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CHAPTER FOUR THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION ISSUE Contemporaries did not much heed the arguments of Governor George Johnstone, but we should. He had a knack for explaining the issues separating Great Britain and the American colonies more clearly than his more influential and better remembered colleagues. For one thing, he knew where to look for the source of colonial whig constitutional doctrines. "It is now clear," he told the House of Commons in a widely printed speech of December 1774, "that the people of America, actuated with the same firm and resolute spirit, and tinctured with the same enthusiasm which enabled our ancestors to withstand the unjust claims of the crown, in the days of Charles the 1st, are determined to resist the high doctrines of parliamentary supremacy, held forth by this country, which must, in its consequences, reduce their liberties to a level with the colonies of France and Spain." 1 Johnstone's theme was not original. American whigs were often depicted as the heirs of old English and even British2 constitutional struggles. Addressing the Massachusetts Superior Court in the Writ of Assistance case, which John Adams later called the opening event of the revolutionary controversy, James Otis described himself as arguing "in favour of British liberty" and "in opposition to a kind of power, the exercise of which in former periods of English history, cost one King of England his head 52 THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION ISSUE 53 and another his throne."3 On 10 April 1775, just nine days before New England minutemen met British troops on the town green of Lexington, the lord mayor, aldermen, and livery of London warned King George III that legislative grievances had "driven" Americans to despair, and "compelled them to have recourse to that resistance which is justified by the great principles of the Constitution, actuated by which, at the glorious period of the Revolution, our ancestors transferred the Imperial Crown of these Realms from the Popish and tyrannical race of the Stuarts, to the illustrious and Protestant House of Brunswick."4 The political argument was that the British should support not oppose American resistance to parliamentary supremacy because the Americans were doing what the English and Scots had done in 1688. Colonial whig mobs, it was said, were no different from the mobs that "more than once preserved the British Constitution from absolute ruin; such a mob as rose in England, in the reign ofJames the Second.... The difference is, they opposed an arbitrary Monarch, while we are only defending ourselves against the unconstitutional, despotick power of our fellow-subjects-the Lords and Commons ofGreat Britain."5 The constitutional theory was that American resistance to Parliament was sanctioned by English and Scottish precedents. Colonial whigs, a British observer wrote, objected to the Coercive Acts and other parliamentary legislation as acts of oppression, "and if they are right in this, we have no reason to call them Rebels, because, in this State of the Case, their Opposition and Resistance is founded on the same Principles on which the Resistance and Opposition made to King James II. was founded."6 The two main precedents American whigs cited for providing legitimacy to their opposition to parliamentary sovereignty were the English Civil War against Charles I and the Glorious Revolution against James II. Colonial whigs and their British supporters confidently drew analogies between the 1640s and the 1770s, between Charles I's effort to extend the customary tax of ship money and Parliament's Stamp Act,1 and between the royalist claim that allegiance was due to King Charles rather than the laws and the imperialist claim that allegiance was due to the king in Parliament rather than the ancient constitution. The issues even seemed to be the same, in part because the constitutional language was so much the same. "[T]he declared grounds of War betwixt the late King and the ever Renowned Parliament," the Remonstrance of the Cities asserted in 1659, "was ... the Kings illegal imposing Taxes upon the People, without their consent in Parliament, contrary to the known Laws of the Land, his subverting the Fundamental Lawes of the Nation, His neglecting and refusing to bring Delinquents to Tryal, that had been Instruments in obstructing Justice, promoting Monopolies, and other grievances to the great 54 THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION ISSUE Oppr[e]ssion of the People."8 Although eighteenth-century constitutionalists looked back to the Saxons and to the Gothic constitution for the authority of law as an autonomous force, they looked to the...

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