Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, the third son of the Sieur de Longueil, a native of Dieppe in France and lord of Longueuil in Canada, in 1686 begins a brilliant career as soldier and sailor under Pierre de Troyes, the Chevalier de Troyes, and takes part in many expeditions against the English trading posts in Canada.

Fort Severn, located at the mouth of the Severn River on Hudson Bay and established as a trading post in 1689 by the Hudson's Bay Company, falls to Iberville in 1690.

Iberville is in 1695 called upon to attack the English stations along the Atlantic coast from Fort William Henry, on the disputed New England-Acadia boundary, to St. John’s, the fortified English settlement in Newfoundland.

King Charles II had determined in the 1680s to bring the New England colonies under a more centralized administration in order to regulate trade more effectively.

The colonists had fiercely opposed his efforts, resulting in the abrogation of their colonial charter by the Crown.

Charles' successor James II finalizes these efforts in 1686, establishing the Dominion of New England.

Massachusetts Bay Colony, one of the original English settlements in present Massachusetts, had been settled in 1630 by a group of about a thousand Puritan refugees from England under Governor John Winthrop.

The Massachusetts Bay Company had in 1629 obtained from Charles a charter empowering the company to trade and colonize in New England between the Charles and Merrimack rivers.

Omitted from the charter was the usual clause requiring the company to hold its business meetings in England, a circumstance that the Puritan stockholders used to transfer control of the colony to America.

The Puritans established a theocratic government with the franchise limited to church members.

Increasingly in the 1680s, the English Crown has challenged the institutional discrimination displayed by the Puritans of the United Colonies of New England toward Anglicans.

Growing estrangement between the colony and England resulted in the annulment of the company's charter in 1684.

King James II attempts in 1686 to stem growing colonial independence by imposing on the colonies —the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Plymouth Colony, the Province of New Hampshire, the Province of Maine, and the Narraganset Country or King's Province—a kind of supercolony, the Dominion of New England, ostensibly as a measure to enforce the Navigation Acts and to coordinate the mutual defense of colonies against the French and hostile Native Americans.

The capital is located in Boston.

The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations and the Connecticut Colony are added to the Dominion on September 9, 1686.

Sir Edmund Andros, who had grown up as a page in the royal household, had had his fidelity to the crown during its exile after the English Civil Wars rewarded in 1674 by his appointment as governor of New York and New Jersey. (He was also knighted in 1678.)

Although the mother country regarded him as an able and conscientious administrator, the colonists considered him both arrogant and arbitrary, and he had been recalled in 1681 but now returns to America as governor of the Dominion of New England.

The Duke of York had found himself not only proprietor of New York in February 1685 but also king of England, a fact that had changed the status of New York from that of a proprietary to a royal colony.

The process of royal consolidation is accelerated when on May 7, 1688, the Province of New York, together with the Province of East Jersey, and the Province of West Jersey, is made part of the ill-fated Dominion of New England.

Dominion rule has triggered bitter resentment throughout New England; the enforcement of the unpopular Navigation Acts and the curtailing of local democracy has angered the colonists.

New Englanders are encouraged, however, by a change of government in England that had seen James II effectively abdicate, and a populist uprising overthrows Dominion rule on April 18, 1689.

Colonial governments reassert their control in the wake of the revolt, and successive governments will make no more attempts to restore the Dominion.

Andros' imposition of Episcopalian worship in the Old South Meetinghouse in Boston, his vigorous enforcement of the Navigation Acts, his requirement that landholders take out new land patents, and his limitations upon town meetings and rights of local taxation all arouse sharp resentment in colonial America.

When news of the overthrow of James reaches Boston, the colonists revolt, deposing Andros and imprisoning him, eventually returning him to England.

A number of uprisings in the American colonies against royal officials suspected of being Catholics occur after William and Mary ascend the English throne in the Glorious Revolution.

Discontented artisans and small traders led by the prominent Calvinist merchant Jacob Leisler rebel against the crown's agent in New York, Lieutenant Governor Francis Nicholson.

Nicholson flees to England on May 3 when his fort is seized by Leisler's rebellious force.

Supported by small farmers, city workers, and the militia, Leisler sets himself up as head of a revolutionary government that subsequently appoints him commander in chief.

He acknowledges the sovereignty of William and Mary and rules southern New York in their name.

He assumes the title of lieutenant governor in December, and, appointing a council, takes charge of the entire province.