As they framed their appeals to the king, Nelson demonstrates, the patriots reached back to the debate leading up to the English civil wars. In the 1620s, the Stuart monarch Charles I feuded with his parliament, which feared that he would usurp its authority to approve taxes, and reign as an absolute monarch. Both sides claimed to be working for the common good. The parliamentarians insisted that only a legislature—a miniature version of the people as a whole—could represent the people’s interests. Royalists responded that legislators were mere creatures of their constituencies, bound to cater to voters’ whims instead of tending to the kingdom’s needs. Only a monarch, they argued, could counterbalance legislative parochialism and look to the long term.

Charles required revenues, but parliament was determined not to authorize taxes on his terms. So from 1629 to 1640, he ruled without calling parliament into session, scraping together funds by reviving moribund fines and fees, and creatively reinterpreting his royal prerogatives. The deadlock led to a series of civil wars from 1642 to 1651, to Charles’s execution, and to the ultimate triumph of parliament, which absorbed almost all executive authority, leaving England’s monarchs to reign in name alone.

While the wars raged, the early settlers of New England sided squarely with parliament, decrying monarchical tyranny and celebrating its replacement by parliamentary democracy. A century later, however, many of their descendants were nostalgic for Stuart royalism. By the 1760s, parliament was imposing taxes on the colonists without their consent. Patriot leaders like John Adams expressed longing for George III to restrain the legislative tyranny of parliament.

Generations of historians have largely regarded such statements as insincere rhetorical ploys—as arguments of convenience lodged and then quickly forgotten. Nelson makes a convincing case that in so doing, historians have overlooked an important part of the political philosophy that impelled the American Revolution. By citing the king’s refusal to act like a king, he writes, the patriots justified taking matters into their own hands.

Once the war was over, Nelson shows, many of the patriot leaders who had previously argued for royal prerogatives proceeded to push for an executive empowered to do what George III would not. At the Constitutional Convention, the Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson stepped forward and moved “that the Executive consist of a single person.” This was a loaded phrase with which to introduce a controversial idea: When, in 1649, shortly after executing Charles I, parliament abolished the monarchy, it famously declared, “The office of a King … shall not henceforth … be exercised by any one single person.” Wilson was not just proposing that the United States have a president. He was attempting, in the horrified view of the Virginia delegate Edmund Randolph, to insert into the Constitution “the foetus of monarchy.”