Did any of the Founding Fathers advocate for a hereditary monarchy? And whom did they want to be king?

Speaking of Napoleon and picking a non-royal general from another country as monarch, my favorite example of this is Jean Bernadotte who became a marshal of France under Napoleon, and was surprisingly picked to be the heir to the throne by the Swedes. He went on to fight against the French fairly successfully and became King Charles XIV John of Sweden.

While this happened a few decades after the American Revolution, it shows how open minded some people were about such things in that era.

And of course Napoleon himself ended up emperor of France but that was his own doing and Corsica was part of France, just barely, at the time of his birth.

One question that the founding fathers had was the question of the root of power. Basically - by what authority does the mob of people comprising the legislature, courts and executive actually command the land? The guys with more guns isn’t a good long term argument.

In many countries, especially those with an essentially Christian population, the answer is that the authority is bestowed upon the monarch by God. From the monarch flows the authority as they appoint the various members of the branches of government. This is still true in many countries. The recent crowning of Charles in the UK is an example. Coronation occurs in a cathedral and is carried out by bishops. The behind barriers secret business might be viewed as additional ceremony that is just making sure that God is putting his seal on the deal. When Napoleon (being crowned in Notre Dame cathedral by a bunch of bishops) grasped the crown and crowned himself, the insolence was that he put himself above God. Being made king by God, instead of the older deal of being a king-god, makes life a lot easier. (Strange women lying in ponds, and farcical aquatic ceremonies where watery tarts throws swords not withstanding.)

The ability of most monarchs to refuse to make appointments as determined by elections and the elected is severely curtailed. But the root of power remains. God provides the final authority, but it is embodied in the anointed monarch.

There seems to have been some enthusiasm that George’s God given rule over the lands of the newly minted USA wasn’t extinguished, but rather transferred.

However a new king for the US may be expected to open the question about which church was representing God as He was providing authority. The US being founded by a lot of people who were somewhat less than comfortable with a state religion with its whole mess of bishops and the wielding of church power is likely not a good start for a new monarchy. No matter what the rules of succession. Separation of church and state makes it all the more difficult to go down this path.
So a legal fiction whereby George agrees that his God given right to be king of the land can be transferred, not to a person, but to a legal structure, whihc can’t die, and thus doesn’t need any more worry, makes for a much easier answer.

But I can’t imagine that a king didn’t cross a few people’s minds. It was, after all, what people were used to.

M

Though by that time in the history of the colonists it had been a century already that that the Rightful Monarch was really who Parliament said was the Rightful Monarch, pourings of holy oils being a nice ritual but watch yourself, Yer Maj…

Not really. Carlo Buonaparte (Napoleon’s father) had been a high-ranked figure in Pasquale Paoli’s government. Paoli’s government collapsed when Genoa, which nominally owned Corsica, gave its claim on the island to France, which then sent troops in to enforce its ownership. Paoli took refuge in England.

Buonaparte hadn’t been a part of the French takeover. But once the French had established control, Buonaparte switched sides and began working for the French.

Abraham Lincoln, in the Lyceum Address, January 27, 1838:

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

I thought Napoleon was crowned in Rome and the Pope was doing it when Napoleon grabbed the crown and crowned himself.

Thanks for the clarification. I read about this a long time ago and the details were vague. But my main point is that at least some Americans were aware of the Corsican republic and named a town after one of its prominent members.

It was in Notre Dame in Paris. Everything was carefully rehearsed.

Coronation of Napoleon

Historian J. David Markham, who also serves as head of the International Napoleonic Society,[13] alleged in his book Napoleon For Dummies “Napoleon’s detractors like to say that he snatched the crown from the pope, or that this was an act of unbelievable arrogance, but neither of those charges holds water. The most likely explanation is that Napoleon was symbolizing that he was becoming emperor based on his own merits and the will of the people, and not in the name of a religious consecration. The pope knew about this move from the beginning and had no objection (not that it would have mattered).”[14] British historian Vincent Cronin wrote in his book Napoleon Bonaparte: An Intimate Biography that “Napoleon told Pius that he would be placing the crown on his own head. Pius raised no objection.”[15]

He talked about guano in his State of the Union. Other presidents have done worse.

I have to disagree. As @JRDelirious points out, the idea of divine right of kings ended in England when Charles I’s head landed in the basket. The Glorious Revolution established that the monarchs held the Crown by virtue of an Act of Parliament, not by any decision by God. That was the origin of the Non-Jurors: the clergy in the three kingdoms who refused to swear allegiance to William and Mary, precisely because they had come to the throne by parliamentary means, not as the Lord’s Anointed, as had been the theory under previous monarchs, particularly the Stuarts, who had emphasised the Divine Right of Kings.

The King’s power to appoint and delegate authority does not flow from God, but from the statutes passed by Parliament.

Religious ceremonies for the coronation express the pious hope that the new King will rule according to God’s law, not that the King holds office by divine right. It’s a much more formal version of the new President putting his hand on a Bible when they take the oath of office.

Pardon? :face_with_monocle:

Maybe. Divine right isn’t what I’m talking about. That is an entirely different question.

The monarch, as I pointed out, generally has very curtailed powers. But the country requires a root of power. The monarch appoints the government. In the UK, the leader of the winning party at an election goes to the monarch, and establishes that he has the confidence of the parliament, and the monarch invites them to form a government. That is the entire point. The monarch is the only one who can do this. They don’t have any choice in the matter, so there is no question about a divine right. But until the monarch provides this invitation, the government has no legitimacy. The monarch gets the ultimate authority from God as part of the coronation. The parliament can control who gets to be crowned, but there is a point where the root of power is acquired.

