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The King's New Clothes

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 wideranging 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