In the spring of 1689, a German-born wine merchant named Jacob Leisler seized control of a crumbling fort at the tip of Manhattan and held it for nearly two years in the name of the Protestant monarchs William and Mary. What followed was one of the most consequential political upheavals in the history of colonial America — a revolution that established the first popularly elected mayor of New York City, convened the first intercolonial military congress in British North America, and permanently transformed the constitutional landscape of the Province of New York.A Covenant Against Kings places Leisler's Rebellion at the centre of the story it has always deserved. Drawing on the full range of scholarship on the rebellion and its period, Declan MacDiarmada traces the uprising from its roots in the Stuart monarchy's autocratic colonial governance through the terror of French frontier raids, the audacious democratic experiments of the Leislerian administration, and the partisan trial that sent Leisler and his son-in-law Jacob Milborne to the scaffold. He follows the rebellion's long aftermath — the parliamentary reversal, the factional wars, the reinterment ceremony of 1698 — showing how a provincial insurrection of eighteen months shaped New York's political culture for generations.This is the story of what it cost, and what it achieved, to assert the right of self-governance in an empire that had not yet decided to permit it.
