The roots of the nation

The English origins of the American Revolution

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Thinking Minnesota magazine.

The Declaration of Independence held three “truths to be self-evident.” First, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”; second, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”; and third, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”

To understand why these truths were deemed self-evident in the Pennsylvania State House on July 4, 1776 — for they were deemed so almost nowhere else — we must examine their origins and that requires delving deep into the history of the country the signatories were declaring independence from: England.

Consent

In 1013, Aethelred II was forced off the English throne by Sweyn Forkbeard. Upon Forkbeard’s death the following year, the English Witan (“wise men”) invited the exiled Aethelred to return, but only if he agreed to their conditions, specifically that he refrain from excessive taxation and commit to consult with them. Their offer came from “all the Witan,” and Aethelred’s acceptance was addressed to “all the people.” If the English were to be governed, they must first give their consent.

The historian J. R. Maddicott writes: “In other parts of the West, the Germanic legislative tradition” — of the “general assembly” described by Tacitus in the First Century AD and brought to England by the Anglo-Saxons from the Fifth Century led, as legend had it, by Hengist and Horsa — “died out in the Tenth Century. Its energetic preservation and promotion in England was quite exceptional.” By today’s standards, these assemblies were a mockery of democracy, but by the standards of their time, they were startlingly progressive: by which should they be judged?

The Norman Conquest of 1066 ended this, and around 1188 Ranulf de Glanville, Henry II’s chief legal officer, wrote that, “What pleases the prince has the force of law.” On this basis, Henry and his sons extracted cash from their subjects via all manner of methods. So pervasive was this extortion, that in 1200, records show, “The wife of Hugh de Neville offers the King [John] 200 chickens so that she may lie one night with her husband.”

By 1215, the barons had tired of such arbitrary rule and forced John to sign the Magna Carta (Great Charter). The barons looked back to the coronation oath of Henry I in 1100, which itself looked back to that of Edward the Confessor in 1043, in which he swore to uphold the laws and customs of the people. “To this extent,” historian Nicholas Vincent writes, “Magna Carta is to be viewed as a deeply conservative, not as a deliberately radical, measure.” Fundamentally, it held that the king was not above the law but subject to it. Practically, it asserted, among other things, that: “No ‘scutage’ or ‘aid’ may be levied in our kingdom without its general consent…” and that:

To obtain the general consent of the realm for the assessment of an ‘aid’…or a ‘scutage’, we will cause the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons to be summoned individually by letter.

No taxation without representation, in later words.

This would be an increasingly sore point. Cash-strapped monarchs had to go begging to Parliament, a concession won again from Henry III by Simon de Montfort following a further baronial revolt in 1265. Parliament usually sought something in return and resentful monarchs resorted to various extra-Parliamentary ruses — such as fines and forced loans — to raise money.

When he summoned Parliament in 1628, Charles I was presented with the Petition of Right, which precluded him — again — from levying taxes without Parliamentary consent, imprisoning subjects without legal cause (habeas corpus), forcing soldiers or sailors into private homes (quartering), and imposing martial law during peacetime. Charles was a believer in the Divine Right of Kings, which asserted that monarchs derived their authority directly from God, making them accountable only to Him, not to people or parliaments, but he had little choice but to agree. Following a fractious session the following year, however, Charles dissolved Parliament permanently.

Like his predecessors, Charles deployed a variety of fiscal tricks of dubious legality — “thus was the king’s coffers filled with oppression” one contemporary wrote — but when his Scottish subjects rebelled in 1639, these were inadequate. He summoned Parliament in April 1640, quarreled, dissolved it in May, but had to recall it in November following another Scottish victory. Parliament wrung the Triennial Acts out of Charles, requiring it to meet at least every three years and permitting the members to assemble themselves if the king failed to issue a proper summons. Once again, levying taxes without Parliament’s consent was declared unlawful.

When these disputes erupted again in 1642, civil war broke out between Charles and Parliament. Parliament won and, in 1649, Charles went on trial for his life. “I would know by what power I am called hither,” he asked his accusers. “I would know by what authority, I mean lawful…Remember, I am your King, your lawful King.”

“There is a contract and a bargain made between the King and his people,” Judge John Bradshaw answered, echoing the wise men of the 11th Century, “and your oath is taken: and certainly, Sir, the bond is reciprocal.”

Charles was found guilty of treason and beheaded, the starkest possible demonstration of Magna Carta’s assertion that everybody — including the monarch — was subject to the law. English kings had been killed before, but only over narrow dynastic questions. This was new. The dispute that cost Charles his throne and his head was ideological.

Equality

John Wycliffe, born around 1328 and remembered as “the Morning Star of the Reformation,” and his followers, the Lollards, anticipated much of what would later be called Protestantism. They also translated the Bible into English for the first time; it was, Wycliffe argued, “open to understanding of simple men.” “This Bible is for the government of the people, for the people and by the people,” he wrote in 1384. Now, the layman could read for himself such statements as 1 Timothy 2:5: “For one God and one mediator is of God and of men, a man Christ Jesus.” This was the foundation of the “priesthood of all believers,” the later notion, as historian William G. Naphy explains, “that reformation, rather than being the work of councils or clerics or theologians, was a task given by God to all Christians.”

