The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding by Eric Nelson (review)

Eric Nelson’s new book is a controversial analysis of the American founding. Far from being a revolt against the “repeated injuries and usurpations” of royal power as stated in the Declaration of Independence, the American rebellion was a revolt in favour of royal government, driven by the conviction that parliament had usurped the just prerogatives of the crown. Those attuned to the history of the American Revolution will be struck by the significance of this claim. While the intellectual origins of the Revolution have long been the subject of controversy — from the Lockean liberalism of Hartz, to the republican turn of Bailyn, Pocock, and Wood, to the neo-liberalism of Appleby — few have gone so far as to suggest royalism as a progenitor of the movement.

There is much to commend Nelson’s intellectual revisionism. What Nelson terms “patriot royalism” was a significant strand of thought and framed how many colonists understood the imperial crisis. They saw in George III an executive capable of offering them protection from the tyranny of parliament and imagined that he would listen to their pleas for redress. The king’s rejection of colonial petitions turned Americans toward republicanism in 1776. Nelson takes his argument into the era of the constitution to explain why, despite their disappointments in 1775, the revolutionaries kept faith with a powerful executive and saw independent prerogative powers as a crucial check to legislative tyranny. The modern — albeit circumscribed — presidential veto can be interpreted as a reflection of patriot royalism. For Nelson, the 1787 Constitution was not a counterrevolution against the radicalism of 1775–76; but nor was it a radical republican experiment in popular sovereignty. It was the product of ideological consistency and the inherent royalism of the Revolution: “the Constitution… upheld the spirit of ‘75” (p. 185).

The book’s greatest achievement is to counter the triumphalist reading of revolutionary values that have come to be described as the “republican synthesis.” In Nelson’s interpretation, revolutionary Americans were not as radical as we once thought. They wanted to turn back the clock on the British constitution and, far from being harbingers of the modern age, were profoundly at odds with constitutional evolutions in eighteenth-century Britain. He reminds us that the American Revolution was not the first of the modern revolutions but the last of the early modern revolutions. But Nelson stops short of endorsing the “conservative revolution” theory favoured by those on the modern American right and contextualizes revolutionary ideology as very much a product of its time and place.

In entirely reconstructing our history of the origins of the Revolution, however, there are issues with this book. Nelson states that patriot royalism was not “coterminous with the American Revolution as a whole” (p. 9) and that he is only describing one strand of thought. One gets the sense that this statement is a reaction to the criticisms Nelson received in a William and Mary Quarterly roundtable in 2011 than it is a genuine statement of his reservations. For Nelson, royalism is the key and the book’s supporting evidence is deployed in such a way as to minimize alternative explanations. Various texts are interpreted as “influential” without adequate backing (p. 43) while figures such as James Chalmers and Charles Inglis are presented not as Loyalists but rather “respondents” to Tom Paine in order to build the case for royalism (pp. 131-2). Most worryingly, Nelson tends to take his chosen authors at their word, explicitly asserting that people meant what they said (p. 26). One need not return to a Marxist interpretation of ideas as mere rationalizations for underlying interests, however, to appreciate that self-interest and rhetoric played a part in the expression of ideas.

The most problematic aspect of the book relates to definition. Nelson defines monarchy by the negative voice of the executive over the legislature. Patriotic royalists knew they could not reform monarchy in America...