The Law Above the Crown: From Ancient Israel to the American Revolution

Deep Cut: American Kingship in 1775

Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign; he reigned thirty-one years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Jedidah daughter of Adaiah of Bozkath. He did what was right in the sight of the Lord and walked in all the way of his father David; he did not turn aside to the right or to the left.
—Book of Second Kings Chapter 22: verses 1-2

Then the king directed that all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem should be gathered to him. The king went up to the house of the Lord, and with him went all the people of Judah, all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the priests, the prophets, and all the people, both small and great; he read in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant that had been found in the house of the Lord. The king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before the Lord, to follow the Lord, keeping his commandments, his decrees, and his statutes, with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. All the people joined in the covenant. —Second Kings 23:1-3

The American Revolution began as a debate over the power of the British Parliament over the British colonies in America. The colonies thought they had an Ace up their sleeve: the king.

Before they declared independence, the Continental Congress was not a sovereign legislature, it was a meeting of delegates who were effectively ambassadors from their colonies to the other colonies. Like the UN General Assembly in miniature. America’s leaders were mostly of British descent—before 1776 they were proudly British—and in their tradition the king had a duty to resist a bad parliament. Parliament itself was a creation of the crown, and the supreme constitutional authority in England had been the “King-in-Parliament” and it was the constitutional relation of the English Monarchy to parliament that was retained with the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The colonies likewise inherited the relationship of the English Crown to their respective settlements. And the argument articulated by Virginia and her sister colonies was this: we have relationships with the Crown that are free and independent of parliament.

The powers and responsibilities of the English Crown began with the Dark Age/Late Antiquity history of the Christian Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that unified into England under kings Alfred the Great, Edward and finally Athelstan who became the first king of a unified English realm in AD927. From that period to the Reformation, the concept of the monarchy evolved out of the politicking, rivalry, accommodation and compromises of royal families, the nobility, the Church, and people.

Over centuries, political power was negotiated, power was challenged, power was redefined; however, the constants were the Crown and the Church. The contests over power and jurisdiction produced agreements, obligations and eventually principles. British Protestant political theory grew out of that history and became “tradition”. The postmodern idea that the Bible’s support for government authority found in Romans 13 means that those in executive power can do as they please and everyone else must do whatever the leader says, without limit, is something that medieval European popes, nobles, and the educated commoners would find appalling. Support for arbitrary executive power is anti-tradition. Self-government is hard, being ruled is easy, but the British Protestant political tradition chose the difficult path of liberty, and that was a product of a long historical process. Before they could call the king a tyrant, they first had to have the idea that there were things that the king could not do.

In light of which, one might say that King George III would have known when to back off if he had read the position overview. Alas no one sent him the LinkedIn job description that highlighted he needed to have base knowledge of the English Constitution, and the kings of Israel.

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