“1688: Triumph and Warning” — The Glorious Revolution and Its Limits

Torbay

On the afternoon of November 5, 1688, the people of a small fishing village on the Devon coast looked out and saw the sea covered with ships.

There were something like four hundred and sixty of them — better than four hundred transports, escorted by more than fifty warships, carrying roughly fifteen thousand professional soldiers with horses, siege guns, and a printing press.² They had come to Brixham, in Torbay, because the wind had refused to let them go anywhere else. William, Prince of Orange, stadholder of the Dutch Republic and nephew and son-in-law of the reigning King of England, had come down the Channel on an easterly gale, past Dover, where crowds gathered on the cliffs to watch a foreign armada sail by unopposed, while the English fleet lay pinned in the Thames estuary. Then the wind dropped and shifted, and let him land.

Contemporaries called it the Protestant wind, and they did not mean it as a figure of speech.³ To a great many English Protestants the weather of those weeks was evidence that God had taken a side, and the date sharpened the impression: the fifth of November was the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot’s discovery, the day the English calendar had set aside for eighty years to commemorate a Protestant deliverance from Catholic conspiracy. A Protestant prince now landed in England on the Protestant holiday, carried by a Protestant wind, to save the kingdom from a Catholic king. Many contemporaries read the whole sequence providentially, and the statute that eventually settled the crown would describe William, in its own words, as the instrument whom it had pleased Almighty God to make glorious in delivering the kingdom from popery and arbitrary power.

What followed over the next fourteen months produced a document that reads, in places, almost word for word like the American Bill of Rights. It is one of the most consequential constitutional moments in the English-speaking world, and the American founders knew it by heart.

It was also a foreign invasion mounted by a foreign power for reasons of European war, resolved by a deliberately ambiguous legal formula, settled by a narrow political nation on behalf of a population that was never asked, defended in the language of anti-Catholic providence rather than universal rights, and paid for by the conquest of Ireland.

Both of those points are true. That is the difficulty this article is about.

The King Who Frightened His Kingdom

James II came to the throne in February 1685 with more goodwill than his later reputation suggests. He was openly Roman Catholic — politically explosive, but not yet any legal bar to the succession, which is precisely why Parliament had spent the years from 1679 to 1681 trying and failing to create one. That was the Exclusion Crisis, in which Algernon Sidney and John Locke wrote the arguments that cost one of them his head. Yet Protestant England accepted James with little resistance, and two rebellions against him in his first year collapsed and were punished with a savagery people remembered. The acceptance was arithmetic: James was fifty-one, his two surviving children by his first marriage had been raised Protestant, and Mary was married to William of Orange. An aging king with a Catholic faith and a Protestant heir could be waited out. His religion was a temporary inconvenience attached to a mortal body.

What James did with the years he had turned that calculation upside down. The dispensing power that he claimed was a royal power to set aside acts of Parliament, excusing named individuals from a statute, and the suspending power was used for halting a statute altogether. In 1686 he arranged a test case, and eleven of the twelve judges obligingly upheld the dispensing power, which let him commission Catholic officers in defiance of the Test Acts and place Catholics in offices the law reserved for Anglicans.⁴ He built a standing army in peacetime and camped it where London could see it. He created an Ecclesiastical Commission and used it to purge Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1687 he issued a Declaration of Indulgence suspending the penal laws against Catholics and Protestant dissenters alike, and reissued it in 1688 with an order that every clergyman read it from his own pulpit.

That last item can puzzle a modern reader, since on its face James was extending toleration. He was also asserting that a king could nullify a statute by proclamation, and what he could do for the penal laws he could do for any law. Dissenters divided: many welcomed immediate relief after a quarter-century of prosecution, while others distrusted a liberty resting on the prerogative, reasoning that what the king’s pleasure had given it could withdraw, and preferred to wait for a toleration granted by law.

Behind all of it stood France. Louis XIV was the age’s working model of Catholic absolute monarchy — no representative body worth the name, a permanent army, a subordinated church — and in 1685 he revoked the Edict of Nantes, sending tens of thousands of Huguenot refugees into England and the Dutch Republic. Englishmen looking at James saw the English version of a story they had just heard Louis narrate, and the refugees in their streets were the living illustrations.

The phrase they used for what they feared was not absolutism or tyranny in the abstract. It was popery and arbitrary power, spoken as one linked idea, and it appears in exactly that form in the statute they eventually wrote. To them the halves were a single thing: a Catholic king would rule without Parliament, and a king who ruled without Parliament would restore Catholicism. That is prejudice and constitutional argument at once, sincerely both, and translating it into secular rights-talk loses the reasoning of the men who acted on it.

Two Days in June

The crisis arrived in a single month, and very nearly on a single day.

On June 10th 1688, James’s second wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward Stuart.⁵ In an instant the arithmetic that had bought England its patience was void. The boy displaced his Protestant half-sisters and would be raised Catholic; a Catholic interlude had now become a Catholic dynasty, stretching forward past every life then being lived. Within days a rumor was circulating, repeated in writing at the very top of the political nation, that Mary had given birth stillborn and that the child proffered in its place was a substitute smuggled into the bedchamber in a warming pan. There was no evidence for it and subsequent modern genealogy has debunked this myth. At the time however, the salacious rumor was believed anyway.

Meanwhile seven bishops, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, had petitioned to be excused from reading the Declaration to their congregations, on the ground that it rested on a suspending power Parliament had declared illegal. James prosecuted them for seditious libel and held them in the Tower. Their trial opened on June 29th; on June 30th they were acquitted, and London erupted — bonfires, church bells, soldiers of the king’s own army cheering the verdict against him.⁶

That same day, June 30th, seven men signed a letter to William of Orange.

Not the same seven, though one bishop was among them, and the two are easy to confuse. They were the Earls of Shrewsbury, Devonshire, and Danby; Baron Lumley; Henry Compton, Bishop of London; Edward Russell; and Henry Sidney — posterity called them the Immortal Seven. They wrote in cipher, probably at Shrewsbury’s house in London, and the letter went to The Hague carried by Admiral Arthur Herbert dressed as a common sailor. It told William that the great body of the people were dissatisfied, and that if he came with a force sufficient to defend those who declared for him, they and their friends would rise.⁷

Two details to note. The letter would almost certainly have exposed all seven to prosecution for high treason had James prevailed, and it was signed by a bishop, two of England’s wealthiest peers, and a former Lord Treasurer. The second detail is Henry Sidney. He was the younger brother of Algernon Sidney, whose private manuscript had been seized five years earlier and treated by Judge Jeffreys as an overt act of treason. Algernon died after the government made his unpublished resistance theory the evidence against him. Henry drafted the letter that put resistance into practice. The family parallel is striking, though it does not establish that the brothers held identical theories.

The Protestant Wind

William did not come because seven Englishmen asked him to. He had wanted an English army and an English fleet on his side for years, and had told his English correspondents what he required before he would move: a written request, so that the enterprise could be presented as a rescue rather than a conquest.

