Reviewed by Maya Jasanoff | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3

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Reviewed by Maya Jasanoff | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776. By Brendan McConville. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 340 pages. $39.95 (cloth), $21.95 (paper).
Reviewed by Maya Jasanoff, Haåvard University
In the days following the Declaration of Independence, the British monarchy came crashing down all over the newly united states. Patriots marched through the streets of Boston tearing down inn signs, placards, and anything else bearing royal emblems, before hurling them all into a general bonfire. A statue of the king was wheeled through the town of Baltimore, like a condemned man headed for execution, and set ablaze before a crowd of hundreds. On Bowling Green in New York, a team of soldiers and eager civilians toppled the mighty equestrian statue of George III from its marble pedestal and lopped off its head. The valuable lead got melted down into more than forty thousand bullets.	1
The iconoclastic frenzy that swept across revolutionary America in 1776 has the air of pent-up feelings unleashed, taboos suddenly cast off, and this is how Brendan McConville interprets the coming of revolution in his stridently revisionist book, The King's Three Faces. Countering a Whiggish historiography dedicated to chronicling the increasing republicanization of prerevolutionary America, McConville argues that this period witnessed a process of steady royalization, in which popular attachment to the monarchy strengthened. By the 1760s, he contends, colonial Americans felt more connected to the king than their British peers, and the intensity of their relationship to the Crown, felt through a powerful combination of "love and fear" (112), culminated in an unsustainable set of expectations that would be traduced by British actions in the years immediately leading up to the war. The result is a provocative and important corrective to dominant teleological narratives, albeit (like the monarchy he describes) stretched thin in places.	2
By tracing the presence and significance of the monarchy across colonial American society, The King's Three Faces stands as a valuable companion piece to work on the "Anglicization" of the American colonies by John M. Murrin, T. H. Breen, and others.¹ The book is a gold mine of offbeat facts and fresh interpretations. McConville's creatively assorted evidence ranges from the American enthusiasm for genealogy to dentifrice advertisements and citations of Shakespeare. Particularly illuminating is his discussion of holidays and rituals, in which he shows how the very calendar by which colonists led their daily lives became saturated with references to royalty. Another important insight comes in his consideration of prerevolutionary slave rebellions. On several occasions, slaves invoked the king to justify revolt, convinced that the king—a higher authority than their masters—intended to free them. Royal power, not protorepublican ideology, inspired subversion. As McConville quite rightly suggests, these attitudes may "help explain the widespread phenomenon of slave loyalism during the Revolution" (175). This is one of several places where his book invites a rethinking of the meanings of loyalism more generally.	. . .

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