The world will be able to watch live coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, which will be broadcast and live-streamed to millions of viewers. Likewise, news of her death spread instantaneously Sept. 8. Within minutes of the initial word from the @RoyalFamily Twitter account, a BBC newsreader appeared in a black suit and tie to solemnly announce the queen’s death. Within the hour, the new king, Charles III, made his first public statement on his mother’s death. At the White House, reporters interrupted press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in the middle of a briefing to inform her of the news and get an on-the-spot reaction. Messages and tributes — from heads of state and ordinary people alike — began to pour in from around the world.
For Americans, of course, the death of Elizabeth is a major news story, but not a political crisis. By contrast, the death of her ancestor George II in 1760 had a profound impact on his subjects across the Atlantic. What’s more, the slow and uneven way that news about his death reached the world — profoundly different from the minute-by-minute reporting of Queen Elizabeth II’s demise — helped set the stage for the 13 American colonies to choose independence.
In 1760, George II was America’s ruler, London was its capital and British colonists in North America still thought of England as “home.” When George II died at age 76 on the morning of Oct. 25 that year, it was therefore as much of a crisis for the colonies as it was in Great Britain itself. What’s more, at that time, the American colonies were a central theater in the Seven Years’ War, the struggle for commerce and empire that Britain was waging against France across North America, the Caribbean, West Africa and Asia. There was no news more important during an imperial war than the death of the king.
As a legal matter, it was more than simply shocking news. Every facet of government — from Parliament, the Privy Council, judges, sheriffs and down to the local jailer — acted in the name of the sovereign. The king’s death nullified all of their authority. In theory, it left no one in power to make laws, resolve disputes, levy taxes (and collect them) or keep prisoners in confinement until empowered by the new king, George III.
In Britain, successive governments had adopted various administrative techniques to smooth the transition of power. By law, for six months following the death of the king, Parliament would continue in session and officials appointed by the previous king would remain in their positions.
But this was not so in the American colonies, where the laws on the transition of royal authority were varied, inconsistent and, in some colonies, totally absent from the books.
In short, the death of the king threatened military and political disaster for the overseas colonies.
But in the closing days of October 1760, as messengers and diplomats raced to coordinate official mourning protocols across the king’s domains in England, Scotland, Ireland and Hanover (a German principality 400 miles away), the American colonies remained on the far side of a wide ocean, ignorant that they had lost one king and gained another.
The British state should have used its entire power to inform them with the utmost haste and guarantee the smooth transition of government in what was not only a colonial possession, but a critical military zone. Under the protocols then in effect, the Board of Trade, a powerful body that effectively administered the imperial affairs in the name of the sovereign, should have prepared dispatches for each of the colonial governors. The dispatches should have included legal documents that allowed civil and military officials to continue in their places, and colonial legislatures to continue in session, for up to six months.
They should have been placed aboard two mail packet ships, one bound for New York and the other for the West Indies, within a day or two of George II’s death. The packet ships would have crossed the Atlantic in about six weeks, if the weather cooperated, carrying the first news of the king’s death to the colonies.
Instead, it took eight days for the Board of Trade to prepare even basic circular letters to officially inform the colonial administrations. They contained no instructions on the continuity of government or the conduct of the war, only a promise that further instructions would follow. As one senior British official remarked at the time, the Privy Council and the Board of Trade “were as much unprepared as if the late king had been only 25 and seemed to have determined nothing.”
Making matters worse, bad weather prevented the ships meant to carry the letters from departing England. The circulars sat in docked ships at Falmouth until Nov. 13.
Then, during the crossing, bad weather blew the New York-bound ship off course. It made its first landfall on Martha’s Vineyard on Dec. 26, limped along to New London, Conn., on Dec. 29, and did not arrive in New York until Jan. 10. It then took New York’s governing council until Jan. 17 to officially proclaim the new king. Meanwhile, rumors of the king’s death had been circulating in the city for weeks.
And that was just for the official instructions to reach their first port of call in New York. It would take even more time and effort to transmit them to the colonial governments scattered up and down the Atlantic Seaboard.
Take New Jersey. With rumors becoming increasingly widespread, on Jan. 12, 1761, Gov. Thomas Boone wrote to the Board of Trade to complain. He accused Benjamin Franklin, deputy postmaster for North America, of mismanaging the postal route in New Jersey and of having “alter’d its Route … upon some Pique” and begged the Board of Trade to ask the metropolitan postmaster general to intervene. In fact, the cause of the delay was not malice, but sheer folly: The governor of New York had sent New Jersey’s copy of the royal instructions to Philadelphia by mistake. When the Pennsylvania authorities discovered the error, they routed the dispatch back to New Jersey not by express mail but by regular post. As a result, New Jersey did not proclaim the king’s death until Jan. 26, 1761 — three months after it had taken place.
Similar comedies of errors played out in each of the British colonies. And even once they had belatedly proclaimed the new king, that was usually only the beginning of their troubles.
The uncertainties created by the death of the king exacerbated existing political tensions in each colony. Pennsylvanians, for instance, asked whether legal cases decided by judges who still held appointments from the dead king should be considered legitimate. In New York, the colonial legislature refused the governor’s instructions to convene, on the basis that it arguably no longer existed. Even in colonies, such as Massachusetts, that had the foresight to copy the English rule of a six-month extension of government, the question remained: Six months from when? With three months already passed and the ports now frozen by winter, they had no hope of an answer from London in any useful time frame.
Up and down the colonies, leaders and politicians began to grapple seriously with the challenges of their distance in space and time from the center of the empire. At least four colonies (New York, New Jersey, South Carolina and Bermuda) took up legislation not only to formalize the six-month transition period, but also to establish that the period only started — indeed, that the king only legally died — when his death was proclaimed in the colonies.
Thus, the colonies started contemplating a kind of temporal independence from London, the right to live on their own timelines.
With the death of George II, it began to dawn on American colonists that transatlantic communication was too clunky, too slow to be practicable for administering an empire, if it had ever been practicable to begin with. As one American would write in a pamphlet a few years later, “To be always running three or four thousand miles with a tale or a petition, waiting four or five months for an answer, which when obtained requires five or six more to explain it in, will in a few years be looked upon as folly and childishness.” The year was 1776, the writer’s name was Thomas Paine and the pamphlet was “Common Sense.”
All in all, the death of George II sensitized the colonists to the ways in which, although they thought of themselves as belonging to the English nation, their lives at the periphery would always lag behind events at the heart of the empire. When they ultimately declared their independence from tyrannical King George III in 1776, the American colonists would also be declaring their independence from the tyranny of imperial time.