Nursing Fathers: American Colonists’ Conception of English Protestant Kingship, 1688-1776

The rhetoric of Revolutionary America successfully cast King George III as an oppressive tyrant who crushed his North American colonists through excessive fiscal demands and political constraints. Yet for nearly a century prior to the Revolution, the English king had occupied a vital and overwhelmingly positive role in the political imagination of his colonial subjects. In this insightful new book on the subject, Benjamin Price argues that for most of the eighteenth century North American colonists viewed themselves as Englishmen, loyal to the monarchy and to the English constitution as recast by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Price astutely analyzes the political ideology of kingship in colonial America, concluding that it was only on the very eve of the Revolution that most colonists rejected the vision of the king as a ‘nursing father,’ that is, as a ‘benevolent and just’ protector of their lives, property, civil rights, and religious freedom. This fresh and exciting book should find a wide readership among historians of colonial America, early modern England, and Anglo-American political theory.