England tried twice to limit the power of kings.
The third time, the colonists got it right.
Two hundred and fifty years ago this July, something happened in Philadelphia that the English-speaking world had been trying to bring about for 125 years. For more than a century, England had wrestled with a single question: what do you do with a king who believes his power has no limits? England tried to answer it twice — in 1649 and again in 1688 — and twice the answer came apart. The third attempt fell to a different people, on a different continent, with something the English had never possessed: a foundation for liberty that no king had granted and therefore no king could take away. That third attempt is what we celebrate this July 4th. And understanding why the first two failed is what makes America’s 250th birthday worth more than fireworks.
The first attempt began with a bill of particulars. When Parliament put Charles I on trial in January 1649, the charges read like a preview of Jefferson’s grievances against George III: forced taxation without consent, dissolution of representative bodies, quartering of soldiers, imprisonment without trial. Charles had governed for eleven years without Parliament, raised money through extortion schemes revived from the medieval era, and imposed religious worship at gunpoint on a population that had not asked for it. Parliament took his head. The principle was right — no ruler stands above the law — but establishing the principle was the easy part. Oliver Cromwell, the military commander who won the war, dissolved the Parliament he had fought to protect and ruled as Lord Protector — a republican title for what was in practice a military dictatorship. When Cromwell died in 1658, the republic died with him. England had identified the disease with precision and prescribed a cure that was the disease in different clothing.
The second attempt, in 1688, was quieter — but still incomplete. When James II began suspending acts of Parliament at will, packing the army with Catholic officers, and producing a male heir who promised a Catholic dynasty in perpetuity, seven English noblemen wrote a secret letter to the Protestant Dutch prince William of Orange: come with an army, and we will deliver you a kingdom. William landed on Guy Fawkes Day 1688. James’s army evaporated. His own son-in-law defected. His daughter abandoned him. He fled to France, dropping the Great Seal of England into the Thames on his way out — believing he could stop the machinery of government by sinking its symbol. A fisherman pulled it from the river. The Glorious Revolution produced a written constitutional settlement — the English Bill of Rights of 1689 — that defanged the monarchy without abolishing it. A genuine achievement. But it carried a fatal silence: it never answered where rights came from. Parliament had granted them. Parliament could repeal them.
Which is precisely where the colonists came in — and where the story becomes ours. By 1776 they had absorbed both revolutions and identified exactly where each had broken down. More importantly, they possessed something neither English revolution had: eighty years of pulpit argument that answered the question the English Bill of Rights had left open. Where do rights come from? Not from Parliament. Not from history. From the Creator — which meant no parliament, no king, no majority of men could revoke them. Jonathan Mayhew had made that argument from his Boston pulpit in 1750, building a charge-by-charge case against royal tyranny from Scripture itself, constructing the prosecutorial architecture Jefferson would deploy twenty-six years later in Philadelphia. The Great Awakening had carried that argument up and down the seaboard. By June 1776, the intellectual work was done. Jefferson was giving common sentiment an expression equal to the occasion.
What the Americans built was something the world had not seen: a written constitution, separated powers, an independent judiciary, a Bill of Rights derived not from parliamentary concession but from natural law. And then — the act that astonished every monarch in Europe — the general who won the war resigned his commission and went home. Washington’s resignation in December 1783 was the thing Cromwell had never done and could never do. It was the moment that proved the republic meant what it said.
Three attempts. One hundred and twenty-five years. Each one learning from the last. The first established that kings could be held accountable. The second established that accountability required written, enforceable limits. The third established something neither England nor any nation before it had ever put into a founding document: that those limits answered to an authority higher than any government — that rulers were accountable not merely to parliaments or constitutions, but to God and the moral order He established. Parliament can repeal what Parliament grants. No parliament can repeal what the Creator ordains. England got the principle right in 1649. England got the mechanism right in 1688. America got the foundation right in 1776 — and that foundation, answerable to heaven rather than to men, is why we are still here.
At 250 years, that foundation holds. Not without strain, not without argument — but the Founders expected argument. They built a republic designed to contain it rather than suppress it, on the conviction that free people disagree, and the ones who stop disagreeing have stopped being free. England tried twice and taught us how. America tried once and showed the world what it looks like when you finally get it right. That is worth celebrating. And on this 250th July Fourth, it is worth being proud of — not just for what we inherited, but for what that inheritance cost the generations who passed it to us.
Dory Wiley is President and CEO of Commerce Street Holdings, LLC, a Dallas-based financial services firm. He is a presidential historian and has lectured on American and presidential history at universities and conferences. He appears regularly on CNBC, Fox Business, and Bloomberg.
The views and opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of The Dallas Express, its editors, or its staff.
