What effect did the Glorious Revolution have on the people living in Massachusetts? Did they even know it occurred?

by votremouse
Kochevnik81

The Glorious Revolution had some real impacts on the colony of Massachusetts, and on the English colonies in North America as a whole. People were most definitely aware of it.

James II had tried dissolving colonial charters and combining the colonies making up the now-northeastern US into the Dominion of New England with a royal governor, Edmund Andros - this included present-day New England, and what is now New York and New Jersey. This (plus the introduction of the Church of England) was incredibly unpopular, and once news of the 1688 Revolution (or Dutch invasion, depending on how one looks at it) reached the colonies, local revolts also broke out against the Royal Governor and his government.

With Governor Andros located in Boston, local Massachusetts militias (supported by the former colony officials that Andros had supplanted) gathered, and declared Andros' government defunct. He and his officials were arrested, and eventually sent back to England. A similar revolt, Leisler's Rebellion, happened in New York City against Andros' Lieutenant Governor. Unfortunately there, Leisler ran into difficulties negotiating the transfer of power to the new governor of New York sent by William and Mary, and Leisler ended up being tried and executed for treason.

Other colonies mostly bloodlessly removed any traces of the Dominion of New England - Connecticut and Rhode Island got their charters restored, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies were united in 1691 as Massachusetts, with a new governor (William Phips) and royal charter, and New Hampshire and New York also got royal charters and governors.

Another major way that inhabitants of Massachusetts, and of the New England colonies in general, were aware of the Glorious Revolution was that the overthrow of James II precipitated the War of the League of Augsburg, which was known in North America as King William's War. It was the first of the big intercontinental colonial wars fought between England and France, and lasted from 1689 to 1697. It was particularly devastating to New England as the French and their native allies launched some major raids against settlements not only along the frontier, but pretty deeply into English-populated territory (including against Haverhill, which is less than 40 miles from Boston).

A wikipedia article about the Boston revolt is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1689_Boston_revolt

Also a fairly in-depth discussion of this period in American colonial history is in Samuel Eliot Morison's Oxford History of the American People.