Friday, April 25, 2025

Thomas Jefferson and the Glorious Revolution

Thomas Jefferson, regarded as the most important author of the Declaration of Independence, studied law at William & Mary College, in Williamsburg, Virginia. So it's not a surprise that Jefferson would cite William and Mary's Glorious Revolution of 1688/89.

Here's an example, explaining how the monarchy was subject to Parliament:

"Since the establishment, however, of the British constitution, at the Glorious Revolution, on its free and antient principles, neither his majesty, nor his ancestors, have exercised such a power of dissolution in the island of Great Britain; and when his majesty was petitioned, by the united voice of his people there, to dissolve the present parliament, who had become obnoxious to them, his ministers were heard to declare, in open parliament, that his majesty possessed no such power by the constitution..." 

- from Thomas Jefferson's Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)

Within the college collections are these documents from 1688 & 1689, and has both portraits and statues of William and Mary.

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