His reasons were European. Louis XIV was about to open the war that would consume the next decade, and had invaded the Rhineland that autumn. The Dutch Republic had nearly been destroyed by a French invasion in 1672 and could not survive a second with England on the French side. William’s overriding aim was to prevent an Anglo-French alliance and bring English resources into the coalition against Louis, which is what his accession accomplished. A great deal of English constitutional history followed from a Dutch calculation about a continental war.

That Dutch republic is the one this series highlighted a few articles ago, which had fought free of Spain, sheltered dissenters and refugees, and made a commercial civilization out of a rebellion. Its stadholder came with an army, a fleet, and a paper: a printed Declaration of Reasons setting out the grievances of the English nation and disclaiming any intention to conquer, distributed in tens of thousands of copies before and during the landing. The invasion arrived with its own press campaign already written.

The campaign itself was decided by defection rather than battle. James marched west to Salisbury with an army on paper larger than William’s, and watched it dissolve — officers going over, including John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough, and finally his own daughter Anne. His nerve broke. He sent his wife and infant son to France, and then, in the small hours of December 11, 1688, fled London himself.

By the traditional account he carried off the Great Seal of England and cast it into the Thames, apparently meaning to obstruct the ordinary machinery of government; though the circumstances of that episode have been questioned, and the intention cannot be proved.⁸ What is not in doubt is that his flight left no monarch willing and able to summon a Parliament in the ordinary form. He was caught by fishermen in Kent and brought ignominiously back, which was the last thing anybody wanted. William made sure the second attempt succeeded, and by the end of December James was in France under Louis XIV’s protection.

Whether what had happened was a revolution, a liberation, or a successful foreign invasion has been argued ever since, and the argument is not a modern invention designed to spoil the story. Contemporaries noticed, and the scholarship remains divided.⁹ The question is not closed, thus we cannot describe the Declaration of Right without also noting the four hundred and sixty ships.

The Empty Throne

The throne was occupied in fact by nobody, and claimed in law by a king who had fled.

England was not without precedent. Edward II had been removed in 1327 and Richard II in 1399, and both times the men who did it reached for the device the Convention was about to reach for: a text of abdication or renunciation, framed so that the king appeared to have surrendered the crown rather than had it taken. What 1689 lacked was a procedure that could be invoked without reopening the most dangerous question in politics — whether subjects may depose a king — which Restoration doctrine flatly denied. The Convention that assembled at Westminster on January 22, 1689 was not even a Parliament in the proper sense, since only a monarch could summon one; it met on letters written by William, and its acts later had to be retroactively validated by statute. What the political nation inserted into that gap was a masterpiece of deliberate ambiguity.

On January 28, 1689 the House of Commons resolved that King James the Second, having endeavored to subvert the constitution of the kingdom by breaking the original contract between king and people, and by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons having violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, had abdicated the government, and that the throne was thereby vacant.

Every clause was doing political work. “The original contract between king and people” is Whig language, conceding that kingship rests on an agreement a king can break; “abdicated” and “withdrawn himself” are Tory comfort, describing James as having left of his own motion rather than been deposed, which Anglican doctrine could not permit. The resolution let a believer in divine right and a believer in popular sovereignty vote the same words on opposite grounds.

The Lords would not have it. They sent the vote back with two amendments: strike “abdicated” and insert “deserted,” and delete the vacancy clause altogether. The distinction mattered enormously. A deserted throne is still somebody’s throne: a king who has deserted might be recalled, or a regency established in his name, or the crown passed to his infant son. A vacant throne can be filled by whomever the nation chooses. The Commons refused both and explained why in terms that highlighted their intentions: “deserted,” they replied on February 4th, respected only the withdrawing, whereas “abdicated” respected the whole.¹⁰ They wanted a word covering the misgovernment as well as the flight, because they meant the vacancy to follow from the misgovernment. With crowds in the street and a private warning to the peers that William would go home rather than accept a regency, the Lords gave way.

James had not abdicated in any ordinary sense. He had fled a foreign army after his own officers deserted him. The formula was a deliberately ambiguous constitutional construction. It did the work of a legal fiction — the device by which a legal system accomplishes what it has no procedure for accomplishing, using a form it does have — without requiring every member to concede that its premises were fictitious. What cannot be claimed is that every member understood the words identically: some treated the misconduct and flight as forfeiture in substance, others as genuine renunciation, and a good many valued the wording because it spared them from deciding. That unity was purchased by never stating the principle it had acted on — which is why the Revolution could afterward be claimed by radicals and conservatives alike, each with a straight face.

On February 13, 1689, William and Mary came to the Banqueting House at Whitehall, and the clerk of the House of Lords read aloud the Declaration of Right: a recital of James’s illegal acts and a declaration of thirteen ancient rights and liberties, followed by the offer of the crown, which they accepted jointly, with real executive power vested in William alone. The drafting had run through more than one committee — a body of thirty-nine under Sir George Treby framed the initial heads of grievance on February 2nd — and the man most often credited with the final text was John Somers, a young Whig lawyer who had made his name months earlier defending the seven bishops, and who would become Lord Chancellor.¹¹

One point about that ceremony is easy to miss and analytically decisive. The Declaration was read before the crown was offered, and it was not made a condition of accepting it.¹² No bargain was struck in form; the new sovereigns did not take the throne on terms they could be held to. The Declaration presented itself as stating what the law already was, and then they received the crown. Whether it was in substance a condition is still argued. What is certain is that the men who arranged it took care that it should not look like one.

What the Bill of Rights Actually Said

In December 1689 the Convention, by then sitting as a Parliament, turned the Declaration into a statute. The Bill of Rights received the royal assent on December 16, 1689, under the long title of an act declaring the rights and liberties of the subject and settling the succession of the crown.¹³

Among its declaratory clauses are these, short and blunt. That the pretended power of suspending laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal. That the pretended power of dispensing with laws, as it had been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal. That levying money for the use of the crown by pretense of prerogative, without grant of Parliament, is illegal. That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal. That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law. That election of members of Parliament ought to be free. That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament. That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. And that for redress of all grievances, and for the amending, strengthening and preserving of the laws, Parliaments ought to be held frequently.¹⁴

An American reading that list will recognize much of it, and the recognition is not an accident. A careful reader will also notice something odd about the tense: the document does not present itself as creating rights. It declares them — asserting, in its own phrase, that they are the true, ancient, and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom. That was the Convention’s constitutional posture, and a posture is not a finding of fact: historians continue to argue how much innovation the language of restoration concealed, and the arms clause is the most disputed case of all. What is certain is that the Convention claimed to be restoring rather than inventing, and the claim shapes everything about the settlement.

The clause Americans know best requires the most care. It reads: that the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.¹⁵

Read it slowly. Within the English settlement it is a right for Protestant subjects only, and the exclusion was not passive: Parliament legislated in the same period to disarm Catholics. Scotland proceeded under its separate Claim of Right, and Ireland’s statutory position followed a different and far more punitive course. “Suitable to their conditions” was commonly read as preserving distinctions of status and circumstance rather than granting every Protestant an identical entitlement, and “as allowed by law” left the possession of arms subject to ordinary legislation. The clause answered a grievance listed earlier in the same statute, that James had disarmed Protestants while arming Catholics. It is the ancestor of a later and much broader American provision, and the distance between ancestor and descendant is real. What to make of that distance belongs elsewhere.

