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The Constitution’s Deep Roots
The accession to the throne of James II, a Catholic, brought on the opposition of the great landed proprietors of England and of most of the
English people, who were overwhelmingly Protestant. In 1688 James was
forced to flee abroad. He was succeeded as sovereign by the Protestant
William III, from the Netherlands, the husband of James’s daughter, Mary.
To secure the throne, William III was compelled to recognize the supremacy of Parliament. From 1689 forward, the royal influence over government in England tended to diminish, and the power of Parliament—
that is, of the English form of representative government—tended to
increase.
In 1714, George, King of Hanover, came over from Germany to be enthroned as George I of England. Throughout the eighteenth century Britain was ruled by three Georges, of whom the first two were unfamiliar
with English ways, so that political power inclined toward Parliament
and parliamentary political parties. George III, hoping to rule as a ‘‘Patriot King,’’ tried to restore much of the royal authority, and in doing so
he helped to bring on the American Revolution.
The Challenge of Parliamentary Supremacy
Though not always clearly perceived in England or in the colonies, the
English Constitution, it may thus be seen, had changed much since the
time of Charles I, and there were often conflicting precedents. The constitutional conflicts of the early seventeenth century centered around a
struggle for power between the King and Parliament, whereas the American revolutionary struggle pitted the American colonists and their provincial assemblies against Parliament. The supremacy of the King had
been displaced by the supremacy of Parliament, and it was a complicated
and confusing task to sort out the arguments against one form of supremacy and apply them to the other. This much the colonists did know:
that a legislature could be just as tyrannical as a king, and that in fact it
was often more difficult to deal with an entire assembly of tyrants than
with one. The reign of Oliver Cromwell following the execution of Charles
I in 1649 plunged England into a state of despotic rule that far surpassed
the excesses of the Stuart kings and taught the Anglo-Americans the hard
lesson that unchecked power can lead to tyranny no matter who wields it.