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  • The King’s New Clothes
  • Eric Hinderaker (bio)
Brendan McConville. The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xv + 322 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95.

I find much to admire in this book. It is, in the first place, sweeping in scope and bold in its revisionism. It engages the big themes and fundamental questions that microhistories and more specialized works often gesture toward but rarely take head-on. McConville wants to shake our most basic conceptions of Anglo-American political culture, and to do so in a way that challenges, not just the thinking of specialists, but also the generalizations offered in textbooks and survey classes. He hopes, in short, to overturn some of the most cherished assumptions in early American history. At the center of McConville's wide-ranging book is the claim that royalism—not Parliament-centered constitutionalism, not incipient democracy—was the central feature of the colonies' shared political culture. While the Glorious Revolution gave England its king-in-parliament, it gave the colonies a "Protestant political culture built around a cult of benevolent monarchy" (p. 8). The King's Three Faces explores the forms that royalism took in the colonies and challenges the "'whiggish' and teleological history" that, according to McConville, still dominates the history of political culture in British North America (p. 3). Though the book's argument is not wholly persuasive and its revisionism is overstated, there is a great deal of value and interest in its pages.

The book is organized into three parts. In the first, "The British Peace," McConville traces the long trajectory from the turmoil of the English Civil War to the restoration of order following the Glorious Revolution. In the colonies, the result of this transition was an imperial culture that was strikingly royalist in character. During the first half of the eighteenth century, public celebrations, popular iconography, and popular conceptions of history all came to reflect a growing enthusiasm, even reverence, for the British Empire and its Hanoverian kings. This widespread support for king and empire was a far cry from the staunchly anti-royalist republicanism of the seventeenth century's "hot" Protestants who settled in Massachusetts Bay while their fellow Puritans made war on Charles I. It included enthusiastic celebrations of royal holidays and [End Page 184] a growing affection for the stability the Hanovers represented. In a chapter devoted to "The Passions of Empire," McConville contends that the empire inspired a combination of fear, love, and desire in its subjects. Fear, because empires and the powerful kings associated with them could too easily become tyrannical in the manner of the Catholic, absolutist French, so one thread of imperial culture was fiercely anti-French and anti-Catholic; love, because the wisdom of the Hanovers and the perfection of the British constitution ensured the preservation of British liberties; desire, because monarchy itself was increasingly commodified and woven into the structure of colonists' aspirations. Cures and remedies—everything from pearl dentifrice to smallpox inoculation—were recommended by association with royalty. Royal symbols appeared on glassware and pottery, and medals and prints bearing the kings' likenesses flooded colonial markets. "Purchasing such goods," McConville suggests, "allowed for the royalization of the household" (p. 127).

Part Two, "Three Faces," purports to identify "at least three conceptions of the king and the empire [that] were manifesting themselves in the American provinces" (p. 143). Though its four chapters contain much of the book's most interesting material, they strain toward a unified and coherent argument and are surprisingly vague in articulating what "the king's three faces" really were. They also defy easy summary. In general, they argue that notions of kingship and royal authority expanded and fragmented in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, so that colonists of every stripe invested the notion of royalty with expectations and associations it could not easily deliver. For colonial elites, monarchy meant patronage, yet the creaky infrastructure of empire never kept pace with population growth in the colonies and leading men were therefore often frustrated in their pursuit of place. Here, apparently, is the king's first face...

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