In this episode of Dave Does History, we step into the uneasy months before independence, when not everyone in the colonies was ready to break with the Crown. Some still believed King George III could be reasoned with, that he might rise above Parliament and become the kind of monarch Enlightenment thinkers dreamed of. John Dickinson’s Olive Branch Petition was a final appeal to that idea, a hope that the King would act as a Patriot King, as imagined by Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke.

But what happens when two sides read the same words and draw opposite meanings?

As Dave unpacks the theory of the Patriot King and the political storm surrounding the petition, we come to see how hope collided with power. The King believed he was already the answer. The colonists learned otherwise.

This was the moment the last bridge burned. After that, the only road left led to revolution.