The rest of the statute settled the crown: on William and Mary jointly, then to Mary’s heirs, then to Anne and hers, then to William’s. And it barred from the throne forever anyone reconciled to or in communion with the Church of Rome, professing the Roman Catholic religion, or married to a Catholic — providing, in a clause annexed to the original act, that in any such case the people of these realms should be absolved of their allegiance. The document that gave England its most famous catalogue of liberties also wrote a religious test for the monarchy into the fundamental law of the state, and released subjects from obedience to any sovereign who failed it. Both things are in the same statute, a few paragraphs apart.

The Act of Toleration and Its Boundaries

The other great measure of 1689 was passed in May, seven months before the Bill of Rights. Its long title tells almost the whole story: an act for exempting their Majesties’ Protestant subjects dissenting from the Church of England from the penalties of certain laws.¹⁶

Within its boundaries it was a real gain. Protestant dissenters — Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and by special accommodation the Quakers — could now worship in their own licensed meeting houses with their own ministers, provided they swore the oaths of allegiance and supremacy and denied transubstantiation. Two generations of English Protestants had been fined, imprisoned, and driven from their homes for praying in the wrong building; prosecution for licensed dissenting worship now largely ceased, and hundreds of thousands lived differently for it.

Its boundaries were drawn as deliberately as its grant. Roman Catholics were excluded entirely, as were those who denied the Trinity, and the act made no provision at all for Jews; the required oaths were the instrument of exclusion, since no Catholic could swear them. Nor did it repeal any of the disabling statutes. The Test and Corporation Acts stayed on the books, so a dissenter now entitled to attend his own chapel still could not hold civil or military office, take a degree at Oxford or Cambridge, or escape tithes to the church he did not attend.

Toleration in 1689 meant the removal of criminal penalties for a particular kind of Protestant worship. It did not mean religious equality, or freedom of conscience as a right of persons, or anything at all for those outside the Protestant fold. Non-Trinitarians waited until 1813, Catholics until 1791 for the freedom to worship and 1829 for the removal of most of their remaining political disabilities. Calling the act religious liberty without those qualifications flatters it well past what it will bear — which does not diminish what it did for the people it covered, who had waited a long time.

What Was Won and What Was Not

Set against James’s claims, the gains were substantial and they held. The suspending power was gone, and the dispensing power with it: the crown could no longer set aside an act of Parliament, and no English monarch has seriously tried since. Money and soldiers were the practical engines. Because the crown could not levy revenue without a parliamentary grant, could not keep a peacetime army without parliamentary consent, and thereafter received military funding only in short increments, no king could govern for long without calling Parliament and keeping it. What had been an occasional royal convenience became a permanent institution. The Triennial Act of 1694 required Parliament to meet at least every three years and none to last longer than three; the Act of Settlement of 1701 enacted that judges hold office during good behavior rather than at the king’s pleasure, removable only on an address from both Houses — a protection that took effect with the Hanoverian succession in 1714.¹⁷ By that succession the crown had lost the power to legislate alone, to tax alone, to keep an army alone, to govern indefinitely without Parliament, and to dismiss a judge who ruled against it.

What the previous three articles traced — law binding the king, a ruler who breaks it open to resistance, rights belonging to subjects rather than to the sovereign’s generosity — was now in the statute book rather than in pamphlets written by men who might hang for them. Sidney’s Discourses was published in 1698 in the same kingdom whose government had used his seized manuscript against him at his trial.

The settlement did not establish popular sovereignty, and was not intended to. The nation that acted in 1689 was the political nation: peers, gentry, merchants, the Commons, and the small propertied electorate behind them. That electorate was real and should not be written out — the Convention’s Commons was returned on elections held after William’s circular letters to the counties and boroughs, and the Bill of Rights recites them in its preamble. But the franchise was narrow, unequal, and male; no one voted on the succession itself; and nobody asked the laborers of Devon whether they preferred William to James. Neither the franchise nor the distribution of seats was altered. An oligarchic political nation replaced one king with another and decisively strengthened Parliament’s position in the constitution.

Nor did it produce a written constitution standing above the legislature, and here the contrast with the previous generation is exact. Forty years earlier the Levellers had proposed a written instrument deriving its authority from popular consent, granting the representatives limited powers, and reserving certain matters — religion, conscription against conscience, equality before the law — as native rights no representative body could touch. The Agreement of the People placed the fundamental law above Parliament. The Bill of Rights placed it inside Parliament: a statute, declaring rights the same legislature could in principle alter by later statute. That is a description of what they built and meant to build, not a criticism by a later age’s standards. They were not trying to bind Parliament; Parliament was what they were making strong enough to bind the king. The idea of a fundamental law above the legislature had been articulated in England and set aside, and its durable realization would come across the Atlantic.

The settlement also redistributed political power to almost nobody, and the reckoning below takes up what that cost. Several of its restraints on the prerogative did protect subjects who held no vote, which the objections after it take up in turn. But it was made by and for a narrow Protestant political nation whose authors would have been astonished to hear that they were legislating for humanity.

Scotland and Ireland

The most durable myth about 1688 is contained in a single word, and the word is bloodless. Judged by England alone, the claim has something in it. There were skirmishes, most notably at Reading, and anti-Catholic riots in several towns, but no battle was fought between the two armies, and the king was removed at a cost in English lives any other seventeenth-century regime change would have envied. Contemporaries were astonished, and the astonishment was warranted. The description was not, because the revolution did not stop at the English border.

In Scotland — where he had reigned as James VII — the Convention of Estates went further than England had dared. The English fiction of abdication by departure did not fit a king who had never governed Scotland from London, so the Scots said instead that he had forfaulted (forfeited) the crown by his actions, and set out the case in a Claim of Right. A king could therefore lose his throne for what he had done, by the judgment of the estates of the realm. Scotland reached the contractual principle by the front door while England was still going round the back.¹⁸

It also got a war. John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, raised the Highlands and on July 27, 1689 destroyed a government army under Hugh Mackay in the pass of Killiecrankie. Dundee was killed in the charge, and the rising, deprived of the only man who could hold it together, was checked at Dunkeld the following month and broken the next year. Then, in 1692, came the episode Scotland has never forgotten: the massacre at Glencoe, where a detachment quartered on the MacDonalds under pretense of hospitality killed their hosts on government orders over a delayed oath. The order bore William’s signature, though how much he grasped of what he authorized has been disputed ever since. An inquiry three years later found it to be murder.¹⁹

Ireland was not an episode. It was a three-year war whose outcome shaped the next two centuries. Ireland in 1688 was a Catholic country ruled by a Protestant minority under a land settlement imposed by conquest a generation earlier. For Irish Catholics James was no threat to liberty; he was the first king in living memory who had begun restoring their access to office, army, and land, and his cause was theirs. The war began with the Protestant defense of Derry through the spring and summer of 1689 and turned on July 1, 1690 at the river Boyne, where William’s multinational army defeated James’s and James fled to France for good.