So, in the modern world, the monarch has no divine right - they have no say and certainly have no power to ignore the elected government - but is required to provide the elected government with the right to govern.

Guano was, at the time, a key national resource required to sustain intensive farming techniques as a fertilizer. Fillmore may have been a not-so-great President, but I think his rep as a “the worst President” is overblown - he was serving at a bad time, but didn’t, IMHO, do a completely terrible job. There was a fair amount of direct good that came out of his administration. And the Compromise of 1850, while horrific in its impact to the millions held in bondage, gave the North 10 more years of industrialization that may well have helped shorten the Civil War that was, at that point, inevitable. He was, IMHO, better than the President that immediately preceded him (Taylor) and 3 of the 4 that succeeded him (Pierce, Buchanan, and Johnson). I would probably place him the teens if I ranked all 46 US Presidents and even that might be harsh on my part.

No, the king and the parliament get their constitutional authority from man-made law, both common law and statute.

The coronation is a fancy religious and political ceremony, but it is not the source of royal power. Edward VIII had full authority as monarch without ever being crowned.

Charles had full authority as monarch on September 8, 2022, from the moment Elizabeth died. He didn’t need to be crowned to acquire royal authority.

If monarchist America had followed a British model, then they probably would’ve adopted something similar to the Act of Settlement and restricted eligibility to the throne to “heirs of the body”, which would rule out adoption. Since George was already quite aged and childless, I assume they’d have picked his father as their Sophia of Hanover, and on his death the throne would have passed to one of his nephews since his oldest brother predeceased him.

Alternately, Washington turns down the throne and instead becomes PM to King Thomas I or someone else for whom a lack of heirs wouldn’t be a problem.

For instance, the King of Australia holds his royal position by virtue of section 1 and section 61 of the Australian Constitution, which was drafted by a group of Australian politicians and enacted by the British Parliament. No mention of God there:

Randy bugger that he was.

The Australian constitutions is a totally weird thing. That it is nothing but an act of parliament of a foreign power tells you a lot. It imports the entire history of that UK and its monarchy with it. That history is implicit and does not need repeating. Compared to any other country, the Oz constitution is lacking just about everything you would expect in a constitution. It is mostly just a set of procedural rules about how government will be performed and which powers are allowed to the federal government.

As to the phrase: The executive power of the Commonwealth is vested in the Queen this can be viewed as either a statement granting that authority, or noting the exiting authority. If the constitution was a standalone document it would be granting the authority. But it isn’t a standalone document. It is an act of the UK parliament. It is the UK parliament, itself appointed by the UK monarch, defining that the executive power of Oz is the monarch from which the act itself derives authority. This is the UK parliament giving permission, not a standalone constitution. Which is why it is a weird constitution, and makes more than a few Australians uncomfortable.

And no, there isn’t any mention of God. Constitutions can be silent on the subject simply because you can’t bring God into existence by naming Him in a constitution. All these various constitutions and precedents were arrived at in societies where it was a reasonable assumption that everyone was Christian. And not just a social Christian, but rather with conviction. That God existed and was the supreme authority over man and the Earth was simply part of the landscape. Why would you need to spell this out? Indeed needing to spell it out in a constitution is almost heretical. God has no need of some piece of paper to create His divine authority over the Earth and man. That is the point after which you start to define earthly power, not before.

That this is a Christian thing is also one of the accidents of history. The early missionaries spreading across Europe iterated onto a useful maxim to pitch to the local rulers. Christianity was not in competition with the local rulers. Rather it would bring with it the idea that the Christian God would provide authority to the ruler and make kings. So making it the state religion was bringing with it an agreement to provide divine authority to the local ruler.

The Australian constitution defines the monarch of the UK as its monarch. It has been mooted that we could actually decide to choose a different monarch if ties to the UK one proved troublesome. It would require a referendum, but we are at least afforded that ability to change the constitution. But if we otherwise kept the constitution the way it is, a monarch still sits at the top. The referendum held a decade or so back that tried to move Oz to a republic would have replaced the monarch’s local representative (aka the Governor General) with a locally appointed fixed term person that didn’t derive authority from the UK monarch. Which does break the idea that we need a monarch, any monarch really, to be the root of power.

There are some useful modern twists that make having a remote monarch the root of power as opposed to a locally appointed person a good thing. The US gets around some of these questions with the three way split of POTUS, SCOTUS, and the Senate. Here in Oz we can get some way there with a joint sitting of the two houses of the parliament, but it isn’t easy. The UK monarch is, by convention, not allowed any say in proceedings. However, if they did attempt to wield power, we would be in uncharted waters. The outcome would be unlikely to go the monarch’s way however. The dismissal of the elected government in 1975 is as close as anyone ever wants to get. That was the monarch’s appointed representative wielding power. That was bad enough. Given the elected government had recommended the appointee in the first place, and it was someone from their own ranks made it all the more unhappy.

Perhaps the point is also that we can’t view the decisions of the past with a modern idea of the nature of monarchs and with a secular eye. Modern thinking pretty much assumes that authority is man made. That the discovery and colonisation of new worlds ceased some time back may have some bearing on a changing view as well. But this isn’t necessarily how people thought a century - or two three or four ago. Which is where the thread came in.

More critical than most people think. After Fillmore’s speech Congress passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856, which allowed America to claim uninhabited islands with guano, which were usually off the Pacific Coast of South America. The act also let the islands be abandoned when the guano was gone. The sources I consulted said this was the first instance of American imperialism.
Know why Bolivia doesn’t have a seacoast? They lost it in a war about guano.
One of the chapters I wrote for our book on military innovations that made it to civilian life was about industrial fertilizer, and this was in the history section. I also got to put “guano” in the index.

Guano was also used to make gunpowder.