fiscal and political chaos to persuade the nation that the egalitarian and republican ideas of preceding decades were no longer viable (184).
For Nelson, however, neither Wilson nor his supporters betrayed revolutionary ideals. The new frame of government proposed, with its strong chief magistrate, embodied the “apotheosis of their Revolutionary commitments, not a repudiation of them” (185). As he argues in The Royalist Revolution, a number of the Founding Fathers assembled had in fact embraced royalism for upwards of twenty years. The strong executive created in 1787 therefore marked the resurgence and realization of a long-standing royalist constitutionalism. Here, “royalism” evokes the political and constitutional theory of those who defended the king during the English Revolution (1642–60). Proponents typically believed that prerogative power was compatible with protecting subjects’ liberties. Royalism did not signify an idealization of kingly title or hereditary right but was manifest in its adherents “orientation” (9) to questions regarding monarchy, prerogative power, and corruption.
Although tracing the emergence and development of royalism takes Nelson back to seventeenth-century England, his most important intervention concerns the “royalist revolution” in mid-eighteenth-century British North America. Not to be taken as coterminous with the American Revolution, the royalist revolution instead refers to a “particular understanding of the purposes and character” (9) of the colonial revolt against Great Britain. The book suggests that there was a spectrum of patriotism but deftly shows where the numerous patriots diverged. Whiggish patriots believed that only a well-constituted assembly could represent the people and that corruption stemmed from the expanding powers of the crown. Patriot royalists, however, contended that an expansion of the royal prerogative promised a path forward. And it was patriot royalism that Nelson argues achieved intellectual dominance on two key occasions—the early 1770s and the later 1780s.
The Royalist Revolution necessarily engages an old debate about the imperial crisis and the American Revolutionary War: did the American colonists rebel against the king or against Parliament? Nelson does not merely claim that numerous patriots remained loyal to George III up until the early moments of 1776, however. He argues that figures like John Adams, James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, James Iredell, and Benjamin Rush went much further, offering a “neo-Stuart defense of prerogative power during the imperial crisis” (5). As these patriots opposed Parliament, they simultaneously waged a campaign to restore the ancient prerogative powers of the crown, including the negative voice, or royal veto. They aimed, in effect, to overturn the much vaunted English constitution secured in 1688.
By asserting that royalism was intertwined with patriotism from the 1760s forwards, The Royalist Revolution offers a compelling challenge to scholars such as Caroline Robbins, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and J. G. A. Pocock, who have instead portrayed the patriots as “radical whigs, or republicans-in-waiting” (6). Perhaps even more importantly, whereas many historians have characterized the patriots’ appeal to the crown as a rhetorical ploy or tactical maneuver in their struggle against Parliament, Nelson takes the language of these appeals more seriously. In fact, he insists that many patriots profoundly reconsidered their basic political commitments in the 1760s and 1770s; while American colonists had historically seen themselves as heirs of the parliamentary struggle against absolutism, reaction to the Stamp Act and Townshend duties changed the terms of the debate. Patriots increasingly began to emphasize the failure of the British people to protect the “ancient independence” of the crown from Parliament, drawing on arguments that had emerged in the 1730s about a weakened monarchy.
Relying on close rereadings of key pamphlets and letters, Nelson traces the ebb and flow of patriot royalism. His first chapter examines the period between 1768 and 1775, analyzing the writings of patriots including Adams, Rush, and Wilson to underline their repeated defense of prerogative power and striking return to the royalism of the Stuart courts. Focusing on a similar period, in chapter 2 he documents the emergence of a royalist theory of representation among patriot pamphleteers like Bancroft and Iredell, a theory that stressed the authorization given to the king but not to Parliament by colonial charters. Documenting the pervasiveness of patriot royalism not only works to underscore the fundamental continuity between 1775 and 1787 but also allows Nelson to highlight the significance of the 1776 “flight” from the king and the turn to republicanism in chapter 3. But while he acknowledges that patriot royalists generally rejected both their former king and monarchical culture after 1776, Nelson's fourth chapter maintains that many continued to believe that chief magistrates might still represent the body of the people. Patriots like Adams and Hamilton quietly undertook detailed analyses of monarchy and prerogative power even as anti-monarchism dominated the landscape. Finally, as Nelson shows in chapter 5, the powerful presidency created in 1787 emerged not because the founding fathers idealized monarchical culture but because so many of them believed—and had believed for arguably two decades—that a veto-wielding chief magistrate could stand above faction and prevent legislative abuses.
Nelson eloquently underlines the significance of his reinterpretation for American historians. The Royalist Revolution challenges readers to rethink the conventional narrative about the revolt against tyranny, the republicanism of the Founding Fathers, and the surprising extension of executive power in 1787. Readers of this journal will also note that Nelson's exciting work contributes to a growing body of scholarship on monarchy, loyalty, and the significance of royal power in the British Empire. Many of the patriot royalists insisted that it was the person of the king who bound together the empire, recognizing the power inherent in the traditional relationship between monarch and subject and understanding that a king could protect the liberties of subjects who swore obedience. In this, they were not unlike many others in the British Empire. Additionally, where Nelson's crisp analysis focuses on a particular subset of patriots, it does provoke a number of questions for those who have read recent work by Maya Jasanoff, Jerry Bannister, and Liam Riordan. Did the royalist patriots, as they distanced themselves from patriots who critiqued the prerogative, also distinguish themselves from Loyalists, who may have believed in loyalty but did not necessarily always believe in prerogative power? If so, when, and how? Might not the answer to these questions help shed even further light on Nelson's memorable penultimate line about a divergence between Great Britain and the United States, “on one side of the Atlantic, there would be kings without monarchy; on the other, monarchy without kings” (232)?
