On the 4 July 1776, the Second Continental Congress ratified their Declaration of Independence. It outlined their intent and motivations for declaring themselves to be thirteen sovereign states free from the British Empire. Toward the start of the document’s indictment are these words:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

The word ‘tyranny’ has become somewhat of a buzzword in American history, and the role of the British monarch is central to that. While the new republic of the United States of America was born in 1783, the role of absolutism in the Americas runs deeper. America is not the only country to overthrow a tyrannical monarch. The English themselves did it twice in the seventeenth century alone…

The second of these, the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, saw the overthrow of James II & VII, brother of Charles II and son of the executed Charles I. It has been considered a bloodless revolution as Parliament invited James’s daughter, Mary, and her husband the stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, William of Orange, to invade.

For England, the revolution was both formative and transformative as the status quo of domestic and foreign policy was turned upside-down. Historians have described the Glorious Revolution as the ‘first modern revolution’, as it marks the beginnings of modern Britain.[1]

The revolution overthrew a perceived Catholic tyrant with close ties to Louis XIV of France, cemented British involvement in continental warfare through the Nine Years’ War, ushered in the 1689 Bill of Rights, and allowed for modern-style public debt through the creation of the Bank of England.

England, and later Great Britain, became the first modern fiscal-military nation state but above all else had firmly established the role parliamentary supremacy over arbitrary power.

Despite not being remembered or celebrated today, the Glorious Revolution is perhaps the closest Britain will ever come to the formative impact of America’s Fourth of July.

However, in the 1680s, England was a burgeoning transatlantic power with trade and possessions in the Caribbean and North America. The overthrow of tyranny was not limited to just one side of the Atlantic, and 1776 was not America’s first revolution.

Prior to James II’s overthrow in 1688, the respective reigns of the restored Stuart monarchs were characterised by centralisation, authoritarianism, and religious alienation.

Domestically, both kings relied heavily on economic and religious support from Louis XIV of France. This was epitomised by the 1670 Secret Treaty of Dover in which Charles II converted to Catholicism and assisted Louis XIV in his war against the Dutch Republic. In return, Louis paid Charles an annual salary of £230,000 and pledged military assistance in the case of rebellion.[2]

Colonially, the Stuarts sought to break the economic and political monopoly posed by private companies such as the Massachusetts Bay Company, and to prevent their supposed subversion of the Navigation Acts. In 1673 a new Navigation Act was passed and in 1676 the Lords of Trade and Plantations was created to ensure their enforcement.

Colonial administrator Edward Randolph sent several letters to the new body to present his grievances. In May 1676 and July 1686, Randolph aired his complaints in reports that dubbed New Englanders as ‘usurpers’ who had ‘protected the late [Charles I]’s murderers’.[3]

Randolph’s latter report of 1686 clarified the ‘high misdemeanours’ in a list of 13 grievances and provided legal precedent to annul the charter of Massachusetts:

2. They have made laws repugnant to the laws of England, and have not repealed those objected to by Sir William Jones and Sir Francis Winnington as they promised.

6. They have obstructed the execution of the Acts of Trade and Navigation, and refused to recognise many of them. They award executions against the King’s officers in causes under appeal to the King, obstruct his officers in the discharge of their duty, refuse appeals to the King, and set up their own naval office in opposition to his.

8. They opposed the King’s Commissioners in 1664, notwithstanding their protestations of loyalty, proclaimed the General Court the supreme judicature of the Colony, received Goffe and Whalley, the regicides, with honour, and protected them.[4]

Randolph was successful in petitioning against the Massachusetts Bay Company, whose charter was subsequently revoked and reorganised into the new Dominion of New England in 1684.

The Dominion, governed by James II’s former New York governor Sir Edmund Andros, was given executive powers of taxation, land distribution, justice, and defence, akin to a Spanish viceroyalty. Coupled with this, Andros sought to limit local town meetings and improve the role of the Church of England in the Puritan dominated region.

Much like the proprietary colony of New York (1664-85), which possessed no lower house of assembly, the Dominion of New England was an exercise in authoritarianism.

