Other European monarchies saw the English government as entirely too republican. Englishmen were too liberty‐​loving and egalitarian to be considered good subjects for monarchy, and the English monarchy certainly had a kind of republican constitution. The English king, during the eighteenth century, had their prerogatives and finances severely limited by the strength of the English Parliament, and by the independence of the three branches of the English government (monarchy, nobility and commons). [1]

It is not easy to pinpoint the exact time that the republican spirit began developing in England. After all, prior to the Norman Invasion in 1066 the king of England was nominated by the previous king and elected by the Witangemot. It was not strictly hereditary, which is how Harold Godwinson, who had no royal blood whatsoever, wound up on the throne in 1066 while William of Normandy believed it should be his (William was the late King Edward’s cousin). The Witangemot was by no means a democratic institution, but it can be seen as one small limitation on the absolute power of monarchies in England. [2]

After the Norman invasion William created a kind of bureaucracy that was capable of governing the kingdom in his absence as he controlled large areas of land in modern day France and spent considerable time outside of the kingdom. This Norman England consisted of a new Norman nobility that owed its position to William and showed him considerable loyalty. [3] In addition to this new nobility, William’s Norman England featured a few important developments.

The Witangemot was replaced by a new council of advisors along with a chief justiciar. Together, this group was able to administer the king’s justice whether the king was in England or not. Another important change was the sheriff becoming a royal official. As such the sheriff was responsible for enforcing royal law and maintaining royal justice at the county level. Finally, the reforms in the church cannot be underestimated as they suborned the church to royal authority more and coerced it into becoming more of a partner in supporting royal authority throughout the realm. [4] The English proceeded to govern themselves in the name of the king under each monarch until the early thirteenth century when John I lost all the French lands to the French king.

In 1215 John’s barons had grown tired of the ever‐​increasing demands being made by the Plantagenet kings and they rose in rebellion against him. These barons forced John to issue Magna Carta, which placed some serious limits on absolute monarchy. This document guaranteed certain private property rights by requiring that the king could not take horses and wagons, grain, wood, etc., without paying for them or through due process. Magna Carta prohibited the king from selling his justice or depriving anyone of it. It also secured a right to not be punished for crimes beyond the degree of the crime committed, or until after due process which was administered by the peers of the accused. The original document also included a clause that allowed for uncivil disobedience should the king not honor his side of the agreement.

While it is debatable whether the Magna Carta itself accomplished those things the barons desired, it clearly inspired later generations of Englishmen in their beliefs about the inherited rights of Englishmen. These rights became an important part of the arguments against Charles I that set the stage for the English Civil War. After all, the parliamentarians argued that they were doing nothing more than protecting the existing order, which Charles was trying to change. [5] Charles dissolved Parliament and attempted to rule without it, but raised the ire of his subjects when he tried to collect the Ship Money, which was a tax that was supposed to be used in times of emergency to pay for coastal defense. The King’s opponents argued that he could not charge the Ship Money because there was no emergency, therefore he needed to call Parliament and ask for money. [6] Beyond that, Edward Coke, a supporter of Parliament, declared that Magna Carta saved England from tyranny by placing the king under the law, limiting his powers, and that it brought about constitutional government. [7]

Magna Carta and the arguments against the tyranny of absolute monarchy were part of the shared history that migrated to the western hemisphere along with the colonists that moved there throughout the seventeenth century. The peculiarities of the English constitution were magnified in America and the colonists moved much further down the road toward republicanism than did their counterparts in England because of some key differences between the two. The lack of an established church under the king’s control meant that the king could not rely on it to help maintain loyalty. There was also no aristocracy in the colonies. The wealthiest of American elites were no better than minor gentry in England and the ranks of the elites were more accessible. These wealthy Americans did not dominate their locales in the same way that English aristocrats did and the less wealthy knew there were ways for them to join the ranks of the elites. Finally, the great distance, and the time it took to cross that distance, led to a certain amount of negligence by the crown, leaving the colonists to govern themselves in near complete autonomy. [8] For all this, the American colonies were ideally suited for the development of true republicanism. [9]

In the 1760s, after the French and Indian War, the Parliament in London decided it needed to recoup the money it spent fighting the French in the colonies by levying colonial taxes. In the process, they hoped to exert their authority over the colonies. By that time however, the colonists had been left alone too long and they were not interested in relinquishing the autonomy they enjoyed. More than that though, the colonists saw it as their right as Englishmen to govern themselves, and this is where they began to expound on their ideas, first of self‐​rule, and then of republicanism.

Alexander Hamilton wrote: