The Glorious Revolution helped usher in the Age of Enlightenment in the American colonies.
The single most important development in England to affect the self-identity of the colonists was the Glorious Revolution of 1688. While this was a profound event for the English, for the colonists it was truly earth-shattering. The colonists had suffered under James II just as profoundly, and perhaps more so, than the English. James had refused to recognized colonial charters, did not allow colonists any say over laws and taxes, and seemed to rule arbitrarily. In many ways, James' treatment of the colonies mirrored his growing independence of the English Parliament. Moreover, James was a Catholic and the colonists were primarily Protestant, most of them radical Protestants. When James issued the Declarations of Indulgence, which granted freedom of worship to Catholics, this pleased Marylanders, but it deeply troubled the rest of the colonies. More ominous to the colonies was the pattern which James seemed to be laying down; all his actions seemed to indicate that he wanted to replace Protestant institutions with Catholic ones. This bode especially ill since France, a Catholic country, had become an absolute monarchy under Louis XIV. In the colonists mind, Catholicism equaled absolutism. This equation was playing itself out: by the time of the Glorious Revolution, over half the governments of the colonies, hitherto more or less autonomous, were under the direct control of the monarch.
News of the Glorious Revolution filtered in slowly and inaccurately to the colonies. The colonists instantly saw the applicability of the Revolution to their situation, and began a series of revolts in 1689. They really had little idea as to what had precisely happened, and when William of Orange became King of England, his orders to the colonies never really made it in a timely manner. Starting first in Boston, and spreading to Plymouth, New York and Maryland, revolts broke out forcing the king's government, the Dominion, to hand power back over to the colonists. The English, for their part, did not see the connection between their revolution and the American reassertion of power over their affairs; most, in fact, were appalled by the 1689 revolutions. An important watershed had been reached, however; the principle of colonial autonomy became the rallying cry of Americans through the eighteenth century.