The suppression of local town meetings and frequent arrests of so-called dissenters were the cornerstones of Andros’s Dominion, and of the Stuart colonial policy.

This trend toward authoritarianism from 1675 was the principal royal policy of the Stuarts, as new Governors were sent to royal colonies to limit the power of elected Legislative Assemblies.

Richard Dunn has described the colonial policy of the Stuarts as ‘slipshod’, ‘careless’ and economically ‘recklessly aggrandising’.[5] For Dunn, the implementation of authoritarian and unrepresentative proprietary government was the primary cause of the ‘genuinely transatlantic phenomenon’ in the spread of the Glorious Revolution to North America.[6]

The Glorious Revolution spread to North America with promises of representative constitutional monarchy and religious toleration. These ‘copycat’ rebellions took place in Boston, New York, and Maryland that saw the overthrow of Catholic, or closet-Catholic, proprietary governments.

The first of the revolutions in mainland North America was the Boston Revolt, organised by Puritan ministers Cotton and Increase Mather, former governor Simon Bradstreet, and colonial agents.

Like in England, the authoritarian control of Catholic office holders was deeply unpopular in New England. Since his appointment in 1684, Governor Edmund Andros had restricted town meetings, strictly enforced the Navigation Acts, and promoted the Church of England over New England’s traditional Puritan faith.

The Stuart policy in both England and America was, ‘calculated to alienate the most people’,[7] as the old-style rule of private companies and diffused imperial power was centralised under direct crown control.

As news of the Glorious Revolution in England spread across the Atlantic Ocean by April 1689, religious leaders and armed citizens acted swiftly and arrested Andros on 18 April and Boston’s defences were taken without a shot fired. This was a bloodless coup that effectively gave control of the entire New England region to revolutionaries.[8]

Accounts, such as the anonymous A.B.’s Account of the Late Revolution in New England, were testament to the widespread grievances toward Andros’s rule. A.B.’s account begins as a critique of the Dominion, believing it to be an ‘Illegal Subversion of our Ancient Government’ that was ‘among the worst of Treasons’.[9]

The Boston Revolt was further justified as a defence against ‘imminent popery and slavery’ and the defence of the rights of freeborn Englishmen.[10] A.B. described the overthrow as rather brief, writing:

Drums were beaten, and the whole town was immediately up in arms. The first work done, was by small parties here and there about the Town to seize upon these unworthy Men … It was expected that the Garrison might make some Resistance: but then intended to be Owners of it within one half-hour, or perish in the Attempt. When they were just come to beset the Fort, they met the Governor and his Creatures, going down the Hill to the Man-of-Wars Pinace.[11]

Andros was read a declaration and taken into custody as a prisoner of war. From here, A.B.’s account shifted to a plea for the restoration of the old charters of the former separated colonies, ‘conceiving that the vacating of our Charter was a most illegal and injurious thing’,[12] into order to fill the ‘Vacuum Domicilium’.

This plea wasn’t uncommon of other contemporary accounts. For months, colonial agents had written to the Board of Trade for the restoration of the old charters. One such petition from Sir William Phips and Increase Mather, addressed to the king and dated 19 February 1689, read:

The charters and corporations of the four Colonies of New England were taken away in 1684 by illegal and arbitrary proceedings and Sir Edmund Andros was appointed Governor. Sir Edmund’s commission is now determined by the devolution of the Crown upon your Majesty. We beg the restoration of our ancient privileges and that Simon Bradstreet, Thomas Hinkley, Robert Trant, and Walter Clark may be re-admitted to their respective Governments.[13]

Others printed broadside ballads or ‘scope notes’: single printed pages providing an etched image alongside political information and commentary in the form of a poem or ballad. In 1689, Mather’s printer, Benjamin Harris, produced a broadside entitled The Plain Case Stated of Old – but especially of New England, in an Address to His Highness the Prince of Orange. The pieced combined anti-Catholicism with English constitutionalism into a poem, echoing the sentiments of previously mentioned letters:

