Nelson, “The King is the Only Sovereign of the Empire”: Prerogative, Representation,
and the American Founding
Précis
My paper at the July 2012 session of the workshop argued that those who made the
“patriot” case in the late 1760s and early 1770s understood themselves to be reviving the
Royalist political and constitutional theory of the 1630s and 1640s. Their goal of
denying parliament any jurisdiction over British North America could only be achieved
through the assertion of sweeping new prerogative powers for the crown—powers that
the reviled Stuart monarchs had insisted upon, but which had been extinguished by the
whig settlement of 1689. The American writers, therefore, found themselves abandoning
the whig tradition (and, in particular, the whig theory of popular sovereignty) and arguing
that, in the great constitutional crisis of the seventeenth century, the Royalists had gotten
it right after all. None of this was lost on their opponents: defenders of the British
administration during this period did not accuse the patriots of being crypto-republicans,
as so many scholars have regarded them since the 1960s, but rather of being de facto
Jacobites and “prerogative men.” Patriots defended their new position historically, by
endorsing the Stuart conception of the royal prerogative, and philosophically, by reviving
the Royalist theory of representation (the latter was needed in order to explain why the
existence of prerogative powers in the crown was consistent with the liberty of subjects—
that is, to defend an alternative, monarchical conception of popular sovereignty). It is, I
suggest, not at all coincidental that those who were most active in developing and
propagating this neo-Stuart defense of the royal prerogative in the 1770s—John Adams,
James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, James Iredell, and others—also became the leading
advocates for sweeping prerogative powers in the executive in the 1780s. Indeed, Wilson
himself defended the Federalist vision of executive power in the Constitutional
Convention by remarking that, during the Revolution, “the people of Amer[ica] Did not
oppose the British King but the parliament—the opposition was not ag[ains]t an Unity
but a corrupt multitude.” The American Revolution, unlike the two seventeenth-century
English revolutions and the French Revolution, was a revolution against a legislature, not
against a king. It is this basic fact, more than any other, that explains the trajectory of
American constitutionalism in the 1780s. I tell the full version of this story in a book
manuscript, currently entitled “The Royalist Revolution.”