Two points about that battle get mangled. The first is the calendar: this article uses Old Style dating throughout, as the English sources do, and the Boyne was fought on July 1, 1690 Old Style, July 11, New Style. The modern Twelfth is not a straight recalculation of the Boyne: it began as the commemoration of Aughrim, fought on July 12, 1691, and attached itself to the Boyne only later. The second is scale: the Boyne was politically enormous and militarily moderate, with total deaths on both sides probably under two thousand.²⁰

The killing came afterward, because the war was prolonged. Rather than offer terms that would end it, William published the Declaration of Finglas, pardoning Jacobite common soldiers while excluding the officers and the Catholic landed class — the very men with the means to end it, who now had nothing to gain by stopping. They fought on for a year. On July 12, 1691 at Aughrim in County Galway the Jacobite army was destroyed in one of the bloodiest days in these islands’ military history; estimates of the dead commonly approach seven thousand.²¹ Limerick surrendered in October, and the treaty promised Irish Catholics the religious freedom they had held under Charles II and security in their property. William confirmed the civil articles by letters patent in February 1692, expressly restoring a protective clause left out of the signed text by mistake.²²

The promises were not kept. The Irish Parliament delayed until 1697 and then gave statutory confirmation to only an abridged and mutilated version of the civil articles, omitting the first article on religion and the protective wording the king had confirmed by letters patent. Over the following decades, across three reigns, came the penal laws: Catholics barred from Parliament, the bar, the army, and the vote, restricted in bearing arms, in purchasing land and holding long leases, in educating their children in their faith, and in inheriting under ordinary rules, with an estate divided among all sons unless one conformed.²³ A Catholic majority was reduced to a legally subordinate caste in its own country by the post-Revolution order — begun under William, hardened under Anne, extended by their successors — and by the same confessional logic that ran through the English settlement.

This is not a footnote to 1688. It is 1688, seen from a different island. What declared the ancient liberties of the subject in London was, in Dublin and Galway, the instrument of dispossession, and the two are not separable, because the anti-Catholic provisions were structural to the English settlement rather than incidental to it. A settlement one of whose founding premises was that a Catholic could not be trusted with power produced, with perfect internal consistency, a legal order in which Catholics were trusted with nothing.

The word “bloodless” describes one of three kingdoms. Used of the whole it is not a compression but an erasure, and it erases the people who paid.

Locke and the Settlement

John Locke came home in February 1689, on the ship that carried the future queen. Later that year his Two Treatises of Government appeared in London, anonymously, with the following year on its title page. Later generations made it the philosophy of the Revolution; its immediate reception was far more limited, and in the flood of pamphlets published just after 1688 identifiable uses of the Treatises are remarkably scarce.

The chronology alone unsettles the received picture. The Two Treatises was composed roughly between 1679 and 1682, during the Exclusion Crisis, years before there was a Revolution to justify — written in the same danger and against the same enemy as Sidney’s Discourses, as the previous article set out.²⁴ Locke composed it amid the Exclusion Crisis in support of resistance directed against Charles II’s regime, and published it into a settlement that had happened without it. The preface he added in 1689 does present the work as establishing King William’s title, which is how the misunderstanding began — but a book published into a revolution already accomplished is not a book written for the occasion.

The deeper point is not about dates. It is that the settlement did not enact Locke’s theory, and that most of the men who made it would have been alarmed to be told it had. Locke’s argument runs on natural rights held by individuals before any government exists, on government as a trust created by consent, and on the people’s retained authority to dissolve a government that betrays it. Almost none of that appears in the Declaration of Right. Contractarian and resistance arguments were circulating — they filled the pamphlet war, and the Commons had already written “the original contract between king and people” into its vacancy resolution — but they did not govern the document that settled the crown, which appeals instead to ancient rights, to precedent, to what ancestors in like case have usually done. The Convention did not claim the people had reassumed a power they had lent. It claimed James had violated laws already old, and that the throne had fallen vacant by his own act.

Macaulay saw this clearly, in the chapter this article opened with. The change, he wrote, seems small: not a single flower of the crown was touched, not a single new right was given to the people.²⁵ That is the arch-Whig, at the summit of his praise, describing the settlement as formally restorative. He was right about the posture. Whether he was right that nothing new was created is precisely what later scholarship disputes.

What the actors did, then, was one thing; what their language made available to everyone who came after was another. Men in Boston and Virginia would take the Whig account at its word and press it considerably further than any Whig of 1689 intended. That is how inheritances work. The heirs do not get what the testator meant. They get what the will says.

The Second Magna Carta

Americans read the English Bill of Rights closely, and read it as theirs.

Through the quarrel with Britain from the mid-1760s, colonial printers reissued the text and writers invoked it constantly, calling it a second Magna Carta — the charter that had settled what an English subject could demand of his government.²⁶ When the colonists began drafting constitutions of their own, the borrowing was direct. George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights of June 1776 carried the 1689 language on excessive bail and cruel punishments almost intact, and Mason’s text became the template other states followed and the source Madison worked from in 1789. The Eighth Amendment is very nearly the English clause reproduced: excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. That line of descent is textual and demonstrable. The others are antecedents rather than sole sources. The English petition clause stands behind the First Amendment’s right to petition for redress of grievances. The quartering of soldiers contrary to law, a grievance the English statute listed by name, belongs to the constitutional memory behind the Third. The Protestant arms clause is one important ancestor of the American arms tradition, though not its only one.

The inheritance was also an expectation. The colonists believed the rights of 1689 were theirs by birth, carried across the Atlantic in their persons as Englishmen, and said so repeatedly in the years when they were still trying to remain Englishmen. What they discovered in the 1760s and 1770s was that the settlement they appealed to did not say what they needed it to say. The settlement had strengthened Parliament and the developing doctrine of its supremacy. It had not placed rights beyond Parliament but in Parliament’s keeping, declared by statute and secured by the good faith of the body that declared them. That arrangement gave an Englishman in Bristol some purchase on the body that held his liberties — unequal and indirect, since most of Bristol could not vote either. It gave the colonist in Boston no representation he recognized and no higher law by which Parliament’s claims could be judged.

The king had been chained. The legislature had not. That discovery — that the liberties of 1689 were real and were not enough — is one of the roads that leads to Philadelphia.

The Honest Reckoning

Anti-Catholic exclusion was among the Revolution’s constitutive premises — joined to the defense of Parliament, of statute, of the established church, and of England against a French-style monarchy — and it was the premise written into permanent law. It barred Catholics from the throne forever, released subjects from allegiance to any sovereign who converted, left the Test Acts standing, and in Ireland followed conquest with a penal regime aimed at Catholic land, inheritance, education, arms, office, the professions, and the vote. Ireland’s Catholic majority was made legally subordinate in its own country as a consequence of events this article has also praised, and not as an unforeseen side effect: it followed from the settlement’s confessional premise with the tidiness of arithmetic.

