Why did J Locke write against the king?

Answer 1

Technically, john Locke's Two Treatises on Civil Government (1690) were not written against the king, because at the time of its composition, James II was being deposed in favor of a much less Roman Catholic monarch, who turned out to be Mary, his daughter from his first marriage to a Protestant woman, Lady Anne Hyde.

Locke's treatises were intended, among other things, to affirm the just rule of a legal monarch in conjunction and cooperation with the will of the people, as represented by the British Parliament in the late 17th century. When James II opposed Parliament and refused to disinherit his son because of his Roman Catholic convictions (from his conversion around 1668), Parliament simply ousted him in 1688 and invited Mary and her husband, William, to rule in his stead.

If Locke had been writing against the king, he would have been writing against monarchy in general; that wasn't the case. In the following century, Locke's work was used as a justification for revolution against tyrannical and autocratic rule by out-of-touch monarchs like George III (American Revolution) and Louis XVI (French Revolution). When William and Mary brought in the Bill of Rights, nobody could have been more pleased than John Locke, because it was entirely consistent with his own ideas and inspirations.