The Boston Tea Party Was Not the First Time New Englanders Defied the King
In the 1640s, a dispute that had simmered for years between King Charles I and Parliament finally erupted into open warfare to determine once and for all whether the monarch or legislature was supreme. Puritans were a key Parliamentarian constituency, and Puritans happened to be particularly thick in the ground in colonial New England back then. So in 1644, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough sailed across the Atlantic with a regiment of New Englanders to fight against King Charles. A century and a half before the American Revolution, the Americans proved radical by contemporary standards.
In an augury of future events, in the midst of the fight between King and Parliament, the colonial Americans pushed for universal male suffrage three centuries before it was actually granted in England. As Rainsborough put it: “I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government“.