What was this? Not sure I have heard of this episode.
At that time the Queen’s courtier ladies were political appointments, and could expect to be changed with the change of administration.
George III was tremendously popular in England, where his (relatively) simple lifestyle, and fidelity to his wife, were favourably contrasted with the vicious dissolute habits of his brothers, and his children.
To be fair to those (we?) colonial bumpkins, many (most?) of the British colonies in North America were chartered and at least at least nominally administered by the crown, usually through an appointed royal governor. Several of them were chartered before or during those Parliament-royalty battles that you mention in your post. So while Parliament was asserting itself on the right side of the pond, the colonists still though of themselves as subjects of the king in particular, not under the thumb of Parliament.
You could view it through the lens of another power struggle between crown and Parliament, this time over colonial policy, with colonial assemblies asserting coequal status with Parliament regarding their relations with the crown, and thus in a sense on the side of the king. When the king did not defend those rights the colonists saw as theirs as his subjects, they naturally revolted against the king rather than against another body which (as they saw it) had no authority over them.
That’s as true now as it was in 1776 but doesn’t imply that the monarch has any real political power.
Chopping off the head of Charles I after his defeat in the English Civil War must rank was an act that clearly marked the passing of executive power from the Monarchy to Parliament.
The Parliamentary system was allowed to develop during the long reign of the succession of Hanovarian Kings who were absent, uninterested, mad or simply incompetent. This limited their political influence. They were, however, reliably Protestant, which removed the likelihood of any influence from continental powers whose royal families were Catholic.
If I recall my high school history -
It all started with the Magna Carta (1215). The King was often at odds with his top nobles, and in John’s time it broke into open rebellion between the king and a number of barons. John was obliged to agree to the Magna Carta. One of the things it did was limit feudal obligations, which eventually morphed into the King could not create new taxes without the consent of the council of barons, and then also the council of commons… i.e. parliament.
Oddly enough, no matter what a government has for ongoing revenue, it needs more. The dispute between James I then Charles I and parliament grew worse and worse, as Charles eventually tried to get by without parliament - until he couldn’t. When he called them to meet, they had demands he refused to agree to. Eventually this led to open warfare, and Charles lost. Bigly.
So the erosion of kingly power was an ongoing saga. Contrary to Hollywood-style myth, a strongman does not snap his fingers and everyone jumps. Whether it’s Stalin, or Kim-whatever, or Henry VIII - they all worry that someone behind their back is plotting their replacement (which is often the case). If the king lets a large number of barons become to unhappy and insecure, they may seek to replace him - as happened with John.
Because of this, in general, the monarchs generally stuck to the spirit of the compact between them and the rest, to the point where by 1640, the breaking of that accord resulted in the civil war.
But yes, the major turning point was when the monarchy they agree to accept back in 1661 failed to meet up to their expectations, so the new monarch - William and Mary - was essentially selected by parliament to be a creature of the ruling elite, rather than their master.
So under William III’s 3rd parliament , they made laws that limited the term of parliament to three years, but also that when the monarch dissolved parliament, fresh elections were called… That meant that when William III dissolved parliament in November 1701, a new election formed a new parliament in December, straight away…
While it might be regarded as the will of the parliament that installed William III, it actually had to be encoded in law … to give a judge the ability to decide… All this mention of parliament forgets that they also expected the courts to decide one way or the other …so they had to make it official law … rather than a royal decree, it had to be an act of parliament that the monarch signed into law…
Thats the date of the real locking in of the permanent power of the parliament, the locking in of the permanency , via elections, of the parliament. If the parliament is 3 years old, or doesn’t sit for some time,. then they go to elections and there is a new parliament.
I believe that’s implicit in what I said.
I was more amplifying than anything else. Well said.
