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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 the years that followed — embodied above all in the Declaration and then Bill of Rights of 1689, and completed over the next dozen years by the Toleration Act, the Triennial Act, the financial revolution, and finally the Act of Settlement of 1701 — answered that problem in a way that quietly transformed the English monarchy. It established, in practice if not always 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 in form to this day was born here, and this lesson completes the settlement strand of the breadth study — the third and final movement of the course, after conflict and revolution.
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 J.C.D. 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. Because the course extends to 1701, we are able to judge the settlement not by the cautious words of a single year but by the whole cluster of measures that grew from it — which is exactly where its revolutionary character becomes visible.
Key enquiry: Did the settlement of 1689–1701 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; and how far does the answer depend on whether we judge it by its language or by its long-term consequences?
With no king to summon a Parliament, William called an irregular Convention — echoing the body that had restored Charles II in 1660, and lacking the strict legal authority of a Parliament summoned by royal writ. 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, since 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 very title to its terms.
This deliberate ambiguity is the key to interpreting 1689, and it is worth dwelling on because it is the seed of every later debate about the Revolution. 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 the "conservative" readings find their warrant in this single, calculated evasion. A strong candidate does not choose one and ignore the other; a strong candidate recognises that the settlement was designed to sustain both readings at once, and analyses why.
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: it looked backward, to particular grievances, even as it laid down principles of lasting force.
| Provision | Significance |
|---|---|
| Suspending power illegal; dispensing power "as exercised of late" illegal | The Crown may not set aside statutes, nor exempt individuals from them — 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 for good. |
| No standing army in peacetime without consent | Answered the central fear of James's reign; later 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 no longer be treated as sedition. |
| Free elections and freedom of speech in Parliament | Parliamentary privilege secured against Crown interference. |
| No excessive bail or fines, and no cruel and unusual punishments | Judicial protections (later echoed in the American Bill of Rights). |
| Frequent Parliaments | Parliaments to be held frequently — soon 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. This is the single most important point in the whole lesson. Where the Petition of Right of 1628 had been a paper guarantee the Crown could evade — as the first lesson of this course showed, Charles I conceded it and then ignored it — the Bill of Rights was backed by the power of the purse, and that is why it held. The distance between a right conceded under pressure and then evaded, and a right made a permanent condition of solvency, is the exact measure of the constitutional change the century produced.
It is as important to know the settlement's limits as its provisions, and a balanced answer insists on them. 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 the choice of ministers, over foreign policy, and over the conduct of war. The landed elite continued to dominate both Parliament and the counties. The settlement redistributed power between Crown and Parliament; it did not democratise the state or widen the political nation.
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 the device of "occasional conformity"). The Church of England remained the established Church with its privileges intact.
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 early 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 imprisoned in their thousands — measures the change. Recognising that the Act was at once limited in principle and transformative in practice is precisely the balanced judgement the top band rewards, and it is the theme the next lesson pursues in depth across the whole period.
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 — and that the celebrated English moderation was a choice, not a necessity.
| 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 the Massacre of 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 debate: 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 readily 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.
If the Bill of Rights supplied the words of the settlement, the financial arrangements of the 1690s supplied its teeth. The single most consequential decision of the Convention was, in appearance, a mundane matter of book-keeping: it declined to vote William and Mary an ordinary revenue adequate to the ordinary costs of government. This was a deliberate departure from precedent. At the Restoration in 1660, Parliament had (in principle) voted Charles II a life revenue meant to let him "live of his own"; the Convention of 1689, its members schooled by the whole seventeenth-century experience, did no such thing. It voted William a revenue that fell short of his peacetime needs, and it granted the funds for the army and navy — the largest items of all — only annually.
