James, the inevitable happened. The Roman Catholic Stuart King
was driven from his throne and his daughter Mary and her
Protestant husband, William of Orange, became the sovereigns of
England by choice of the English Parliament. Again had the
struggle between Roman Catholic and Protestant brought revolution
in England, and the politics of Europe dominated America. The
revolution in London was followed by revolution in Boston and New
York. The authority of James II was repudiated. His chief agent
in New England, Sir Edmund Andros, was seized and imprisoned, and
William and Mary reigned over the English colonies in America as
they reigned over the motherland.

To the loyal Catholics of France the English, who had driven out
a Catholic king and dethroned an ancient line, were guilty of the
double sin of heresy and of treason. To the Jesuit enthusiast in
Canada not only were they infidel devils in human shape upon
whose plans must rest the curse of God; they were also rebels,
republican successors of the accursed Cromwell, who had sent an
anointed king to the block. It would be a holy thing to destroy
this lawless power which ruled from London. The Puritans of
Boston were, in turn, not less convinced that theirs was the
cause of God, and that Satan, enthroned in the French dominance
at Quebec, must soon fall. The smaller the pit the fiercer the
rats. Passions raged in the petty colonial capitals more bitterly
than even in London and Paris. This intensity of religious
differences embittered the struggle for the mastery of the new
continent.

The English colonies had twenty white men to one in Canada. Yet
Canada was long able to wage war on something like equal terms.