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The flight of James II in December 1688 left England with a throne that was, in the most literal sense, empty — and with an urgent, unprecedented problem: how to fill it without either restoring a Catholic king or admitting, in so many words, that subjects might depose their sovereign. The settlement reached in 1689 — embodied above all in the Declaration and then Bill of Rights, and supplemented by the Toleration Act and later the Triennial and Act of Settlement — answered that problem in a way that quietly transformed the English monarchy. It established, in practice if not in explicit theory, that the Crown held its authority by parliamentary consent rather than divine right alone; that the law stood above the prerogative; and that certain fundamental liberties lay beyond the reach of any king. The "constitutional monarchy" that endures to this day was born here.
The central interpretive problem is the nature and significance of this settlement. Was it, in the older Whig view associated with Macaulay, the triumphant climax of a centuries-long struggle for English liberty — a true and glorious revolution? Or was it, as conservative and revisionist historians such as J.R. Jones and Jonathan Clark have urged, a deliberately conservative and backward-looking event, cloaked in the language of "restoring" ancient rights, that bent rather than broke the hereditary principle and left the social order untouched? Or was it, as Steve Pincus insists, genuinely revolutionary in its consequences — the foundation of a new fiscal-military state, a new political economy, and a new public politics of party? The settlement's own studied ambiguity — designed to let Whig and Tory both accept it — is precisely what makes it so contestable, and so rewarding to analyse.
Key Question: Did the 1689 settlement amount to a genuine revolution — establishing parliamentary sovereignty and breaking the hereditary, divine-right monarchy — or was it a conservative, ambiguously-worded accommodation that preserved as much as it changed?
With no king to summon a Parliament, William called an irregular Convention (echoing the body that had restored Charles II in 1660). It faced the delicate task of regularising a fait accompli — William held the military power and would accept nothing less than the crown — without conceding the dangerous principle that Parliament could depose and elect monarchs at will.
| Whig Position | Tory Position |
|---|---|
| James had broken the "original contract" between king and people and, by fleeing, had abdicated; the throne was therefore vacant and Parliament could fill it | An anointed king could not be deposed; at most he had "deserted," and a regency (or rule in James's name) should be established, preserving hereditary right |
| Sovereignty ultimately derives from the people through Parliament | Sovereignty derives from God through indefeasible hereditary succession |
The settlement's genius was a formula vague enough for both parties to swallow. The Convention resolved that James, by withdrawing and breaking the original contract, had "abdicated" the government, and that the throne was thereby "vacant" (Whig language) — while pointedly not spelling out a general right of resistance (a reassurance to Tories). The crown was then offered jointly to William and Mary, with administration vested in William — a hereditary fig-leaf (Mary was James's Protestant daughter) over what was, in substance, a parliamentary disposal of the throne. The Declaration of Rights was read to William and Mary before they accepted, tying their title to its terms.
This deliberate ambiguity is the key to interpreting 1689. The settlement was revolutionary in effect — Parliament had set aside a lawful king and chosen his successors, attaching conditions to the crown — yet it was framed so as to deny that anything so radical had occurred. Both the "revolution" and "conservative" readings find their warrant in this single, calculated evasion.
The Declaration of Rights was enacted in statute as the Bill of Rights in December 1689. It was less a charter of new liberties than a catalogue of James II's specific abuses, recast as prohibitions — which is exactly why its meaning is debated.
| Provision | Significance |
|---|---|
| Suspending power illegal; dispensing power "as exercised of late" illegal | The Crown may not set aside or exempt individuals from statutes — striking directly at James's Indulgences and at Godden v. Hales |
| No taxation by prerogative | All revenue requires parliamentary consent — closing the door on the impositions and Ship Money of earlier reigns |
| No standing army in peacetime without consent | Answered the central fear of James's reign; reinforced by the annual Mutiny Act, which made the army's very legality depend on yearly parliamentary renewal |
| Right to petition the king | Vindicated the Seven Bishops; petitioning could not be treated as sedition |
| Free elections and freedom of speech in Parliament | Parliamentary privilege secured against Crown interference |
| No excessive bail, fines, or cruel and unusual punishments | Judicial protections (later echoed in the US Bill of Rights) |
| Frequent Parliaments | Parliaments to be held frequently — given teeth by the Triennial Act (1694), requiring elections at least every three years |
Crucially, the practical guarantee of all this was financial. The Convention deliberately granted William an inadequate ordinary revenue and voted the army's funds annually, so that the king could not, like his predecessors, contemplate ruling without Parliament. Where the Petition of Right (1628) had been a paper guarantee the Crown could evade, the Bill of Rights was backed by the power of the purse — and that is why it held.
It is as important to know the settlement's limits as its provisions. The Bill of Rights did not establish manhood suffrage or democracy; it did not grant religious liberty to Catholics (who were in fact newly barred from the throne); it did not create a formal separation of powers or a single codified constitution; and it left the monarch with substantial real power — over ministers, foreign policy, and the conduct of war. The landed elite continued to dominate Parliament and county. The settlement redistributed power between Crown and Parliament; it did not democratise the state.
