Person: Nelson, Eric
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Nelson
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Eric
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Nelson, Eric
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Publication A Response to Gordon S. Wood(2016) Nelson, EricPublication Barons' Wars, under Other Names": Feudalism, Royalism, and the American Founding(Informa UK Limited, 2016) Nelson, EricThe Machiavellian Moment was largely responsible for establishing what remains the dominant understanding of American Revolutionary ideology. Patriots, on this account, were radical whigs; their great preoccupation was a terror of crown power and executive corruption. This essay proposes to test the whig reading of patriot political thought in a manner suggested by Professor Pocock’s pioneering first book, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. The whig tradition, as he taught us, located in the remote Saxon past an ‘ancient constitution’ of liberty, in which elected monarchs merely executed laws approved by their free subjects in a primeval parliament. This republican idyll, whigs believed, was then tragically interrupted by the Norman Conquest of 1066, which introduced feudal tenures and monarchical tyranny. Did patriot theorists accept this narrative? The answer, I shall argue, is strikingly mixed. By the early 1770s, appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’ had become less common in patriot writing. And by the end of the 1770s, many patriots had absorbed a completely different understanding of the feudal past—one pioneered by Royalist historians of the seventeenth century and then adapted by Scottish historians of the eighteenth. This shift reflects a broader transformation in patriot political and constitutional theory.Publication Patriot royalism: The Stuart monarchy in American political thought, 1769–75(Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2011) Nelson, Eric“Patriot Royalism” makes the case that American patriots of the early 1770s became the last Atlantic defenders of the early Stuart monarchs. Their constitutional argument—that America was “outside of the realm” of Great Britain and therefore to be governed not by Parliament but by the royal prerogative—had famously been made by James I and Charles I in their acrimonious disputes with Parliament over colonial affairs in the 1620s. Most patriot writers were fully aware of the provenance of this new position and enthusiastically embraced its ideological implications. In the process they developed a radical, revisionist account of seventeenth-century English history. A proper reckoning with the story of patriot Royalism should allow us to appreciate the true drama of the republican turn in 1776, as well as to understand the persistent allure of prerogative powers in the formative period of American constitutionalism.