As the Mother of Parliaments wrestles with whether to bow to the voters of Great Britain or the mandarins in Brussels, here’s what we will be thinking. We will be thinking how lucky Americans are that the Revolutionaries who founded our country struck for independence when they did. They seized independence when they had the chance, and it’s made all the difference since.

The emergence of the Tory leadership on the wrong side of this issue is one of the saddest and most bizarre tales in British history. It started under Prime Minister Cameron, who offered voters the chance to decide this question only to take to the hustings against his own country’s independence. Mr. Cameron warned that it would be an “an illusion of sovereignty.”

At the time he issued that warning — we’re talking February 2016 — we wondered what Elizabeth II would make of her prime minister arguing against British independence. Where, after all, would the sneering about “an illusion of sovereignty” leave the Crown? It liked to think of itself, and with good reason, as having been sovereign for more than a thousand years.

It’s an incredible situation, the more so after Mrs. May announced today that when the current crisis is put to Parliament she intends to vote against a no-deal Brexit. An unadorned, no-deal Brexit, after all, is what voters chose when they cast their referendum ballots in June 2016. Now Mrs. May is saying that today she will side in Parliament against Britain’s own voters and in favor of the European mandarins.

All to avoid the course of action the British people had asked for in a referendum sought by Mrs. May’s own party. In that referendum, Mrs. May had been, infamously, in favor of remaining in Europe. What the Tories were thinking when they gave her the reins following Mr. Cameron’s resignation is unfathomable to homo americanus. In any event, her pursuit of a deal discloses her remainerism.

The crisis she has precipitated is incredible. It is illustrated wonderfully in the Drudge Report, one of the few newspapers that seems to grasp this story. It illustrates its front today with nine images of the British front pages blaring : “How Much More of This Can Britain Take?,” “Horror Show,” “Driven to Despair,” “Huge Defeat,” “House of Fools,” “Mayhem,” “Haven’t a Clue,” and “Out of Control.”

In America’s case, it was worse. We plunged into the Revolutionary War against our oppressor. Three years after we declared independence, factions loyal to George III were raiding the Connecticut coast. We held out, though, for a no-deal independence. We didn’t ratify our Constitution until 13 years after independence. We didn’t get our “deal” — the Jay Treaty — until another five years later.

Why did we succeed? In declaring our independence, the representatives of the United States, sitting in general congress, did two things the authors of the Brexit referendum failed to do. One is that for the rectitude of their intentions, they appealed directly to God. The other is that relying on what they called divine providence, they pledged their personal lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.

So how could any of them turn around and dicker with George III on the particulars? It would have been unthinkable for someone like George Washington, or any of our founders, to go sniveling off to treat with George III the way Mrs. May has been doing with Brussels. It’s hard to see how, absent the kind of commitment America showed, the Tories are going to gain the independence Britain’s magnificent people so clearly crave.