The men who did all this were not the people in any comprehensive sense. They were a few hundred landowners, lawyers, bishops, and merchants, returned by a narrow electorate, who invited a foreign army, deposed a king they had sworn to obey, and legislated in the name of a nation they had not asked. They then called it a restoration of ancient custom, which spared them from stating the principle they had acted on, and the formula at the center of the business — that James had abdicated — was adopted precisely so that nobody need say out loud that subjects had removed a king. The language of the age has flattered them since. “Glorious” came from the statute, applied to a Dutch prince as God’s instrument, and hardened into the ordinary name for the event; “bloodless” was a description of England that got applied to three kingdoms, one of which lost thousands of men in a single afternoon at Aughrim.

None of that is cancelled by what follows, and none of it excused by it.

What those few hundred men built outgrew them. They set limits on power for their own reasons, most narrow and several self-interested, and the limits held after the reasons were forgotten. A crown that cannot suspend a law, tax without consent, or keep an army without consent has been permanently reduced, whoever reduced it and whatever they meant by it. Some of what they declared — on petition, on bail, on fines and punishments, on taxation — was stated in language general enough to be quoted by people the settlement had shut out, even while its arms clause, its succession rules, and its electorate stayed explicitly Protestant and narrow. Dissenters pressed the settlement’s own logic through the long campaign that ended in the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts; Catholic emancipationists turned it against the penal laws; Americans turned it against Parliament itself — every one of them people the settlement had excluded, arguing in the settlement’s own words.

That is not a redemption of the men but an observation about what they left. The right judgment is the uncomfortable one: an incomplete revolution made by narrow men for mixed motives, which delivered conquest to one kingdom and permanent second-class status to a whole religion, and which also placed real and lasting chains on arbitrary power. Both halves are the record, and the inheritance is the whole thing, received as it actually was.

The Skeptic’s Case

It Was Not a Revolution but a Foreign Invasion and a Dynastic Coup

In November 1688 a foreign head of state landed on English soil with some fifteen thousand professional troops and a fleet of over four hundred ships, marched on the capital, occupied it, and took the crown — for reasons of his own foreign policy, to secure English resources for a European war against France. The “invitation” was solicited by William himself as political cover and signed by seven men who represented nobody but themselves. James was not deposed by a rising of his people; he was abandoned by his officers in the face of a cohesive invading army and the collapse of his own command, and fled. The settlement was then arranged by an assembly convened on the invader’s letters, which was not a lawful Parliament and had to have its own acts retroactively validated. Had any of this happened to a country we disliked, we would call it a coup with a foreign sponsor and not hesitate.

Every sentence of that is accurate. The scale of the invasion is habitually minimized in the English telling and the Dutch motive habitually left out; any account of 1688 that does not begin with the ships is liturgy rather than history.

What the objection does not establish is its conclusion, because whether an event was an invasion and what the invasion produced are separate questions. The test is not the purity of William’s motives but what the political nation did in the fourteen months after he landed — and what it did was decline to let him take the crown by conquest. He held the decisive military leverage, but he also needed English revenue, the English fleet, the cooperation of English institutions, and a title that subjects would obey. He summoned the Convention, submitted to a public recitation of the limits on royal power before accepting the throne, and governed thereafter with Parliaments he could not do without. An invader who accepts a title dependent on English political cooperation, and then spends a decade unable to raise money or keep an army without an assembly’s consent, has not conducted an ordinary conquest. The invasion is real. So is the settlement it made room for.

The Settlement Was Too Narrow to Count as a Landmark of Liberty

The second objection grants the constitutional changes and denies their significance. No popular sovereignty, no written constitution above the legislature, no religious liberty for Catholics or non-Trinitarians or Jews, no franchise reform, no relief for the poor or for women, and conquest with a penal code for Ireland. What changed, on this account, is that a landed oligarchy took from the crown the arbitrary powers it wanted and spent a century exercising them through Parliament. Calling that a landmark of freedom is Whig sentiment mistaking a transfer of power for a limitation of it.

The indictment holds, and the reckoning above already granted it. The settlement was oligarchic, and it did transfer power rather than diffuse it.

The reply turns on a distinction the objection collapses. A limitation on arbitrary power and a broadening of who holds power are different achievements, and the first can be accomplished without the second. 1689 accomplished the first: the circle of rulers stayed narrow, while what could be done to a subject without law became permanently narrower. A subject who cannot be taxed by proclamation, imprisoned on excessive bail, or tried before a court erected by prerogative is better off than one who can, whether or not he votes. The objection is right that this is not democracy, and wrong to conclude it is therefore not liberty. The two were separated for a long time in English history.

The Line from 1688 to American Liberty Is a Story the Colonists Told Themselves

The third objection is the sharpest, because it turns this series’ own argument against it. The Americans of the 1770s built their case on an inheritance from 1689 that the English constitution did not actually contain. They claimed the rights of Englishmen secured by the Revolution — but the Revolution had secured those rights by making Parliament supreme, and Parliament was the body they were resisting. When Parliament asserted authority to legislate for the colonies in all cases whatsoever, it was exercising the settlement of 1689 as designed, not violating it. The colonists were not the heirs of the Glorious Revolution but its rebels, and the appeal to 1688 was a self-flattering construction after the fact.

The constitutional point is correct, and it is the single most important thing an American reader should take from this article. The strengthening of Parliament and of the developing doctrine of its supremacy was central to the settlement of 1689, and that supremacy was what the colonists had to reject. Their inherited-rights arguments collided with Westminster’s increasingly dominant doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty and virtual representation, and within that doctrine they could not obtain the limitation they believed their rights required.

The objection still proves less than it thinks, because it treats the colonists’ claim as a mistake rather than the discovery it turned out to be. What the Americans found in the 1760s was not that the rights of 1689 were fictions. Those rights were real; the difficulty was structural. Rights declared by a legislature and left in its keeping are secure only so far as those who hold them have some remedy against it. Outside its system of representation a subject might still win in an ordinary court, but he could not stop the declaring body from altering the terms. That is not a misreading of the settlement but an accurate reading of its limit, arrived at by people standing where the limit could be felt. They took the substance of 1689 and concluded the form was insufficient, which is why the documents they wrote look like the English Bill of Rights in their clauses and nothing like it in their architecture. What the heirs did with the inheritance was fix what had broken on them.

The Road Continues

By the Hanoverian succession of 1714 the English inheritance was substantially assembled.

There was law binding on the king, which Coke had asserted against two Stuarts at the cost of his office. There was the proposition that a free people might set down their fundamental law in writing and reserve rights no majority could reach, which the Levellers had reasoned out at Putney before their movement was broken and soldiers of the 1649 mutinies were shot at Burford. There was the argument from nature and consent, and the right to resist a ruler who broke his trust, which Sidney and Locke had built into systems at the risk of their lives and in one case at the cost of it. And now there was a statute: a bill of rights on the books, a crown that could not legislate or tax or arm itself alone, judges who could not be dismissed for their verdicts, and Parliaments that had to meet.

It was not enough. The statute declared rights instead of securing them against the body that declared them; the liberty was Protestant, propertied, and English, and its cost was charged to Ireland; and the men who made it believed they were restoring a past rather than founding a future.

