As the 250th anniversary looms, it is time to admit something. The American Revolution, however benign its consequences, was fueled by a conspiracy theory of QAnon proportions. The patriots, along with many British Whigs, convinced themselves that George III, that dim and dutiful dullard, was scheming to restore the monarchy to a level of autocratic power it had not enjoyed since the Middle Ages.
Obviously, that did not happen. Great Britain, like North America, continued to evolve after 1782 toward greater pluralism, and the king surrendered what few powers he still had to Parliament. Similar things happened in other English-speaking democracies.
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Indeed, there is only one nation in the Anglosphere where we still find a concentration of monarchical power. When Charles III arrives at the White House for his state visit, he will be painfully aware that his presidential host exercises a degree of sovereign authority that none of Charles’s own ancestors has wielded since nearly a century before the War of Independence.
DONALD TRUMP IS LOSING HIS MIND
For the extraordinary truth is that the Founders did not simply bestow upon the presidency powers equivalent to those of the British Crown. They gave it the powers that they wrongly imagined the Crown to possess.
Consider some of the uses that Trump has made of his executive powers: altering the definition of qualification for national citizenship; imposing tariffs across the board; declaring emergencies and deploying troops internally; bypassing congressional spending limits.
My point is not that these are good or bad things. My point is that there is no way George III, let alone Charles III, could have done any of them. The last king who tried to issue anything like as many executive orders as Trump was James II, who reigned from 1685 to 1688 and who aimed to convert England and Scotland to Catholicism. The ways in which he tried to do so — bypassing parliament, appointing Catholic army officers without approval, seeking to interfere in the independence of universities and local councils — prompted an uprising, known as the Glorious Revolution, after which such monarchical excesses were expressly prohibited.
The Glorious Revolution mattered deeply to the Founders. Indeed, much of the U.S. Bill of Rights was copied word-for-word from the 1689 English Bill of Rights, brought in to prevent any future king from behaving like James. Yet, at the same time, the Founders had come to believe their own propaganda about George III.
As the British historian David Cannadine put it, “The founding fathers gave to the American presidency just those powers they erroneously believed King George III still possessed — to appoint and dismiss his cabinet, to make war and peace and to veto bills sent up by the legislature. From the outset, then, the American presidency was vested with what might be termed monarchical authority, which meant it really was a form of elective kingship.”
Consider the right of the head of state to pardon or exempt people from laws. English monarchs used to have this power, though its scope was constantly disputed by Parliament. While early 17th-century kings were allowed to pardon individuals, they were generally held not to have the power to pardon whole classes of people. James II was accused of abusing this power by appointing Catholics en masse as army officers, in contravention of the laws of his day. When he was deposed, his successors lost any such ability. The Bill of Rights laid down “that the pretended Power of Dispensing with Laws or the Execution of Laws by Regall Authoritie as it hath beene assumed and exercised of late is illegall.”
The mass pardoning of the Jan. 6 rioters would have been unthinkable, not just to Charles III in 2026, not just to George III in 1776, but to William II in 1696. Kings after 1689 had lost the power to pardon anyone, even their immediate family.
One senses Trump’s incredulity that Charles’s brother, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, has been arrested and questioned over his links to Jeffrey Epstein. The idea that Trump would allow such a thing to happen to any of his children or children-in-law is unthinkable.
Nor could Charles III accept a private jet from a foreign government, or encourage other countries to invest in the funds of his friends or family, or allow anyone to charge fees to secure access to him.
Even the last distinctive feature of the U.S. presidency, the fact that it is not hereditary, seems to offend a great many MAGA activists. Surely no one could back the candidacy of any of Trump’s offspring on grounds of pure meritocracy. “If you can keep it?” I suppose 250 years is a good run.
