On the afternoon of 5 November 1688, the people of a Devon fishing village looked out at Tor Bay and could not see the water for ships. Something like four hundred and sixty of them, carrying fifteen thousand professional soldiers, their horses, their siege guns, and a printing press. It was the largest fleet to reach English shores since 1066, it had sailed the length of the Channel unopposed, and it belonged to a foreign head of state. Fourteen months later that same kingdo

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 secula