But the pieces were now in the world, in print, in a language that would carry. What they needed was someone to ask what they meant — not what an English lawyer could prove about the ancient constitution, but what could be said about human beings as such. That work was about to be done, much of it in a country recently driven through the Revolution’s wars and then drawn into a union its own Parliament approved amid heavy pressure, bargaining, and widespread opposition. Professors and lawyers and clergymen in Edinburgh and Glasgow would look at the same inheritance and ask a stranger question: what if the best things in human life are the ones nobody planned? To the Scottish alternative, the next article turns.

This is the road to 1776, and we are still walking it.

Self-Reflection Prompts

1. The Convention described James as having abdicated, though his departure had followed an invasion, the collapse of his army, and the defection of his officers. The formula let men who believed in the divine right of kings and men who believed in government by consent act together, at the price of never stating which principle they had acted on. When a political community cannot agree on its founding principle, is a form of words that lets everyone proceed a mark of practical wisdom, or of a settlement that will have to be made again later?

2. The Bill of Rights declared that it was asserting ancient and indubitable rights rather than creating new ones. Does it matter whether a right is called discovered or granted? Consider how differently a government behaves toward a liberty it believes it conferred and one it believes it merely acknowledged.

3. The Act of Toleration removed criminal penalties from Protestant dissenters, left Catholics, non-Trinitarians, and Jews where it found them, and kept the laws barring dissenters from office and university. A great advance or a narrow bargain? Ask the same of a policy in your own country that benefits one group and leaves an adjacent group untouched, and whether you judge the two by the same standard.

4. Many Protestant dissenters in 1688 distrusted a toleration offered by royal proclamation, holding that a liberty granted at a ruler’s pleasure could be withdrawn at his pleasure, and preferred one granted by law. They waited for the next Parliament and received a narrower protection than James had proclaimed. Were they foolish? Consider a benefit available to you today by executive discretion rather than statute, and decide whether you would take it.

5. The Liberty Test. The settlement of 1689 stripped the crown of the power to suspend laws, tax without consent, and keep a peacetime army — and lodged those powers in a legislature that could itself alter, by later statute, the rights it had just declared. Measured against the question this series always asks — did it leave people more free, or more governed? — apply the same two-part test to the government you live under. Which powers has it been genuinely stripped of, so that it could not reclaim them tomorrow if it wished? And which of your liberties exist only because the body that could take them away has not yet chosen to?

Endnotes

1. Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, 5 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848–61), vol. 2, chap. 10, in the concluding reflections on the Revolution. The passage was written and published in 1848, during the year of revolutions across Europe, and Macaulay says so in the surrounding text (”To us, who have lived in the year 1848 . . .”). It is quoted here as the classic Whig verdict, which this article examines rather than adopts.

2. Estimates of the expedition vary with what is counted. The fleet is generally given as approximately 463 vessels — upward of 400 transports escorted by some 50 or more warships — carrying roughly 15,000 regular troops, with volunteers, British and Huguenot exiles, and camp followers raising the total embarked considerably higher. See Jonathan I. Israel, “The Dutch Role in the Glorious Revolution,” in The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact, ed. Jonathan I. Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London: Allen Lane, 2006). The landing was at Brixham, in Torbay, Devon, on 5 November 1688 (Old Style). Comparisons with the Spanish Armada of 1588 are common but depend on which count of the Armada is used and are therefore not asserted here as a fixed multiple.

3. The easterly gale that carried the fleet down the Channel and confined the English fleet in the Thames was called the Protestant wind by contemporaries; see Harris, Revolution, on the providential reading of the expedition. The quoted description of William as the instrument whom God had made glorious in delivering the kingdom from popery and arbitrary power is from the recital of the Bill of Rights itself: Bill of Rights, 1 Will. & Mar. sess. 2, c. 2, introductory recital (spelling modernized here and throughout). The fifth of November was the statutory anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot deliverance, observed in England since 1606.

4. On the suspending and dispensing powers, the test case of Godden v. Hales (1686), in which eleven of the twelve judges upheld the dispensing power, the Ecclesiastical Commission, the Declarations of Indulgence of 1687 and 1688, and the enlargement of the standing army, see Harris, Revolution, and W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Each of these grievances is recited by name in the opening list of the Bill of Rights.

5. James Francis Edward Stuart was born on 10 June 1688. On the warming-pan allegation — that the child was supposititious and had been introduced into the birth chamber — see Harris, Revolution. The allegation was asserted in the Invitation of 30 June and repeated at the highest levels of the political nation; there is no evidentiary basis for it, and it is recorded here as a belief widely held, not as a fact.

6. The seven bishops, headed by William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, petitioned on 18 May 1688 to be excused from reading the Declaration of Indulgence, were prosecuted for seditious libel, tried on 29 June, and acquitted on 30 June. Trial of the Seven Bishops, 12 Howell’s State Trials 183 (1688); see also Harris, Revolution. The Seven Bishops and the Immortal Seven are distinct groups and are frequently confused. Henry Compton, Bishop of London, signed the Invitation and was not among the seven prosecuted bishops.

7. The Invitation to William, 30 June 1688, is preserved at The National Archives, Kew, SP 8/1/224. The signatories were Charles Talbot, twelfth Earl of Shrewsbury; William Cavendish, fourth Earl of Devonshire; Thomas Osborne, first Earl of Danby; Richard Lumley, Baron Lumley; Henry Compton, Bishop of London; Edward Russell; and Henry Sidney, who is generally credited with drafting it. See “Immortal seven (act. 1688),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. It was carried to The Hague by Arthur Herbert, later Earl of Torrington, travelling disguised as a common seaman; Herbert was the courier and not a signatory. Several popular lists of the seven are inaccurate, variously substituting Archbishop Sancroft, Lord Delamer, or Herbert himself. Henry Sidney (1641–1704), later Earl of Romney, was a younger son of Robert Sidney, second Earl of Leicester, and thus the younger brother of Algernon Sidney (1623–83), the subject of the previous article.

8. James left London in the early hours of 11 December 1688; he was intercepted by fishermen in Kent and returned, and departed finally on 23 December with William’s connivance, reaching France shortly afterward. On the tradition that he carried off the Great Seal and cast it into the Thames: the episode appears in early accounts and is generally credited, but its circumstances and evidentiary basis have been questioned in the antiquarian literature, and the purpose commonly ascribed to James is inference rather than record. See Harris, Revolution, and Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries.

9. On William’s strategic motives, the Nine Years’ War, and the Dutch fear of an Anglo-French alignment, see Israel, “The Dutch Role in the Glorious Revolution.” William’s printed manifesto, the Declaration of Reasons, was distributed in England in very large numbers before and during the landing; on its scale and on the argument that 1688–89 was a genuinely popular and radical upheaval rather than a conservative adjustment, see Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Pincus’s thesis is contested, and reviewers have judged his alignment of 1688 with 1789 and 1917 to be overdrawn; see Mark Knights, review of 1688: The First Modern Revolution, Reviews in History (2010). For the three-kingdoms reading, see Harris, Revolution. This article treats the invasion-or-revolution question as genuinely open.

