A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire by Adrian Chastain Weimer (review)

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Reviewed by:

• A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire by Adrian Chastain Weimer
• Bryce Traister (bio)

A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire
adrian chastain weimer
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023
366 pp.

From the Errand into the Wilderness to "Schoolhouse Rock," students of American colonial history have offered a variety of answers to the question "Where did the idea of American self-government come from?" Adrian Chastain Weimer's splendid new study, A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire, joins this conversation. What Weimer labels a "regional constitutional culture" emerges "in defiance of the Restoration monarchy" (2). Governors, ministers, and commoners, "under extraordinary pressure to compromise with the crown, … developed a cohesive, broad-based constitutional culture … enriched by a wide range of political, artistic, religious and historical forms, [that] would define the region for decades to come" (3). Not content to leave the object of her exhaustively researched study secured hermetically in the past, she remarks, "Its long term implications can still be felt in some places" (3).

A Constitutional Culture focuses on a quite specific period, 1660–67, or, roughly, from the year of the Stuart monarchy's restoration to the year in which the General Court voted to defy Charles II's demand that the New England colonies send agents commissioned to receive direct instruction from the Crown, in London. This would see the end of colonial self-rule and have the colonies acknowledge the Crown's absolute sovereignty (241–42). In lieu of its accession to these demands, the General Court instead sent a tribute payment of trees felled in the old-growth forests of New England that would make masts for naval ships needed in the ongoing conflict with the Dutch and the French (252). When the trees finally arrived, the Crown "received them with surprising warmth," and the colonists provided relief as well for naval forces in the Caribbean. Such gestures were well received, but the larger point was still made: "In restoration Massachusetts, the king's ability to command had run up against a sturdy constitutional culture" (256). [End Page 508]

That culture, at least so far as Weimar's book demonstrates, both solicited and resisted a formal Royal Commission that traveled New England from February 1665 to September 1666 charged with a series of activities that would together assert the Crown's authority in the day-to-day lives of the colonists. The Royal Commission would demand oath-making in the king's name; extend the franchise to all competent landholders of good "Conversation"; make available the Eucharist to all orthodox persons; and expunge all laws deemed by the commission to be hostile to the Crown's interests and prerogatives (156–57). Along the way, the Royal Commission would hear appeals (thereby superseding New England judicial sovereignty), settle land disputes, enforce treaties with Native peoples, and negotiate new treaties as necessary. How New Englanders evaded, pretended to honor, scorned, and ultimately defied these orders comprises the bulk of Weimer's study, which is told primarily as historical chronology in different colonial settings, and frequently through a "case study" presentation that focalizes a single perspective. As historical storytelling, A Constitutional Culture really shines.

The study begins, for example, with the story of Sir Robert Carr, one of the Stuart courtiers sent over as Royal Commissioner in 1666. Drunken and disorderly, Carr assaults a Boston constable named Richard Bennett, and then he defies a subsequent notice of arrest on the grounds that, as an agent of the king, he is immune to local laws and their enforcement. "Carr's tale might seem minor or even humorous in hindsight," Weimar notes. "Were kings, or their commissioners, accountable under the law? Where was the line between constitutional defiance and sedition?" (2). Weimer's study considers possible answers to these questions from a number of perspectives, including the perspective of ministers (chapter 4), governors, and other members of Bay Colony officialdom (chapter 3, 5, 6); settler interlocutors with Indigenous nations and communities such as Roger Williams and John Eliot (chapter 9); and the...