In 1988, to mark the Tercentenary of the 1688 Glorious Revolution, HMSO produced this official brochure to accompany an exhibition that was held at the Houses of Parliament. Published under the auspices of the Lord Chancellor, Baron Mackay of Clashfern, and the Speaker of the House of Commons, Lord Bernard Weatherill, it had a double page spread about the American Revolution which describes the indelible umbilical connection between 1688 and 1776:
"... When Britain tried to impose more of the financial responsibility for maintaining the empire on the colonists in the period after 1763, the Americans viewed the moves as an attempt to overthrow their liberty much in the way that James Il's policies had seemed an attack on English liberties 80 years before.
And when the American Revolution finally erupted, the issues involved would have been very familiar to the participants in the Glorious Revolution: the proper distribution of governmental power, and the rights of subjects and citizens. Moreover, in making their new constitution the Americans drew on the English constitutional documents of 1689, notably the Bill of Rights, even to the extent of using some of the same phraseology.
The American Revolution was an inspiration to the French revolutionaries of 1789, and when they drafted their Declaration des Droits de l'homme they consciously followed the American Declaration of Independence. In the process, they were also harking back to the Declaration of Rights of 1689, a fact which some Frenchmen at the time recognised and which the Revolution Society in England was keen to point out..."
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