Those Laws, which Parliament had made to live, Were laid in Dust by Grand Prerogative … Nor could the Vastness of his damn’d design The Limits of his Popish Rage confine, But or’e the Ocean to this world it flew; Reformed America must suffer too. … by Your great Example sway’d. A just attempt opprest New-England Made, Not to revenge our wrongs but set us free From arbitrary Power and Slavery.[14]

A similar bloodless rebellion against Governor Francis Nicholson occurred on 31 May in New York, as Jacob Leisler’s militia captured Fort James. However, the uncertainty of New England’s charter and constitution remained until 1691. Agents repeatedly pleaded to the Board of Trade for a new charter, adding to a sense of uncertainty in the province.[15]

Uncertainty and fragmentation was exemplified in the defence of the province in the immediate aftermath of the revolt. Despite Andros’s insufficient administrative prowess, he was a competent military commander, having organised the defence of New York during King Philip’s War (1675-1678) and commanded Loyalist forces in the English Civil War (1642-1651).[16]

Andros’s dismissal immediately weakened New England’s military capabilities. In fear of disloyalty toward the new Revolutionary Council of Safety, troops were pulled from outposts on the province’s borders and the two regiments of regulars previously under Andros’s command simply deserted. This left many fortified positions, such as Fort Pentagouet, with fewer than twenty men defending them.[17]

The precariousness of this situation left many contemporaries to believe that the province may now be worse off than it was under Andros. An anonymous letter addressed to the former treasurer of the Dominion, John Usher, warned that Indian raids had ravaged the eastern borders of New York and that the new government had fragmented the region into ‘independent little kingdoms’:

The Eastern parts used to be under protection of New York, which is not now in a position to protect them – the people have stirred up the Yorkers to cast off the Lieutenant-General, and up jumps hot-brained Captain Leisler into the saddle and has his hands full of work. Thus New England, which yesterday was united and formidable, is divided into about ten little independent kingdoms, each acting as if it knew no superior power.[18]

Letters in support of the former Stuart governor were common, such as John Riggs’s petition to the king of 22 July 1689. Riggs, who described himself as ‘servant to Sir Edmund Andros’, believed, ‘Andros, the Governor of New England, behaved himself with all moderation in the Government. He is and always was a Protestant … He now begs that he may be released from his present close confinement’.[19]

Set against the backdrop of declining religiosity in New England, known as declension, a return to rule under the former Puritan dominated governments was unpalatable for the disenfranchised non-Puritan masses. Francis Brinley of Newport, Rhode Island believed, ‘if the Government of the old times be restored there can be no living here for sober men.’[20]

If the Glorious Revolution had spread to the North American colonies in order to safeguard against ‘slavery’ and arbitrary rule, it had fundamentally failed in Boston and New York. The province was now under immediate threat from New France and her Indian allies, while the fragmentation of the political sphere left many uncertain who was truly in control.

‘Every man is a governor’, declared one letter to the Board of Trade, ‘They hope daily for Mather to arrive with a charter.’[22]

A new charter would not arrive until October 1691, but it did not revert the region back to the old separate charters. Instead, the region remained unified under the Second Charter of Massachusetts and was transformed into a royal colony.

The new charter can be seen almost as a continuation of Stuart centralising policy. The colony now received an appointed, rather than elected, governor and political enfranchisement had been expanded to non-Puritans.

This trend toward centralisation was further compounded by the lack any real consequences for the deposed governors. Edmund Andros was simply reappointed to Virginia (1692-98) and Maryland (1693-94), while Francis Nicholson became governor of Maryland (1694-98), Nova Scotia (1712-15) and South Carolina (1721-25).

Coupled with this, a new Navigation Act was enacted in 1696 sought to tighten loopholes and prevent ‘the great abuses committed daily’ in the colonies.[22] Even in the manufacturing sector, New England saw little freedom as the Woollen Act of 1699 imposed a ban and heightened taxation on the exportation of American-made woollen goods. Alongside the newfound supreme sovereignty of Westminster, New England found itself totally subservient to England with reduced levels of self-government and a stricter application of the navigation system.

Furthermore, The Glorious Revolution in North America was not a uniform activity carried out en masse across all the colonies.

