The English Bill of Rights and the Toleration Act of 1689 affirmed
freedom of worship for Christians in the colonies as well as in England and enforced limits on the Crown . Equally important, John Locke’s Sec- ond Treatise on Government (1690), the Glorious Revolution’s major theoretical justification, set forth a theory of government based not on divine right but on contract . It contended that the people, endowed with natural rights of life, liberty, and property, had the right to reb- el when governments violated their rights .
By the early 18th century, almost all the colonies had been brought under the direct jurisdiction of the British Crown, but under the rules established by the Glorious Revolu- tion . Colonial governors sought to exercise powers that the king had lost in England, but the colonial as- semblies, aware of events there, at- tempted to assert their “rights” and “liberties .” Their leverage rested on two significant powers similar to those held by the English Parlia- ment: the right to vote on taxes and expenditures, and the right to ini- tiate legislation rather than merely react to proposals of the governor .
The legislatures used these rights to check the power of royal gover- nors and to pass other measures to expand their power and influence . The recurring clashes between gov- ernor and assembly made colonial politics tumultuous and worked in- creasingly to awaken the colonists to the divergence between American and English interests . In many cases, the royal authorities did not under-
stand the importance of what the colonial assemblies were doing and simply neglected them . Nonetheless, the precedents and principles estab- lished in the conflicts between as- semblies and governors eventually became part of the unwritten “con- stitution” of the colonies . In this way, the colonial legislatures asserted the right of self-government .