I always hear that the colonies revolted to throw off the shackles of tyranny and oppression, but am I thinking in modern terms when I hear those words? I never got the impression that things were really quite that bad in England, and after all, not all the colonies joined the revolution.
This really takes some background to explain, so bear with me.
At the time, it was a time-honored English legal doctrine that Englishmen have certain intrinsic rights that the Crown (and Parliament, by extension) can't take away. It took centuries to develop the concept, but by 1770 or so, these so-called Rights of Englishmen were well-established enough that the standard treatise on the subject, Commentaries on the Laws of England, treated them as more or less a given. The origin of this doctrine is Calvin's Case, 77 E.R. 377 (1572), which held that even Scotsmen were entitled to the Rights of Englishmen after the English and Scottish crowns were unified. Among other things, the Rights of Englishmen include the right to Parliamentary representation.
But there's a catch: English law also enshrined the concept of parliamentary supremacy-- that Parliament can do whatever it feels like, without any restrictions, and that includes legislating on behalf of the colonies, a power it asserted in the Declaratory Act of 1766.
Now, before the French and Indian War (1756-63), these two principles had never come into conflict. Parliament generally took a hands-off approach to the Thirteen Colonies, a policy known as "salutary neglect." After the French and Indian War ended, however, Parliament realized two things: first, colonies in the Americas were expensive to defend against the French and Indians; and second, the colonies should pay for that defense, at least in part. This led to the passage of the Stamp Act of 1765, which caused an uproar in the colonies and was quickly repealed.
Thus began a decade of push-and-pull on both sides of the Atlantic, as Anglo-American opinion gradually split between the governing Tory party and the opposition Whig party. Tories generally argued in favor of Parliamentary sovereignty and the right of Parliament to act for the colonies, under the theory that the Colonies were "virtually represented" in Parliament; Whigs sympathized with American theories of "no taxation without representation". Both sides had legitimate bases in English constitutional law for their interpretations.
So, it wasn't black and white by any means.
Ultimately, of course, the question ended up getting settled by generals, not by lawyers.
Good books to check out on the subject:
Greene, Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution; Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England