10. The resolution of the House of Commons of 28 January 1689 is quoted here in substance and in its own words. The text is given in John Miller, “The Glorious Revolution: ‘Contract’ and ‘Abdication’ Reconsidered,” Historical Journal 25, no. 3 (1982): 541–55, at 541, and in the proceedings of the Convention. The Lords’ amendments substituting “deserted” for “abdicated” and striking the vacancy clause, together with the Commons’ refusal of 4 February 1689 and the reason given — that “deserted” respected only the withdrawing while “abdicated” respected the whole — are recorded in The History and Proceedings of the House of Commons, vol. 2 (London, 1742), and are reproduced at British History Online. See also Lois G. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), chaps. 7–8, on the vacancy debate.

11. On the Declaration of Right and its drafting, see Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689. The drafting ran through more than one body: a committee of thirty-nine chaired by Sir George Treby framed the twenty-three Heads of Grievances on 2 February 1689, and the Lords later appointed a committee of thirteen under Lord Fauconberg to defend their amendments. Somers is the figure most often credited with shaping the final text; reference works describing him simply as chairman of “the committee that drew up the Declaration” compress a multi-stage process. Somers (1651–1716) had served on the defence counsel in the trial of the seven bishops the previous June and later became Lord Chancellor. The Declaration was agreed on 12 February and read to William and Mary at the Banqueting House, Whitehall, on 13 February 1689, immediately before the crown was offered and accepted.

12. That the Declaration was read to William and Mary but was not made a condition of their acceptance of the crown is the standard modern finding; see Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689, and Pincus, 1688, on the Declaration as a tactical compromise between Whigs and Tories that set out grievances without settling their cause or remedy. Popular accounts stating that William and Mary were required to assent to the Bill of Rights as a precondition of the throne are inaccurate.

13. Bill of Rights, 1 Will. & Mar. sess. 2, c. 2; royal assent 16 December 1689 by modern reckoning. Long title: “An Act declareing the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Setleing the Succession of the Crowne.” The statute is conventionally catalogued as the Bill of Rights 1688, on legislation.gov.uk and in The Statutes of the Realm, vol. 6 (1819), because of contemporary parliamentary and legal-year dating practice, under which the civil year did not begin until 25 March. Three dates should be kept apart: the Convention first assembled on 22 January 1689; William and Mary accepted the crown on 13 February; and the Bill received assent in December. The marginal headings printed in nineteenth-century editions (”Dispensing Power,” “Subjects’ Arms,” and so on) were editorial additions and form no part of the enrolled act.

14. Bill of Rights, 1 Will. & Mar. sess. 2, c. 2, declaratory clauses. Quoted and paraphrased here from the text as printed at legislation.gov.uk from The Statutes of the Realm; spelling modernized. The declaratory language that the rights claimed are “the true auntient and indubitable Rights and Liberties of the People of this Kingdome” appears in the enacting portion of the same statute.

15. Bill of Rights, 1 Will. & Mar. sess. 2, c. 2: “That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law.” The clause answers the grievance recited earlier in the same statute, that James had caused “severall good Subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when Papists were both Armed and Imployed contrary to Law.” On the clause’s confessional limitation, its qualification by social rank, and its subordination to ordinary legislation, see Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689, chap. 5. Whether the clause restated an ancient right or created a new one is disputed: Schwoerer counts it among the minority of provisions that genuinely reaffirmed old law, while Joyce Lee Malcolm, “The Creation of a ‘True Antient and Indubitable’ Right: The English Bill of Rights and the Right to Be Armed,” Journal of British Studies 32, no. 3 (1993), argues that the earlier duty to be armed had never been a right and that the Convention created one. This is the sharpest instance of the wider question of how much innovation the settlement’s restorative language concealed.

16. Toleration Act, 1 Will. & Mar. c. 18; royal assent 24 May 1689. Long title: “An Act for Exempting their Majestyes Protestant Subjects dissenting from the Church of England from the Penalties of certaine Lawes.” Relief was conditioned on subscribing the oaths of allegiance and supremacy and denying transubstantiation, which excluded Roman Catholics by design; the act also excluded those denying the Trinity and made no provision for Jews. It repealed none of the disabling statutes, and neither the Test Act nor the Corporation Act, and dissenters remained liable to tithes and barred from civil and military office and from the universities. Toleration was extended to non-Trinitarians by the Doctrine of the Trinity Act 1813, and to Roman Catholics by the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791 and, for most remaining political disabilities, the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829. On the failed attempt to repeal the sacramental test in 1689, see Harris, Revolution.

17. Triennial Act 1694, also styled the Meeting of Parliament Act 1694, 6 & 7 Will. & Mar. c. 2; royal assent 22 December 1694; requiring that Parliament be summoned within three years of the previous one and that no Parliament continue longer than three years. It was superseded by the Septennial Act 1715 (taking effect 1716). Act of Settlement 1701, 12 & 13 Will. 3, c. 2, long title “An Act for the further Limitation of the Crown and better securing the Rights and Liberties of the Subject,” which settled the succession on Sophia of Hanover and her Protestant heirs and provided that judges’ commissions should be quamdiu se bene gesserint — during good behaviour — with removal only upon the address of both Houses. Its provisions took effect on the death of Anne in 1714.

18. Claim of Right Act 1689 (Scotland), with the Articles of Grievances; and on the Convention of Estates and its finding that James had forfeited rather than abdicated the crown, see Harris, Revolution, chaps. 9–10. The Scots word is printed variously as forfaulted and forefaulted across editions; the form used here follows the modernized text. The distinction from the English formula is substantive: the Scottish version rests the loss of the crown on the king’s conduct and the judgment of the estates, where the English version rests it on his departure.

19. John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, defeated a government army under Major-General Hugh Mackay at the pass of Killiecrankie on 27 July 1689 and was killed in the action; the rising was checked at Dunkeld in August 1689 by the newly raised Cameronian regiment and effectively ended at Cromdale in 1690. Sources differ on the precise date of the action at Dunkeld, which is given variously as 18 and 21 August, and no single date is asserted here. The massacre at Glencoe took place on 13 February 1692; the order bore William’s signature, and the extent of his knowledge of its intended execution remains disputed. A commission of inquiry reporting in 1695 found the killing to have been murder, and the Scottish Parliament addressed the king on the matter. See Harris, Revolution.

20. The Battle of the Boyne was fought on 1 July 1690 Old Style, corresponding to 11 July New Style. This article uses Old Style dating for events in the three kingdoms, following the English sources of the period, while noting that the Dutch Republic and the continent were on the New Style calendar, which accounts for the discrepant dates given for the same events in Dutch and English materials. The modern Twelfth is not a simple recalculation of the Boyne. It began as the commemoration of Aughrim, fought on 12 July 1691 Old Style, which Irish Protestants long treated as the decisive battle of the war; the calendar change of 1752 repositioned the Boyne’s nominal date to 11 July New Style and Aughrim’s to 23 July; and after the founding of the Orange Order in 1795, which preferred the Boyne because William had been present at it, the Twelfth came to commemorate the Boyne on what had been Aughrim’s date. See Pádraig Lenihan, 1690: Battle of the Boyne (Stroud: Tempus, 2003). Estimates of total deaths at the Boyne on both sides are generally placed below two thousand. The siege of Derry ran from April to August 1689.