| Instrument | Detail and significance |
|---|---|
| An inadequate ordinary revenue | The Commons settled on the king a revenue calculated to be insufficient for the ordinary expenses of government in peacetime, so that he must return to Parliament for supply within a year or two — the exact opposite of a settlement designed to let a monarch rule alone. |
| The Civil List (from 1698) | By the Civil List Act of 1698 the costs of the civil government and the royal household were formally separated from the costs of war and given a defined annual sum, so that Parliament could scrutinise and control the two independently. The Crown's finances were, for the first time, made publicly accountable to the Commons in a structured way. |
| Annual army funding and the Mutiny Act | The Mutiny Act (from 1689), renewed yearly, made military discipline — and thus the army's legal existence — depend on annual parliamentary renewal, so that the standing army the Bill of Rights had forbidden in peacetime could not be maintained without the Commons' continuing consent. |
| The "financial revolution" | The vast cost of King William's War against France (1689–97) drove a transformation of public finance: long-term borrowing secured on parliamentary taxation, the founding of the Bank of England (1694), and the creation of a funded National Debt. Because the debt was owed by the nation through Parliament rather than by the king personally, the political nation acquired a direct financial stake in the survival of the new regime. |
The importance of this cannot be overstated, and it is the point on which the whole "was it a revolution?" debate ultimately turns. A right written on parchment is only as strong as the power to enforce it — the very lesson the first lesson of this course drew from the fate of the Petition of Right of 1628, which Charles I conceded under pressure and then simply ignored. What made the settlement of 1689 endure where that of 1628 had failed was not superior draftsmanship but the structural fact that the Crown was now permanently dependent on Parliament for money. A king who must summon Parliament every year to fund his army and service his debts cannot rule without it; and a king who cannot rule without Parliament is, whatever the theory, a constitutional monarch in practice. The financial settlement did what no declaration of rights alone could do: it converted the paper supremacy of Parliament into a permanent working reality. Regular, annual sessions of Parliament — never again to be interrupted as they had been in the 1630s or after 1681 — date from precisely this moment, and they were the child not of principle but of the budget.
Two statutes of the 1690s turned the general promises of the Bill of Rights into enforceable machinery.
The Triennial Act (1694) gave concrete form to the Bill of Rights' vague requirement of "frequent" Parliaments. It provided that a Parliament must be summoned at least once every three years and that no single Parliament might sit for longer than three years before a fresh general election. The significance is twofold. First, it guaranteed the regularity of Parliament, foreclosing any repeat of the personal rules of Charles I (1629–40) or the last years of Charles II (1681–85), when the institution had simply been allowed to lapse. Second — and less often noticed — the three-yearly general elections it mandated made elections a permanent and frequent feature of political life, which in turn entrenched the Whig–Tory party division and the vigorous public, partisan politics of print and electioneering that historians call the "rage of party". The Act was, in this sense, a charter for a political nation as much as for a Parliament. (It was later relaxed by the Septennial Act of 1716, which extended the maximum term to seven years — but that lies beyond this course, and the principle of statutory, regular elections was by then unshakeable.)
The Toleration Act (1689), examined above and pursued at length in the next lesson, belongs equally to the consolidation of the settlement. By granting freedom of worship to Trinitarian Protestant Dissenters who took the oaths, it rewarded the Nonconformists who had rallied against James and made the open, legal coexistence of competing Protestant congregations a permanent feature of English life. It fell far short of religious equality — Catholics and anti-Trinitarians were excluded, and the Test and Corporation Acts still barred Dissenters from office — but it ended the era of active persecution under the Clarendon Code, and in doing so it settled, at least for Protestants, the religious question that had helped ignite the Civil War two generations earlier. The settlement of 1689 was thus a religious as well as a constitutional accommodation, and the two were bound together: the Dissenters' loyalty was part of the coalition that had made the Revolution, and toleration was part of the price.
The settlement's final and in some ways most revealing statute came at the very end of the period. When Princess Anne's last surviving child, the Duke of Gloucester, died in 1700, the Protestant succession established in 1689 faced extinction: after Anne there was no Protestant heir of the direct Stuart line. Parliament's response was the Act of Settlement (1701), and its terms show how far the constitution had travelled since 1625.
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