In Barbados, Governor Edwyn Stede simply switched his devotion from James II to William III. Nathanial Johnson of the Leeward Islands announced his resignation and fled to Carolina. And in Jamaica, Christopher Monck, the Duke of Albemarle, died in October 1688 at the age of 35. This split the colony between the pro-Albemarle small planters and the big planters he had ousted from power. Monck’s death and the following revolution in England simply restored control to the Assembly and big planters.

The Caribbean experienced an entirely different revolution, where the existing royal governors retained their power by way of support from the slave owning elite. This gave rise to two distinct systems of imperial governance, a Caribbean style and a mainland style.[23]

As the anonymous supporter of John Usher had noted, the colonies were fragmented into ‘independent little kingdoms’ with little, or no, unifying objectives. The Glorious Revolution had somewhat weakened the position of the colonies, exemplified by the transformation of New England into the royal colony of Massachusetts.

The continued centralising ambitions under William and Mary, and the rift between representative government in the Americas in contrast to parliamentary supremacy in England, was a debate that raged right up until 1776.

Despite the deeply unpopular attempt to create an American Viceroyalty, the weaknesses of a fragmented America did not go unnoticed. Attempts to unify America, especially in times of war, continued until the Seven Years’ War with the Albany Congress.

As Benjamin Franklin had declared in 1754, and later re-emphasised during the American Revolution, the colonies should Join, or Die.

[1] Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (London: Yale University Press, 2009)

[2] Richard Hutton, “The Making of the Secret Treaty of Dover” in The Historical Journal, 19, 2 (June, 1986), pp. 297-318

[3] Edward Randolph, Representations of Ye Affairs of New England, 6 May 1676

[4] Edward Randolph, Articles of high misdemeanor exhibited to the Lords of Trade, against the Governor and Company of Massachusetts, 12 June 1683

[5] Richard S. Dunn, “The Glorious Revolution and America” in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp.445-466, p. 450-453

[6] ibid, p. 446

[7] ibid., p. 454

[8] Michael G. Laramie, King William’s War: The First Contest for North America, 1689-1697 (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2017), p. 99

[9] A.B., An Account of the Late Revolution in New England, 6 June 1689, as printed in Jack P. Green (ed.), Settlements and Society: 1584-1763, Volume I, 1966, pp. 186-191, p. 186

[10] ibid., p. 188

[11] ibid., p. 189

[12] ibid., p. 190

[13] Letter, Sir William Phipps and Increase Mather to the King, 19 February 1689, as printed in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 13, 1689-1692 (London, 1901), p. 4

[14] The Plain Case Stated of Old – but especially of New-England, in an Address to His Highness the Prince of Orange, 1689 (Boston, Printed for and Sold by Benjamin Harris at London Coffee-House), as printed in Craig Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of Early American Political Theory, 1675–1775 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 68-69

[15] For example, see, Letter, The Agents for Massachusetts to Lords of Trade and Plantations, 21 April 1691, “The people of New England hope to be restored to the former charter-privileges taken from them in the last year of King Charles II … Nothing could be greater encouragement to the prosecution of this war than restoration of the ancient liberties and privileges for which our fathers transported themselves to the wilderness, and have since defended it against all enemies, with considerable advantage to England.”

[16] Michael G. Laramie, King William’s War, 2017, p. 99

[17] ibid., p. 100

[18] Letter, Anonymous to John Usher, 10 July 1689, as printed in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 13, 1689-1692 (London, 1901), p. 82

[19] Letter, John Riggs petition to the king, 22 July 1689, as printed in ibid, p. 103

[20] Letter, Francis Brinley to Thomas Brinley, Newport, Rhode Island, 15 July, 1689, as printed in ibid., p. 120

[21] Letter, Anonymous from Boston to the Board of Trade, 31 July 1689, as printed in ibid.

[22] The Navigation Act of [10 April] 1696, as printed in Jack P. Green (ed.), Settlements and Society: 1584-1763, 1966, p. 210

[23] Richard S. Dunn, The Glorious Revolution and America, 1998, p. 457