One sign of the effectiveness of this new political culture was the introduction of some twenty-six official holidays affirming this monarchical culture, and by 1740, McConville argues, “public spectacles celebrating monarch and empire, involving local elites and military display, occurred at least six times a year in the major population centers, while more modest activities occurred on twenty other days” (63–64). By the imperial crisis, colonial America evidenced a political culture grounded in an intense emotional investment in the king—what McConville at one point calls “the emotional structures” based on “the troika of love, fear, and desire” (106).
From our perspective, what is most notable about this symbolic formation is its relative isolation from other political and social institutions—this is the paradox emphasized by McConville again and again. Where royalist culture in Britain was integrated in “a political order dominated by extensive patronage ties, the state church, long established custom, and a tightly controlled land tenure system,” in the colonies the royalist ties were compartmentalized and passionately intensified in “rites and print culture” (106) and, later in the eighteenth century, in a series of royally marked commodities, from medicines and tableware to iconography in prints and medals.4 The result was a more intense royalism in British North America than in Britain itself, a point crucial to McConville’s account of the imperial crisis.
After the initial imperial conflicts of 1764, colonials responded with “a flight to the king’s love and justice” (251). Contrary to whiggish misinterpretations of the Revolution as the gradual repudiation of monarchical prerogative, colonials in the years before the rupture “completely abandoned the perception that strong kings tended to threaten liberty” (253), going so far as to articulate neoabsolutist arguments “relating the king’s person to the entire physical empire” as fundamental to their interpretation of colonial charter rights (256). Thomas Jefferson, for instance, called for a return to the royal veto on parliamentary legislation—a practice unused since Queen Anne’s reign (261). Thus again another paradox: “As counterintuitive as it may seem, the love of the king and country reached its zenith at the split second before imperial collapse” (251). That is, colonials amplified the symbolic position of the king until the monarch was the sole solution to the crisis into the 1770s. “By 1773, all that remained was faith in the king,” as political theory and rhetoric were channeled through this symbolic conduit (250). When King George did not come to the rescue, when the links between king and imperial practices could no longer be denied, the peripety was sudden and dramatic. In fact, the emotional and symbolic investment in the king explains the long and passionate litany of accusations against him in the Declaration of Independence, which is as much a Declaration of Heartbroken Betrayal. Thus, the British colonies had, at the moment of the rupture with Great Britain, almost a century’s tradition of cultic, symbolic investment in a political leader, unique in the empire in being institutionally unmoored and located primarily in print and pictorial representations.
This special iconic status, inherited by George III, anticipated the domain eventually to be occupied by the Founding Fathers. But a particularly North American occupation of this semiotic space also depended on the emergence of the king’s negative composite during the years of the imperial crisis. Bernard Bailyn long ago noted the oddly persistent significance of John Stuart, the third Lord Bute, in pre-Revolutionary rhetoric, in which he was not only “the root of the evil” of the imperial crisis but also the “malevolent and well-nigh indestructible machinator” behind British politics.5 If Bute is now largely unknown in popular Revolutionary lore, he appeared repeatedly in texts of the imperial crisis, from the Stamp Act controversy to the Declaration of Independence. Historian John Brewer has provided the most detailed account of the iconography of Bute,6 trying to explain the strange “range and extent of hostility to Bute” by excavating the underlying “theory of politics” motivating this antipathy (MLB 5).7 Indeed, Brewer, whose work belongs within the transatlantic “republican synthesis,” argues that the fixation on Bute resulted from a conjunction of whig beliefs about monarchical prerogative, undue nonparliamentary influence, and fears of an unbalanced constitution, going so far as to add that such associations with Bute were unfair and somehow incorrect.8 While one should certainly link the figure of Bute with related ideological positions, we should not let this prosaic translation exercise obscure Bute’s tremendous symbolic composition, which Brewer elsewhere discusses. Two qualities seem most important. For one thing, Bute was a centripetal figure combining and channeling other figures. Indeed, other political officials were deemed Bute’s “locum tenens”—his placeholders—in the parlance of the time, such that his distance or absence from the political scene simply provided more proper names to constitute his power.9 These secondary figures—considered “‘cyphers’ or agents for the minions of Bute” (FLB 102)—were linked metonymically in discourse: Bute and this or that puppet. But in narrative, these connections were made through the emplotment of conspiracy, whereby secondary characters were metaphorical placeholders of the primary figure. In this framework, Revolutionary conspiracy theories may be read not so much as explanations of events, or indices of theories of historical causality, but rather as maps of semiotic layerings.
Just as important, however, was a countervailing centrifugal or splitting dynamic, whereby Bute gathered together traits, events, and qualities that could not initially be linked with King George. “Clearly, it was argued, responsibility” for absolutist tendencies in government “could not be placed upon a King who it was traditionally claimed ‘could do no wrong’” (FLB 114). Thus emerged a theory of a secret “inner cabinet,” or a “dual system of government”—a public or legitimate or monarchically constrained order, on the one hand, and, on the other, a secret, scheming, and prerogative-driven system (FLB 98, 102); thus also emerged the scandalous accusations that Bute had sexual relations with the Princess Dowager (FLB 111).
We see both of these dynamics in the North American versions of Bute, where he is the central figure in characterological clusters including other figures, most notably Lords North and Mansfield. Thus, we find John Leacock’s satirical, mock-scriptural First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times presenting this composite vision: “Behold, yonder I see a dark cloud like unto a large sheet rise from the north, big with oppression and desolation, and the four corners thereof are held by four great beasts, bute, mansfield, bernard and hutchinson.”10 When, in 1776, Leacock published his mock metadrama The Fall of British Tyranny, “Mr. bute” would top the list of “Dramatis Personnæ” as “Lord Paramount,” with Mansfield, Dartmouth, North, and others in subordinate roles.11 John Trumbull’s 1775 M’Fingal opened linking its central character with a Scottish rebelliousness that “With Bute and Mansfield swore allegiance / . . . to raze, as nuisance, / Of church and state the Constitutions.”12 Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s 1776 dramatic poem “The Battle of Bunkers-Hill” envisioned General Gage crying “Oh bute, and dartmouth knew ye what I feel.”13 The popular pamphlet series The Crisis, collaboratively written in England but published serially and repeatedly in the colonies, was full of similar references.14 Bute, for example, “sternly bids North lay another tax,” while anti-American “sentiments are Bute’s by Mansfield’s penn’d”; royal speech, in yet another installment, is “no ordinary composition, it originates from Bute, is trimmed up by Mansfield,