rebellion of 1776

.Through English politics from the 1530s to the 1820s and beyond, the most consistent theme of both popular sentiment and official ideology was anti-Catholicism. From the sixteenth century, Englishmen pictured the Roman Church not merely as a system of cruelty and intolerance, but as an international conspiracy operating through secret agents and with covert sympathy of fellow travellers. Deliverance was attributed to divine intervention in favour of Protestant England. An apocalyptic or millennial perspective on England's and America's history was generated principally in the context of Protestantism's conflict with Rome.
In England, millennial expectations receded after the 1650s. In the colonies, especially Puritan New England, they evolved into the eighteenth century as an orthodoxy. New England society had earlier come close to being a theocracy; the sense of America as a religious experiment, as the new Israel, still gave stability and practical content to millennial hopes. Bri...