Why would payments to authors make this reference to the Queen?

In the 15th and 16th centuries the word royalty meant a grant made by the monarch – thus for example the Oxford English Dictionary tells us “The Maior and Burgesses of Oxon do stande so muche . . . uppon theire right and royaltie of the Thames.” Obviously the king had allowed them to take fish from the river, or row on it, or more probably to charge tolls to people who did those things, since politicians have always loved to do that sort of money-raising thing. Royalties then came to mean payments made to the landowner of a mine for the privilege of extracting the coal from it — no doubt because the monarch was a large landowner, and the word got broadened out to cover quite unroyal folks.  Obviously it was then but a small step when by the middle of the 19th century it was first applied to payments made to authors and to the holders of patents, even though by now Queen Victoria didn’t actually have the right to grant them this income.

Perhaps its adoption in America was sufficiently late for the anti-monarchist ideology of the early Republic to fail to register with those authors and publishers who brought the word over the ocean. The French find no need to refer to royalty in this context: their word is redevance: I wonder if they did before the Revolution. Apparently royauté is accepted as meaning royalty in our sense in Quebec only. Fascinatingly, it appears to be le mot juste in Russian too.