The Toleration Act (1689) granted freedom of public worship to Trinitarian Protestant Dissenters who took the oaths of allegiance — ending the era of active persecution under the Clarendon Code. But its limits were sharply drawn: it did not extend to Catholics or to anti-Trinitarians (Unitarians); and Dissenters remained excluded from public and municipal office by the still-unrepealed Test and Corporation Acts (evaded in practice by "occasional conformity"). The Church of England remained the established Church with its privileges intact.
A-Level Analysis: The Toleration Act is best understood as a pragmatic settlement rather than a statement of principle. It rewarded the Dissenters who had joined the resistance to James and reflected the practical impossibility of crushing Nonconformity — but it stopped well short of religious equality, drew a hard confessional line against Catholics, and left Dissenters as second-class citizens in civil life. Toleration of worship is not the same as equality, and the distinction is exactly the kind of qualification a strong answer draws.
Yet it would be wrong to dismiss the Act as merely grudging, and a balanced answer registers its genuine significance. For all its limits, the Toleration Act marked a decisive and irreversible break with the century-old assumption — shared by Elizabeth, the Stuarts, and the Cavalier Parliament alike — that religious uniformity was both desirable and enforceable. After 1689, the open, legal existence of competing Protestant congregations became a permanent feature of English life; the machinery of persecution under the Clarendon Code was, in practice, dismantled. The contrast with the savage treatment of Dissent only a generation earlier — Bunyan in gaol, Quakers in their thousands imprisoned — measures the change. The Act thus belongs to the wider settlement as its religious dimension: just as the Bill of Rights ended the era of arbitrary government, the Toleration Act ended the era of compulsory conformity, even if both stopped well short of the modern principles (democracy; religious equality) with which they are sometimes confused. Recognising that the Act was at once limited in principle and transformative in practice is precisely the balanced judgement the top band rewards.
| YES — a revolution | NO — a conservative settlement |
|---|---|
| The hereditary principle was broken in practice — Parliament set aside a lawful king and chose his successors | William and Mary had genuine hereditary claims; the language insisted nothing unprecedented had happened |
| The Bill of Rights and the power of the purse established, in effect, parliamentary sovereignty | The Bill largely codified existing principles and grievances rather than inventing new ones |
| The underlying theory — contract, consent, the conditional crown — was revolutionary | The settlement was framed in deliberately conservative, backward-looking, "restorationist" language |
| The consequences were transformative: the fiscal-military state, the financial revolution, organised party politics | The social order was untouched; the landed elite continued to rule; the monarch retained great power |
The most defensible judgement turns on a distinction between intention and language on the one hand and practice and consequence on the other. In its self-presentation, 1689 was conservative — Jones and Clark are right that the settlement strained every nerve to deny that it had deposed a king or asserted popular sovereignty. But in its practical effect and long-term consequences, it was genuinely revolutionary, as Pincus argues: a monarch who could not survive without annual parliamentary supply, an army legal only by yearly renewal, a Bank of England and a funded national debt, and a politics organised around Whig and Tory. The settlement said less than it did — and a sophisticated answer holds those two registers apart.
The "Glorious Revolution" was a settlement for three kingdoms, not one, and the English Bill of Rights tells only part of the story. A strong candidate, following Tim Harris's three-kingdoms approach, recognises that 1688–91 looked very different across the British Isles.
| Kingdom | The Revolution settlement |
|---|---|
| Scotland | A separate Scottish Convention met in 1689 and issued its own, more radically worded Claim of Right, which declared that James had "forfaulted" (forfeited) the throne — far blunter than the English "abdication" fiction. It abolished episcopacy and established a Presbyterian Kirk, reversing decades of Stuart religious policy. The settlement was contested by Highland Jacobitism (Killiecrankie, 1689) and stained by Glencoe (1692) |
| Ireland | There was no peaceful settlement at all: the Revolution meant war. James landed with French troops and held a "Patriot Parliament" in Dublin (1689); only William's victories at the Boyne (1690) and Aughrim (1691) secured the kingdom — for the Protestant Ascendancy, whose Penal Laws then stripped the Catholic majority of political and economic rights, betraying the Treaty of Limerick |
The contrasts are deeply instructive. The Scottish settlement was more radical than the English in both its language (open forfeiture) and its religious revolution (the overthrow of episcopacy). The Irish "settlement" was no settlement but a conquest, sealed by confessional subjugation. This three-kingdoms perspective sharpens the central debates of the lesson: it shows that the English preference for conservative, ambiguous language ("abdication," "vacant") was a choice, not a necessity — the Scots demonstrated that bolder language was available — and it explodes any account of 1688 as uniformly "glorious" and "bloodless." The Revolution that gave England a famously moderate, lawyerly settlement gave Ireland the Boyne and the Penal Laws. To analyse 1689 as a purely English constitutional event is therefore to miss both its variety and its violence.
Section A requires you to assess the value of contemporary sources in context. We model the technique on the Bill of Rights (1689) itself as a representative type — a formal constitutional statute produced by the Convention and assented to as the price of the crown.
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