What did this mean for priests? What did it mean for kings? If Protestantism was the ecclesiastic answer, what was the political one? Church and state sought to suppress an English Bible to avoid such questions. At his trial in 1536, another translator, William Tyndale, made a radically egalitarian, populist defense of the effort: “If God spare my life,” he told his accusers, “ere many years I will cause a boy who drives a plough to know more of the scriptures than you do.” Tyndale was found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake.

Lollard ideas lived on in the shadows, however, reemerging during the Reformation when England embraced Protestantism in the 16th Century and flowered during the Civil War. Parliament raised the New Model Army, well-led, trained, and equipped volunteers who quickly became the finest military force in Europe, bringing victory over Charles. Oliver Cromwell, one of its architects, understood the new, ideological nature of their struggle: “I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows,” he wrote, “than that which you call a Gentle-man and is nothing else.” These were Tyndale’s plough boys, armed.

At the war’s end, Cromwell’s russet-coated troops gathered to discuss the future government of England. The transcripts of these Putney Debates are England’s version of the Federalist Papers. At one point, arguing against a property qualification for voting, an obscure colonel, Edward Sexby, said:

There are many thousands of us soldiers that have ventured our lives; we have but little property in the kingdom, yet we have a birthright. But it seems to me now that you argue that except a man hath a fixed estate in the kingdom, he hath no right in the kingdom. I wonder we were so much deceived. If we had not a right to the kingdom, we were mere mercenary soldiers. There are many in my condition; it may be that they have little property of estate at present, but they have as much birthright as my lords Cromwell and Ireton, as any in this place.

From the priesthood of all believers had evolved the idea of an electorate of not-quite-all Englishmen, a notion beyond anything even in Anglo-Saxon England. This was too much for Cromwell, who shot some of the most radical, dissolved Parliament, and ruled alone as Lord Protector.

But, again, these ideas lived on. As political scientist Bernard Crick noted, at Putney in 1647:

…two quite different arguments are being made. The one is ‘fit to fight, fit to vote’…But the other argument was far more radical – ‘birthright’: being a freeborn Englishman in itself created a right to vote…[Sexby] appears to be on the edge of inventing or invoking a philosophy of natural rights that would include civil rights, and there was no warrant for this in any contemporary philosophy…

There soon would be.

Revolution

Cromwell’s dictatorship died with him, and in 1660, Charles I’s son was invited to return as Charles II. Dying in 1685 without a legitimate heir, he was succeeded by his younger brother, James II, who, the elder brother had glumly prophesied, “will lose his kingdom for a Mass.” Indeed, James’ attempt to re-Catholicize England drove his subjects to depose him and install his Protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange, as joint monarchs in 1688, on condition that they agree to a Bill of Rights. This established a constitutional requirement for the Crown to seek the consent of the people as represented in Parliament, set limits on the powers of the monarch, established the rights of Parliament, including regular parliaments, free elections, and parliamentary privilege, and listed individual rights, including the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and, again, the right not to pay taxes levied without parliamentary approval.

For the second time in 40 years, the English had forcibly deposed a legitimate monarch. To much of Europe, this looked like anarchy. John Locke sought to provide a philosophical warrant for it in his “Two Treatises of Government,” published in 1689. Locke’s thought is deep and wide ranging, but the essential points here are two.

First, Locke believed that man had “natural” or unalienable rights. Like Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 work “Leviathan,” Locke’s argument began in the “state of nature.” But where Hobbes saw this as a moral free for all requiring the imposition of law by an all-powerful sovereign, Locke believed that “laws of nature” pertained in this state, something like evolved social norms such as the “Golden Rule”: “whatever things ye will that men do to you, [and] do ye to them,” as Wycliffe’s translation of Matthew 7:12 read.

“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it,” Locke wrote, “which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Governments are instituted among men — and only for this purpose — to protect them from violations of this natural law: “it is not without reason,” Locke wrote, “that [man] seeks out, and is willing to join in society with others…for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates, by which I call the general name property.”

From this followed the second point: A government which became destructive of these ends had forfeited its right to govern. “[W]henever the power, that is put in any hands for the government of the people, and the preservation of their properties is applied to other ends,” Locke wrote, “and made use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue them to the arbitrary and irregular commands of those that have it; there it presently becomes tyranny.” In this case:

…if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going, it is not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected.

This would become known as the “right of revolution,” which the Second Continental Congress invoked on July 4, 1776.

1776

“The ideology of the [American] Revolution,” the historian Bernard Bailyn wrote, “derived from many sources, was dominated by a peculiar strand of British political thought.” The Declaration of Independence echoes Locke, but Locke, in turn, echoes a tradition going back to Anglo-Saxon England, if not before. The colonists did not, initially, see themselves as Americans fighting for independence, but, the First Continental Congress declared in 1774, “as Englishmen, their ancestors in like cases have usually done, for asserting and vindicating their rights and liberties.” But, after the colonial plough boys and russet-coated captains had fired the shots heard around the world at Lexington in April 1775, it would be either independence or defeat.

The men who signed the Declaration held those three truths to be self-evident because they had grown up in an English political culture in which it was established that governments needed the consent of the governed, it was widely believed that many men were created equal, and they accepted that a government that didn’t uphold its end of the bargain could be legitimately deposed.

The day the Declaration was issued, Congress appointed a committee to design a seal for the United States. Thomas Jefferson proposed putting on the reverse: “Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.” Americans may consider their country young, but its origins lie deep in history.