| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Brendan McConville. The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 2006. Pp. xii, 322. $39.95.
Brendan McConville's political history of eighteenth-century America inspires a string of adjectives: provocative, original, clever, iconoclastic, and querulous. In no uncertain terms, McConville argues that other historians working in this period have got it all wrong. The problem, he believes, is that they have viewed the decades before independence as a long run-up to revolution and, as a result, have failed to hear what ordinary people actually had to say about their political identity within the British Empire. "Thus the provincial world," McConville declares, "has been filled with protorepublicans, readers of Country pamphlets, rising assemblies, plain-folk Protestants, budding contract theorists, protocapitalists, proliberals, modernizers—in short, future Americans" (p. 4). In his bracing root-and-branch attack on current orthodoxies few major scholars receive high marks. They have erred most egregiously by not appreciating just how much ordinary colonists loved their king.	1
McConville's argument turns on an astute observation about how the celebration of kingship after the Glorious Revolution diverged in England and America. Of course, English people were happy the Stuarts had fled, taking their authoritarian notions with them. The Hanoverians brought stability to the nation, and at a time when everyone seemed fearful of Catholic plots, George I preserved the Protestant succession. As historian Linda Colley has observed, however, the early Hanoverians possessed only modest charisma. Spending much of their time in Germany, they led secretive lives and did almost nothing to promote a popular cult of the monarchy. It was not until the late 1780s that an ailing George III revealed his own vulnerability, and thus his humanity to an adoring public.	. . .

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