Dr. Robert Owens Chronicles the History of the Future

Revolutions March 12, 2025

The always grasping never satisfied Stuart dynasty had a rough time during their four reigns as the kings of England.  They sought absolute power and ended up losing the constitutional power they had.   The second one was beheaded by his own people and the last one was chased out of the country.  The first and the third were wastrels who partied themselves to distraction and spent themselves into poverty.  They are best remembered for the line applied to their restoration after the regicide and the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell; “They never learned anything and never forgot anything.”  All in all, they were a sad interlude in a proud heritage.

When the people of England could suffer these inept political neophytes no longer, they rose up in what is known as the Glorious Revolution, chased James II from the country and welcomed William of Orange the husband of James’ daughter Mary as the Protestant replacements to the hated Catholic James.

The coup was greeted in the colonies with jubilation on the part of those seeking greater independence.  They quickly seized upon the revolution as an opportunity to cast the appointees of James as recalcitrant adherents to the old regime and themselves as ardent supporters of the new.  This led to the overturning of every royal colonial government and the installation of more independent and more liberty minded groups.

William of Orange now styled William III of England, was a battle-hardened veteran of the long and bitter continental wars against the aggrandizements of Louis XIV.  His main reason for coveting the crown of England was to subtract England from its alliance with France and to add it to his coalition against that same power.  He had little concern for the colonies except as they figured into his consolidation of power in England and his mobilization of its power against France.

In consequence to this he picked and chose winners and losers in the colonial power struggles based upon his own calculations not the calculations or interests of the colonists.  Sometime this coincided with colonial interests   In Pennsylvania William suspended the charter because Penn had been a favorite of James, and he thus made Pennsylvania a royal colony.  In Maryland he allowed Lord Baltimore to retain his ownership but took the government of the colonies out of his Catholic hands and put it into the hands of an appointed Protestant governor.  In Massachusetts William refused to allow a return to their original charter, and he retained them as royal colonies, but he allowed them a great degree of autonomy and independence in local matters.  The smaller New England colonies were allowed to reinstitute their original charters.

William plunged England into a long-lasting series of European wars all designed to hobble France for the benefit of his native Holland.  These wars cost England more than anyone could have imagined.  They led to a level of taxation never before known to support a massive increase in the military establishment both on land and on the sea.  This also meant that William and the crown were occupied elsewhere.  They had precious little resources to send to America and sought nothing more than revenue to fight on in Europe.  The king didn’t really care what was going on in the colonies as long as they didn’t cause him to divert men or material from his main theater of action and as long as the contributed money to the war effort.  Under these circumstances the colonists were able to gain a degree of freedom and independence not known back in England.

During these years the crowns of England and Scotland were formally united.  They had become united when James VI of Scotland was crowned as James I of England.  Though united in the person of the king and still united after the regicide in the Commonwealth they were officially united in 1707 and after that date the Scots soon came to outnumber the English as immigrants to the colonies.  This marks the birth of Great Britain and the end of Scotland as an independent nation.

Another feature of the Eighteenth-Century British Empire was its suppression of the pirates which had once been an unofficial arm of its own foreign policy against the Spanish.  As the Spanish Empire declined, and the British became the dominant sea power the pirates had become more and more of a nuisance.  Eventually the British used the same tactics which have always worked against pirates, sink their ships, burn their bases and hang those captured.  This effectively suppressed the pirates and brought a measure of peace to the sea lanes so a commercial empire like Britain could thrive. 

The British were preeminently an empire of shopkeepers and merchants.  They may not have had raw political power, but they held economic power that could sway the powers that be.  The colonies had been founded as economic enterprises and even after most of them devolved or evolved into royal colonies they remained primarily economic enterprises. 

Following the tenants of Mercantilism, ever uppermost in the mid of the royal government was how can the colonies benefit the homeland?  How can they contribute to the power of the crown?  And while the empire of the English now spread around the world it was profoundly an Atlantic worldview that predominated the thinking of the empire builders just as it was a European worldview that had predominated the mind of King William allowing the colonies to further develop as independent minded enclaves in the midst of a far-flung empire.