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England

England stood at the beginning of American constitutional history because the colonists first understood themselves as English subjects who possessed ancient rights under English law. The struggles of Sir Edward Coke against royal prerogative, the Petition of Right, the English Civil War, the Habeas Corpus Act, and above all the Glorious Revolution of 1688 helped create the constitutional vocabulary that later Americans used when they protested arbitrary authority. Men such as John Locke and William Blackstone shaped the intellectual world in which colonial leaders thought about law, representation, property, and the limits of government, even when they later interpreted those ideas in more radical directions than many English statesmen intended. During the imperial crisis, England was also the seat of the power Americans resisted: George III, Parliament, and imperial ministries claimed authority to tax and legislate for the colonies after 1763, while Benjamin Franklin and later John Adams argued in London for conciliation and then for recognition of American rights. The imperial relationship deteriorated through the Stamp Act, the Coercive Acts, and the decision to answer colonial defiance with military force, turning England from the mother country into the principal antagonist of the Revolution. Yet even when Americans declared independence, they did not cast aside the English constitutional tradition altogether; they adapted it, widened it, and joined it to natural-rights reasoning and written constitutional forms. England therefore mattered because it furnished both the inheritance and the provocation from which the American republic emerged.