Episode Details

The Dominion of New England did not fall because the colonies resisted it. It fell because the king who built it lost his throne in a single winter. This is the finale of By What Authority: the Glorious Revolution told from the imperial side, where it actually happened. James the Second, a Catholic king of a Protestant country, tried to suspend the law by royal decree — and found, when his son was born and a Catholic dynasty loomed, that England would not be ruled at a king's pleasure. William of Orange published his reasons and crossed the Channel on a Protestant wind; James threw the Great Seal in the Thames and fled to France; and a new throne was handed out on written conditions — the Bill of Rights — that bound a king under the law for the first time. To a people who still remembered the civil war and the last king's head on a block, doing it almost without blood felt like a miracle.

Word crossed the ocean, and from Boston to the Carolinas the Crown's governors were thrown out in a season. William Penn's own patron was the fallen king, and Penn nearly fell with him. Then the new monarch, his eyes fixed on a European war, did the one thing no one expected: he left the colonies alone. What followed was not a policy but the absence of one — three-quarters of a century in which a people quietly forgot how to be ruled from across an ocean.

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