The Glorious Revolution (1688)

The events of 1688 and 1689 are often given a triumphant, tidy name: the Glorious Revolution, the moment when Britain supposedly settled the long quarrel between Crown and Parliament with barely a drop of blood spilled. The reality is more complicated and, in places, considerably bloodier. But the core of the traditional account holds. In the space of a few months a reigning king was driven from his throne, a new pair of monarchs accepted the crown on Parliament’s terms, and a statute was passed that placed lasting limits on royal power. Whatever its myths, 1688-89 marked a decisive turn away from personal royal rule and towards the constitutional monarchy Britain still has.

A Catholic king in a Protestant kingdom

The crisis grew out of religion and the fear of absolute power. James II came to the throne in 1685 as an openly Catholic king of a deeply Protestant country, only a generation after the trauma of civil war. Many were initially willing to tolerate him, reasoning that he was middle-aged and that his Protestant daughters would succeed him. James, however, pressed his luck. He appointed Catholics to senior positions in the army, the universities and government, in defiance of laws designed to exclude them. He claimed a sweeping royal power to suspend and dispense with Acts of Parliament. He maintained a large standing army in peacetime, which many regarded as a threat to liberty, and he pushed for the repeal of laws penalising Catholics and dissenters.

What turned anxiety into action was the birth of a son to James and his Catholic queen in June 1688. Until then, the throne would eventually have passed to his Protestant daughter Mary. Now there was the prospect of a Catholic dynasty stretching into the future. For a powerful section of the political nation, this was intolerable. Rather than wait, seven leading figures, a mix of Whigs and Tories, sent a secret invitation to William of Orange, the Dutch Protestant ruler who was both James’s nephew and the husband of his daughter Mary, asking him to intervene to protect Protestantism and English liberties.

Invasion, flight and settlement

William had his own reasons to accept. As the leader of the Dutch Republic, locked in struggle with the France of Louis XIV, he wanted to prevent England from becoming a Catholic ally of France. In November 1688 he landed with a substantial army at Torbay in Devon. James marched out to confront him, but his support drained away as nobles and officers defected. Demoralised and fearing the fate of his father, Charles I, James lost his nerve. He attempted to flee, was briefly caught, and then was allowed to escape to France, throwing the symbolic Great Seal into the Thames as he went.

His flight created an opening. A convention Parliament met in early 1689 and declared that James had effectively abdicated, leaving the throne vacant. Rather than simply install William as a conqueror, it offered the crown jointly to William and Mary, who accepted on conditions. This was the crucial constitutional move. The new monarchs ruled not by unchallenged hereditary right or by claim of divine appointment, but by a parliamentary settlement that came with explicit terms attached.

The Bill of Rights and the new order

Those terms were set out in the Declaration of Right, soon enacted as the Bill of Rights 1689, one of the foundational documents of the British constitution. It condemned the abuses of James’s reign and laid down clear limits on the Crown. The monarch could not suspend laws or dispense with them as James had done. There would be no taxation without the consent of Parliament, and no standing army in peacetime without its agreement. Elections were to be free, Parliaments were to meet frequently, and freedom of speech within Parliament was protected from royal interference. The Bill also barred Catholics, and anyone married to a Catholic, from the throne, a provision reinforced by the Act of Settlement in 1701, which fixed the succession on Protestant lines.

Alongside the Bill came the Toleration Act of 1689, which granted limited freedom of worship to Protestant dissenters, though not to Catholics and without full civil equality. Just as significant in the long run was money. By making the Crown dependent on regular parliamentary grants rather than its own resources, the settlement ensured that monarchs would have to summon Parliament often. The founding of the Bank of England in 1694 and the development of public credit deepened this dependence and bound the interests of Parliament and Crown together.

Glorious, but not bloodless

The comfortable label “bloodless” applies only to England, and even there it understates the disruption. James did not abandon his claim. He landed in Ireland in 1689 with French support, leading to hard fighting, including the lengthy Siege of Derry and his decisive defeat by William at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Scotland too saw armed resistance from supporters of the old king, known as Jacobites, whose risings would trouble the new regime for decades. For Ireland in particular, the events of 1688-91 were anything but bloodless, and their consequences shaped its politics for centuries.

For all these qualifications, the significance of the settlement is hard to overstate. It established in practice that the monarch governed under the law and depended on Parliament for money and legislation. It secured the Protestant succession and entrenched the principle that sovereignty lay with King and Parliament together. Contemporary thinkers such as John Locke offered theoretical justifications for resisting a tyrannical ruler that seemed to fit the moment. Britain emerged with a monarchy that was real but limited, a Parliament that was indispensable, and a constitutional framework that, in its essentials, has endured ever since.