WI: Lords of America

What if, instead of becoming a Governor, the leaders of the American Colonies were considered Lords? Would that aid in their representation in Parliament? How would it influence the American Revolution?
 
Well, Pennsylvania and Maryland were already kinda like this until the Revolution, while New Jersey and the Carolinas had a similar system until the early 18th century, except they had multiple 'Lords Proprietor' instead of one colonial Lord. Delaware was owned by William Penn for a while, too.

The thing was, none of these Lords had a seat in the House of Lords except if they had a peerage anyway, so I'd suggest a PoD being that Charles II gave these guys an automatic seat in the Lords along with the land grant, so the 8 Carolina Lords Proprietor get their seats in 1663 and William Penn gets a Lordship in 1681. At this point, a lot more British aristocrats are going to try for a colony of their own to exploit for financial and political capital - and they will expect a seat in the Lords when they return.

Now, the other colonies existing c.1700 (Connecticut, Maryland, Massachussets Bay, Virginia, New York and Rhode Island) were already Crown colonies, but Georgia could have been allocated to some adventurer, and Mass, NH, Maine and Vermont could have formed one super-Lordship quite reasonably. Representation in the Commons would still face opposition from the metropole, of course, but a readymade noble lobby group would have been right there.

I'm not going to speculate on the War of Independence with a PoD in the mid/late 1600s.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
In a scenario where the King is giving Lordships to America, it means the King for some reason wants to more integration/development of the Americas. The underlying POD (whatever it was for that king on that day) means the leaderships class of the Americas is tied deeply into the heart of the English power structure. Which means a revolution, much less a successful revolution is much less likely.
 
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