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A Weakness for Royalty
The vindication of John Adams.
Meir Y. Soloveichik
June 18, 2012,
Vol. 17, No. 38
Had our Founding Fathers been suddenly transported last week to
modern America and forced to watch the morning television shows, they would have
been shocked to see breathless American anchors all agog, celebrating the
enduring reign of a British monarch live from London. They would have wondered
why their countrymen were so enchanted by the glory of a direct descendant of
George III the same week that, centuries ago, Richard Henry Lee first submitted
his fateful resolution to the Continental Congress: “That these United Colonies
are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are
absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political
connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be,
totally dissolved.” The man who seconded Lee’s resolution, however, would not
have been surprised. John Adams dedicated his life to the cause of liberty, yet
continued to insist that the allure of royalty among men could never be
abolished.
If the American Revolution came to embody not only a rebellion
against England, but against the very institution of monarchy, a great deal of
the credit goes to Thomas Paine, who devoted the central section of his
Common Sense to a theological attack on kingship of any kind.
“Government by kings,” he informed his many thousands of American readers, “was
first introduced into the world by the Heathens, from whom the children of
Israel copied the custom. It was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever
set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.” As Harvard’s Eric Nelson notes in
his fascinating book The Hebrew Republic, Paine was drawing on
an idea of recent intellectual vintage. Modernity is often seen as an embrace of
secularism, Nelson remarks, but with the triumph of republicanism in modern
political thought the opposite actually occurred. “Renaissance humanism,
structured as it was by the pagan inheritance of Greek and Roman antiquity,
generated an approach to politics that was remarkably secular in character,”
Nelson writes of the previous political order. Meanwhile, in the fervor of the
Reformation in the 17th century, “Christians began to regard the Hebrew Bible as
a political constitution, designed by God himself for the children of
Israel.”
Some of these theologians founded their arguments for republicanism
on the Book of Samuel, wherein God responds with anger to the Israelites’
request for a king. Perhaps the most eloquent English version of this idea can
be found in both the poetry and prose of Milton, a great opponent of the
Restoration. Noting that “God in much displeasure gave a king to Israelites, and
imputed it a sin to them that they sought one,” Milton further argued that all
monarchy is idolatrous, as “a king must be adored like a Demigod, with a
dissolute and haughtie court about him, of vast expence and luxurie.” Had Milton
seen the parade of a thousand boats on the Thames last week, he might have
repeated his contention that a monarch does little except “pageant himself up
and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject
people, on either side deifying and adoring him.” Paine, while himself utterly
irreligious, knew his biblically literate American audience, and argued
similarly: “As exalting one man so greatly above the rest cannot be justified on
the equal rights of nature, so neither can it be defended on the authority of
scripture; for the will of the Almighty as declared by Gideon, and the prophet
Samuel, expressly disapproves of government by kings.”
Adams, in contrast, believed that while the rise of the American
republic would change the world, it could never change human nature. People, he
was certain, would always be attracted to the trappings of majesty, and it was
better to channel it than to ignore it. Upon meeting Paine, Adams reported in
his autobiography, “I told him further, that his reasoning from the Old
Testament was ridiculous, and I could hardly think him sincere. At this he
laughed, and said he had taken his ideas in that part from Milton; and then
expressed a contempt of the Old Testament, and indeed of the Bible at large,
which surprised me.” When he became vice president, Adams argued that royal
titles, such as “His Most Benign Highness,” should be given to the leaders of
the new government. If the grandeur akin to royalty were not accorded public
servants, Adams insisted, Americans would focus their enraptured attention on
others.
His proposal failed spectacularly, and fed false charges that Adams
was himself a monarchist. Mocked by his enemies as “His Rotundity, the Duke of
Braintree,” Adams suffered for eight years in a position that he called “the
most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his
imagination conceived.” For the rest of his life, Adams continued to express
envy at the credit accorded to Paine for the changes wrought by the Revolution.
“What a poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass is Tom Paine’s
‘Common Sense,’ ” he wrote to Jefferson. “And yet history is to ascribe the
Revolution to Thomas Paine!”
Perhaps, though, Adams spoke too soon. Vindicating his prediction,
millions of Americans tuned in to the royal wedding and the Diamond Jubilee.
None of the enraptured anchors saw fit to cite Paine’s contention that “when a
man seriously reflects on the idolatrous homage which is paid to the persons of
kings, he need not wonder that the Almighty, ever jealous of his honour, should
disapprove a form of government which so impiously invades the prerogative of
Heaven.” Paine himself died alone and penniless. Meanwhile, David McCullough’s
bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of our second president has been
made into an HBO miniseries, celebrating Adams’s contributions to the American
cause. Somewhere, John Adams is—well, not smiling, certainly, but perhaps
harrumphing in quiet satisfaction.
Meir Y. Soloveichik is director of the Straus Center for Torah
and Western Thought at Yeshiva University and associate rabbi at
Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan.
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