You had to have believed so incredibly strongly in the goal to have even set it in the first place, with odds like that (revolution is only illegal in the third person "their revolution."). Otherwise, as landed gentry, why not leave things as they were?
The belief in inalienable rights, and the social contract between a government and its people is the heart of the Declaration.
MarciaBC
"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."
Thomas Jefferson