The original Tea Partiers were prominent citizens. Everybody knew who they were in MA, and the colony's political and legal systems demonstrated they were utterly unwilling to enforce the law on them.
IOW, the Tea Party was supported by MA's citizenry and political class. So in essence it was a rebellion by the colony or most of it.
One can certainly argue that the rebellion was justified, but not that it was only a demonstration by a hundred private citizens.
Well, there was a meeting on December 16, 1774, (note the 240 anniversary coming up!) presided over by Samuel Adams...
"Whether or not Samuel Adams helped plan the Boston Tea Party is disputed, but he immediately worked to publicize and defend it.[65]
He argued that the Tea Party was not the act of a lawless mob, but was instead a principled protest and the only remaining option the people had to defend their constitutional rights.[66]
"By "constitution" he referred to the idea that all governments have a constitution, written or not, and that the constitution of Great Britain could be interpreted as banning the levying of taxes without representation.
For example, the Bill of Rights of 1689 established that long-term taxes could not be levied without Parliament, and other precedents said that Parliament must actually represent the people it ruled over, in order to "count"...
"Governor Thomas Hutchinson had been urging London to take a hard line with the Sons of Liberty.
If he had done what the other royal governors had done and let the ship owners and captains resolve the issue with the colonists, the Dartmouth, Eleanor and the Beaver would have left without unloading any tea...
"Robert Murray, a New York merchant, went to Lord North with three other merchants and offered to pay for the losses, but the offer was turned down..."
A few hundred, at most, out of 300,000+ Massachusetts citizens...
Now, that's the way I learned it as a boy -- rightly or wrongly, Tea Party leaders objected to "taxation without representation", and took action to defend their "constitutional rights" as Englishmen.
Of course, you may well argue, and Brits certainly did, that "as colonists, they had no such rights", but from Massachusetts colonists' perspectives, it was Brits who were trying to take their rights away, not Americans wanting to assert some unheard-of privileges.
Indeed, the unusual aggressiveness of the Brit-appointed Massachusetts governor, in enforcing a law which was ignored in other colonies, and British refusal to seek peaceful resolution strongly suggest to me that it was the Brits, not colonists who were "cruisin' for a bruisin'".
Likewise, in early 1861 it was Confederates trying to revoke their 84 year-old compact, and using military force instead of lawful procedures to impose their will on, in one case, Union troops in Fort Sumter.
Do you disagree?