"No Kings" – 1776 was a Revolution against Parliamentary tyranny

Pic above from this website.

The "No Kings" protests in the USA over the past months are a curious contradiction. It's a great present-day slogan, but it's not historically true. Thanks to the 1688 Glorious Revolution, almost a century before, in 1776 King George III was pretty much just a figurehead. The problems and tyrannies that the Colonists faced were because of the London Parliament.

Which is why, for a decade, in multiple documents from The Stamp Act Congress of 1765 to the Second Continental Congress which began in 1775, the Colonists listed their grievances against what Parliament was doing and appealed to the King to intervene. Even if he'd wanted to, he couldn't. He had no executive power. Since 1689 Britain had been a limited monarchy.

• The timeless preamble to the eventual Declaration of Independence made six comments about Government, and then turned its attention to "the present King of Great Britain". It then listed a series of 27 grievances against him, saying that "our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people".

As James Wilson would say in 1787, “The people of [America] did not oppose the British King but the parliament—the opposition was not [against] a unity but a corrupt multitude.”

...............

In The Royalist Revolution; Monarchy and the American Founding (Harvard University Press, 2015) Professor Eric Nelson explains this essential point, especially in the current "No Kings" protest era. As the Amazon summary says – The Founding Fathers were rebels against the British Parliament, not the Crown. Here's an intelligent review of the book from the Harvard Law Review.

"No Kings" is potent and relevant for our day, but it inverts the history.

Kings can be tyrants, but Parliaments can also be, and have been, tyrannies.

• Excellent article from September 2025, entitled On the Law of the Declaration of Independence by Professor Adam Tomkins of the University of Glasgow, is online here

...............

PS – 1776 was primarily a rebellion against a London government that the Founding Father John Ja described as  “wicked Ministers and evil Counsellors”. It is no coincidence that the 1688 Declaration of William Henry Prince of Orange spoke of "evil counsellors" on 20 occasions, and of "wicked Counsellors" with "wicked designs" and "wicked ends".