I think Magna Carta in itself didn’t lead to Parliament - it was as you say a feudal contract. But because it became an object of dispute it was a bargaining chip the barons could use when the king wanted tax. “If you want the tax, you have to re-issue Magna Carta”. Other bargaining chips included the identity of the king’s ministers, issues of justice etc.
The key point here as you say is that medieval kings such as Henry III had very limited hard power. Just because they wanted to raise taxes didn’t mean that they had the administrative and enforcement capabilities to actually collect it. They had to have the agreement of the barons because without it there was simply no way to get taxes raised.
But it turned out even the barons couldn’t raise tax without consent of those from whom they were raising it. So it became necessary not just to have a council of barons but actually to get representatives from the “gentry” class to be part of the negotiating body.
Add in Simon de Montfort using a parlement as a way to get round the barons who hated him and develop a popular power base, a 100 Years War with continual demands for funding, and Wars of the Roses where the feudal barons basically bled themselves dry and you get a Parliament that in fits and starts increasingly asserts its control over a monarchy that becomes increasingly reliant on it.
Ah yes, we mustn’t forget Magna Carta - did she die in vain?
(On a minor nitpick - the Hanoverian succession had been locked in for some years before 1714, and wasn’t a totally open form of monarch-shopping, ultimately the only available Protestant descendant of the Stuarts).
I always had the impression that it was the execution of Charles I and the subsequent Restoration of Charles II that firmly cemented Parliament’s control of the country, and everything after that was basically working out the details of how Parliament and the Crown interacted, and formally establishing it by law. Once Charles I was gone, everything afterward was done at Parliament’s pleasure, including the Restoration, the Bill of Rights, the Hanoverian Succession, etc…
IIRC the end of the parliamentary rule (or rather, the Lord Protector’s) was a bit of a mess, so it’s hard to say who was running the ship. I gather it was more of a common agreement between parliament and the king (Charles II) to reinstate him to keep the peace and good order, but with provisos - rather than dictation by the parliament that “this is how it’s going to be”. When James II broke that agreement, then parliament decided it was safe for them to assert their power.
I’m not sure the parliamentary leaders explicitly asked William to bring his own army with him, but that he did so must also have been a factor.
Royal Assent is still required to make a bill into an Act, but the last time it was refused was 1708 by Queen Anne for the Scottish Militia Bill.
And that was on the advice of the government of the day, whose policy had changed - they no longer wanted the bill to be enacted.
Yes, we’ve beaten that topic to death in previous threads. The monarch has the power to block bills, but - as the House of Lords discovered a century ago - if they use that power against the will of the people and/or parliament, being unelected, the situation will quickly change to remove that power. The “nuclear option” is just that. To quote Daffy Duck “It’s a great trick, but I can only do it once.”
Well, except for the fact that we didn’t elect anyone to the body. And, IIRC, as we were colonies, didn’t the King appoint Governors (or Governours 
) who had a fairly free hand over making petty demands and refusing assent to colonial legislatures? IOW, it wasn’t Parliament that we were upset about, it was the fact that: 1) We were not represented in Parliament, and 2) that the king and his agents ruled us (regardless of the state of affairs in England) with fairly large control despite pretending to allow local legislative bodies.
Governors were appointed on the advice of ministers, though, and ministers were drawn from parliament and depended on support in Parliament as well as on enjoying the confidence of the King.
Great Britain was a monarchy, and all government powers - legislative, executive, judicial - were exercised in the name of the King, but that didn’t mean that the king was actually exercising them. The Prime Minister for most of the revolutionary period was Lord North. While the King broadly supported Lord North, nobody was under any illusion; British policy during the American war of independence was Lord North’s policy, not the King’s, and when that policy ended ignominiously at Yorktown Lord North had to go.
It suited the revolutionaries to direct their rhetoric against the King; they were, after all, seeking not just to escape government by Lord North, but government by the system that produced and empowered Lord North, and the King was the pinnacle of that system. Their greivances did not end with the fall of Lord North. But nor would they have ended with the death of George III.