I’ve been watching the “no kings” protests in the USA with a lot of sympathy. I am not in favour of individuals with arbitrary power over others, or indeed any power which is not checked by some neutral third party. That is exactly the reason why the USA has three branches of government, executive, legislature and judiciary, and the function of the judiciary is to prevent abuses of their position by the executive or legislature. Although it isn’t enshrined in a constitution in the same way as in the States, the UK also has a judiciary which is not afraid to curb excesses of executive power, albeit there have been some shifts in what the legislature allows the courts to do in this respect which have somewhat curbed the courts’ abilities. In the States, in theory a constitutional amendment would be necessary to limit the courts in the same way, so I am distressed to see the US Supreme Court disallowing injunctions against governmental actions in the lower courts and by procedural changes which would render it prohibitively expensive to mount such actions.
But I’m not American, so this is not my circus, not my monkeys.
However, quite a bit of the rhetoric around “No Kings” has brought up again the allegations in the Declaration of Independence regarding King George III, including imposing taxes without consent, cutting off trade, obstructing justice, quartering troops, and waging war against the colonists. Indeed, the DOI paints George as a complete tyrant.
The thing is, no king of England after 1649 has seriously attempted to wield that kind of power. 1649 is, of course the year when our Parliament decided to chop off Charles I’s head for attempting many of those abuses, which had progressively become outside the accepted power of a monarch over the previous 400 years or so. His son James II, after the restoration of the monarchy, displayed some similar impulses, largely around attempting to reverse the country’s adoption of Protestantism, and was quietly deposed in favour of his daugher Mary, who was both safely protestant and married to William of Orange, who was well schooled in being a very limited monarch in his home country (the Netherlands).
Charles I’s elder son, Charles II, is said to have summed up his position well in a counter to a ditty which said “Here lies our mutton-eating King/whose word no man relies on/ who never said a foolish thing/nor ever did a wise one”, to which Charles responded “My sayings are my own, my actions are my ministers”. That was fairly true of him (let’s face it, look what happened to his brother) but became progressively more true over following years, to the extent that by 100 years later, it really wasn’t true that George III could be regarded as tyrannical – at least, not in repect of Britain. He was also King of Hanover, where he had significantly greater power, including raising troops.
To quote from Wikipedia, “Up to this point, in the words of Professor Peter Thomas, George’s “hopes were centred on a political solution, and he always bowed to his cabinet’s opinions even when sceptical of their success. The detailed evidence of the years from 1763 to 1775 tends to exonerate George III from any real responsibility for theAmerican Revolution.” That point was the Intolerable Acts, which I deal with in the next paragraph.
Of course, that is not to say that the colonists didn’t have legitimate grievances, just that those grievances were, in truth, against the parliament of Great Britain and the ministers which that parliament proposed to the King. A succession of Prime Ministers were responsible (with the support of parliament) including George Grenville, Lord Rockingham, William Pitt the elder, the Duke of Grafton and finally Lord North. North was largely responsible for what the colonists called “the Intolerable Acts”, which were designed to punish Massachusetts for dumping tea in Boston harbour, and instead lit the blue touch paper which led to outright rebellion with, of course, the backing of parliament. Of course, the “tea party” was a reaction to the imposition of taxes (which had mostly not previously been levied), notably on tea and on documents requiring a “stamp” – which included newsapapers, so especially angering those most likely to have independence-oriented thoughts. From the British side, they had just won the Seven Years War, ending the threat to the colonies from the French possessions in Québec, Acadia and Louisiana, and wanted the colonies to contribute to the cost of that war.
I think my main message at this point is “Yes, Trump is bad, and he’s acting like the version of a king which the colonists complained about – but please don’t compare him with George III, who was caught in the ‘my actions are my ministers’ trap”. Trump would be better compared with one of the mediaeval kings – possibly Edward II (who I note was deposed and quietly murdered). My secondary message is “Act like this, and the consequences could include losing your head”.
I can’t, however, leave the topic without putting forward a couple of other things the colonists were probably offended by, but which aren’t mentioned in the DOI. The first is the 1763 proclamation by the King (acting as instructed by his prime minister) that westward expansion of the colonies should cease, the westward territory becoming an Indian reserve (in part in thanks to the Indians for support in the war against the French). Stopping the colonists going west would not have been popular, though it’s dubious whether the proclamation could have carried any weight. The second is more subtle. In 1772, the English court of Kings Bench decided Somersett’s case, which determined that slavery was not part of English law and thus a slave brought to England automatically became free. I don’t expect that the colonists were concerned that floods of slaves would cross to England and become free, but that case was effectively the “writing on the wall” – slavery was going to be abolished by Britain. Admittedly, various cases after that sought to distinguish Somersett and roll back the principle, but in 1807 Britain abolished the slave trade and in 1833 abolished slavery throughout British possessions*. It would take another war for that to happen in the USA.
Benjamin Franklin wrote after Somersett’s case “O Pharisaical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single Slave that happens to land on thy coasts, while thy Merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that can scarce be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity!” as part of a trend of writers to seize on the case and extend its principle – clearly at least one of the founding fathers was well acquainted with that movement of sentiment, though I note that the charge of hypocrisy could have been levelled at the slave-owning Franklin.
*The government compensated the slave owners, taking a huge loan for the purpose – which was finally paid off in 2015…