21. On the Declaration of Finglas of July 1690, which pardoned Jacobite rank and file while excluding the officers and the Catholic landed class, see Harris, Revolution. Its exclusions left the Jacobite leadership little reason to come to terms and materially helped prolong the war; that consequence is well attested, whereas prolongation as William’s purpose is not established. The Battle of Aughrim was fought on 12 July 1691. Casualty figures are estimates rather than a settled count, commonly given as approaching seven thousand dead, which places it among the bloodiest single days in the military history of Britain and Ireland.

22. Treaty of Limerick, signed 3 October 1691; text in the Irish statutes and in the CELT corpus, University College Cork. William III ratified the civil articles by letters patent dated 24 February 1692, expressly confirming the words “and all such as are under their protection in the said counties” — a protective clause omitted from the signed second article by mistake and noticed before the surrender was complete.

23. The Irish Parliament did not refuse ratification outright. It delayed until 1697 and then confirmed the civil articles in an abridged form, omitting the first article guaranteeing Catholics the religious freedom they had held under Charles II, and omitting the protective wording William had confirmed by letters patent in 1692. See “Limerick, treaty of,” in The Oxford Companion to British History, which describes the treaty as ratified “only in 1697 in a maimed form,” and J. G. Simms, Jacobite Ireland, 1685–91. The penal laws were not a single enactment but a body of statutes built up across three reigns — begun under William, hardened under Anne, notably by the act to prevent the further growth of popery, 2 Anne c. 6 (1704), and extended by later governments. Modern scholarship also documents uneven enforcement and adaptive Catholic strategies of evasion, which qualifies the regime’s severity in practice without altering the fact of legal subordination.

24. On the composition of the Two Treatises of Government during and immediately after the Exclusion Crisis — probably between roughly 1679 and 1682, substantially before the Revolution — see Peter Laslett’s introduction to John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), which established the earlier dating, and Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s “Two Treatises of Government” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). The work was published anonymously in 1689, with 1690 on the title page. Locke’s own preface presents the work as establishing the title of King William, which is the origin of the persistent misdescription of the Treatises as a justification written for the Revolution. On the limited immediate reception of the Treatises in the pamphlet literature of 1689 and after, and on the range of justifications actually deployed at the time, see Mark Goldie, “The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 83 (1980): 473–564. Laslett establishes the dating; the stronger reading of the work’s political purpose — that it was composed to justify resistance to Charles II’s regime — is Ashcraft’s influential reconstruction rather than a proposition Locke states anywhere, and neither supports any claim about how widely the book was read at once.

25. Macaulay, History of England, vol. 2, chap. 10. The fuller sentence reads: “Not a single flower of the crown was touched. Not a single new right was given to the people. The whole English law, substantive and adjective, was, in the judgment of all the greatest lawyers, of Holt and Treby, of Maynard and Somers, almost exactly the same after the Revolution as before it.” In the 1906 edition the passage falls at 2:377–78. The observation appears within Macaulay’s own celebration of the Revolution and states his restorative reading of the settlement; it is not independent evidence that the settlement contained no legal innovation, which later scholarship disputes.

26. On the colonial reception of the English Bill of Rights, its frequent reprinting in America between 1763 and 1776, and its description by American writers as a second Magna Carta, see Leonard W. Levy, Origins of the Bill of Rights (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights of June 1776 carried the 1689 language on excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments substantially intact and served as the model for other state declarations and for Madison’s drafting in 1789; the Eighth Amendment reproduces the English clause almost exactly. The relationship to the First, Second, and Third Amendments is one of antecedence rather than exclusive descent: colonial charters, colonial practice, and a longer English tradition fed each of them, and textual resemblance alone does not establish a single line of transmission. On the wider transatlantic legacy of the Declaration and the Bill of Rights, see Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689, chap. 12.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary Sources

• Bill of Rights, 1 Will. & Mar. sess. 2, c. 2 (royal assent 16 December 1689). Text in The Statutes of the Realm, vol. 6 (London, 1819), and at legislation.gov.uk and the Avalon Project, Yale Law School.

• Toleration Act, 1 Will. & Mar. c. 18 (royal assent 24 May 1689). Text in The Statutes of the Realm, vol. 6, and at legislation.gov.uk.

• Declaration of Right (presented to William and Mary, 13 February 1689). Text in Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689, appendix.

• The Invitation to William, 30 June 1688. The National Archives, Kew, SP 8/1/224.

• Triennial Act 1694, 6 & 7 Will. & Mar. c. 2; and Act of Settlement 1701, 12 & 13 Will. 3, c. 2.

• Claim of Right Act 1689 (Scotland), and the Articles of Grievances.

• George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights, 12 June 1776.

• Treaty of Limerick, 3 October 1691; William III’s letters patent of ratification, 24 February 1692; and the Irish confirming act of 1697. Texts in the CELT corpus, University College Cork.

• Trial of the Seven Bishops, 12 Howell’s State Trials 183 (1688).

• The History and Proceedings of the House of Commons, vol. 2 (London, 1742), for the Convention debates of January and February 1689. Where the Commons and Lords Journals preserve the relevant resolutions and conferences, they are the primary authority and this retrospective compilation the secondary one.

• John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

• Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, 5 vols. (London, 1848–61).

Secondary Works

• Lois G. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). The standard study of the drafting, the vacancy debate, and the document’s afterlife.

• Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London: Allen Lane, 2006). The leading three-kingdoms account, and the corrective to English-only narratives.

• Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Argues for a popular, violent, and modernizing revolution; influential and contested.

• W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). On the conservatism and hesitancy of the revolutionaries.

• Jonathan I. Israel, ed., The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The Dutch dimension, and the case for reading 1688 as an invasion.

• John Miller, “The Glorious Revolution: ‘Contract’ and ‘Abdication’ Reconsidered,” Historical Journal 25, no. 3 (1982): 541–55.

• J. R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972).

• Mark Goldie, “The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 83 (1980): 473–564. On the pamphlet debate and the range of justifications offered at the time.

• J. G. Simms, Jacobite Ireland, 1685–91 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). A classic account of the Williamite war in Ireland.

• John Childs, The Williamite Wars in Ireland, 1688–1691 (London: Continuum, 2007). The fuller modern military history.

• Joyce Lee Malcolm, “The Creation of a ‘True Antient and Indubitable’ Right: The English Bill of Rights and the Right to Be Armed,” Journal of British Studies 32, no. 3 (1993). Argues, against Schwoerer, that the arms clause created a right rather than restating one.

• Leonard W. Levy, Origins of the Bill of Rights (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). On the English sources of the American amendments.

• Pádraig Lenihan, 1690: Battle of the Boyne (Stroud: Tempus, 2003). On the battle and on the later history of its commemoration.

• Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enl. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992). On the colonial use of the English constitutional inheritance.

• Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). On the transmission of the radical Whig tradition to America.

Next: Article 12 — “The Scottish Alternative”