What were the events that transpired in Boston after news of the Glorious Revolution in England reached the colonists?

Answer 1

When James became king after his brother's death in 1685, he decided to make some drastic changes in both England and America. James wanted very much to rule England without Parliament, the governing body that represented English nobility and landowners. He believed that God had given him the special right to rule as an "absolute monarch," who did not have to include any other government official or group to make laws or rule his people. He was also a Roman Catholic who wanted to change England from a Protestant to a Catholic country.

James also thought that the colonies of New England--Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire--were very poorly governed and much too independent of the king's control. So he sent Edmund Andros (pronounced Andrews) to unite the colonies under one royal government.

Things did not go well for James in England. During his short 3-year rule, he managed to make nearly everyone angry. Whigs, people who supported the power of Parliament to limit the king, opposed James's ideas of absolute rule. Even Tories, those who usually supported the king's authority, soon agreed that James was going too far, especially in his attempts to make England Catholic. In the autumn of 1688 Whigs and Tories joined together to force James off the throne. They invited his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William to rule in James's place.

To explain why they believed their revolution was legal, Parliament passed the English Bill of Rights early in 1689. The bill listed many things James II had done which Parliament believed were illegal. It also listed the rights that Englishmen believed they enjoyed under English law. William and Mary accepted the Bill of Rights at the time of their coronation, swearing to uphold these "ancient rights and liberties" of the English people.

While James was getting into deeper and deeper trouble in England, Adros was busy making his own enemies in America. He took over the colonial governments of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Plymouth, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York, and combined them all into one big government called the Dominion of New England. He made the colonists pay new taxes, arrested and fined people who opposed him, and allowed residents of towns only one meeting a year to take care of important business.

Colonists hated the Dominion. In the summer of 1688, they sent the Puritan minister and president of Harvard College, Increase Mather, to England to protest what Andros was doing. Mather had to sneak on board a ship and hide until the vessel was far away from America. By the time he reached England, the Glorious Revolution was under way there. It was about to happen in Boston, too.