The revolution that defined British governance for the next three centuries began not with barricades or guillotines but with an invitation. In June 1688, seven prominent English noblemen and bishops wrote to William of Orange, the Dutch Stadtholder and son-in-law of King James II, inviting him to come to England with an army and save the kingdom from its king. That letter, and the carefully managed military expedition that followed, produced what the victors called the Glorious Revolution — a constitutional transformation achieved, by British standards at least, with minimal bloodshed.
James II had managed the remarkable feat of alienating virtually every significant political constituency in England within three years of inheriting the throne from his brother Charles II. He was openly Catholic in a Protestant country that had spent the previous century experiencing religious civil war. He issued Declarations of Indulgence that suspended penal laws against Catholics and Dissenters — an exercise of royal prerogative that many regarded as unconstitutional. He promoted Catholics to senior military and civil positions. And when his wife gave birth to a son in June 1688 — raising the prospect of a Catholic succession that might extend indefinitely — the Protestant political establishment concluded that action was necessary.
William landed at Torbay in Devon on 5 November 1688 with an army of 15,000 men, and support for James collapsed with extraordinary speed. Officers and regiments deserted to William. James's own daughter Anne, along with the Duke of Marlborough and many of the army's senior commanders, defected. Faced with universal abandonment, James threw the Great Seal of England into the Thames — symbolically attempting to make government impossible — and fled to France. It was, as one historian remarked, less a revolution than a royal abdication induced by overwhelming political and military pressure.
The constitutional settlement that followed was the lasting achievement. The Bill of Rights of 1689 codified the relationship between Crown and Parliament in a form that has never been fundamentally altered. It established that the monarch could not suspend laws, maintain a standing army in peacetime, or levy taxation without parliamentary consent. It guaranteed free elections, freedom of speech in Parliament, and the right to petition the monarch. It was not a democratic constitution in the modern sense — the franchise remained extremely narrow — but it settled the question that had been fought over throughout the seventeenth century: in England, Parliament was supreme.
The influence of the Glorious Revolution and its constitutional settlement extended far beyond Britain. John Locke, who returned from Dutch exile in William's fleet, published his Two Treatises of Government in 1689, providing the philosophical justification for government based on consent and the right of revolution against tyranny. Locke's ideas travelled to the American colonies, where they shaped the political thinking of Jefferson, Madison and the other framers of a constitution that drew heavily on English constitutional precedent. The American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the Constitution of 1787 can both be read, in significant part, as heirs to the Glorious Revolution.
