In June 1688 the queen of England gave birth to a son, and the news was, for a large part of the political nation, a catastrophe.
The king, James the Second, was Catholic, and had been tolerated on the calculation that his heirs would be his two adult Protestant daughters. A male heir baptised Catholic meant a Catholic dynasty stretching indefinitely into the future, and within days pamphlets were circulating claiming the baby had been smuggled into the birth chamber in a warming pan, which was almost certainly false and was believed by a great many people who wanted it to be true.
James had spent three years since his accession in 1685 doing things that alarmed his Protestant subjects specifically and systematically: appointing Catholics to army commands and university posts in defiance of laws requiring a religious test, suspending those laws by his own authority, and prosecuting bishops who petitioned against it. None of this was, by itself, revolutionary. What made it intolerable was the birth.
Seven prominent men, a mix of Whig and Tory, signed a secret letter inviting James's Protestant son in law, William of Orange, stadtholder of the Dutch Republic and married to James's elder daughter Mary, to come and secure the laws and liberties of the kingdom. William, who had his own reasons entirely unconnected to England, agreed.
This is not a story about English liberty rescuing itself, whatever the later mythology says. William's overriding concern for the previous decade had been French power, and specifically Louis the Fourteenth's ambitions on the Dutch Republic's borders.
England under James had been drifting into alignment with France, which was the nightmare scenario for Dutch security: a hostile naval power across the Channel allied with the land power threatening the Republic's eastern frontier. William needed England either neutral or, better, at war with France alongside the Dutch.
So when the invitation arrived, he assembled the largest invasion fleet in Europe up to that point, larger than the Spanish Armada a century before, with the explicit backing of the Dutch regents, who saw the same strategic logic. He timed it carefully around the season's winds and around what the French court was doing, and he sailed with a printed declaration explaining that he came only to secure a free parliament, not to conquer.
He landed in Devon in November 1688 with an army of Dutch, German, Scandinavian and English exile troops, and marched toward London. There was no battle. James's army began deserting, his own daughter Anne abandoned him, and after a failed attempt to flee he was allowed to escape to France, which suited everybody: a dead or imprisoned king would have been a martyr and a legal problem, while an absent one who could plausibly be said to have abdicated solved the succession neatly.
James had not actually abdicated; he had fled. Parliament, which had no legal standing to meet without a king to summon it, declared the throne vacant on the fiction that James's flight constituted abdication, and then offered the crown jointly to William and Mary.
Attached to the offer was a Declaration of Rights, later enacted as the Bill of Rights of 1689, and its content is worth reading precisely, because it is more limited and more specific than its reputation suggests.
It declares that the suspending power, a king's claimed authority to suspend laws without parliament's consent, is illegal. That the dispensing power, allowing individuals exemption from particular laws, is illegal as James had used it. That a standing army in peacetime without parliament's consent is illegal. That parliamentary elections ought to be free, that parliament ought to meet frequently, and that proceedings in parliament ought not to be questioned in any court. That subjects may petition the king. That Protestants may bear arms for their defence. And that excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishments ought not to be imposed.
What it does not do is establish universal suffrage, or freedom of the press, which was still subject to licensing for another six years, or religious toleration for Catholics, who remained barred from the throne by a clause in the same document and stayed legally disadvantaged in England for another century and a half. It is a settlement of a specific dispute between crown and parliament over specific royal powers, not a charter of general liberty.
The theoretical shift was significant: a monarch now held the crown by parliamentary grant rather than by pure hereditary right, since William and Mary's title rested entirely on the settlement rather than on the strict line of succession, which would have gone to James's infant son.
The practical shift that mattered more day to day was fiscal and administrative, and it happened gradually over the following decade rather than in 1688 itself. William needed money for his war against France, which began within months of his accession and ran, with one interruption, for the rest of his reign and into the next.
Parliament, controlling the purse, used its leverage to make funding conditional and increasingly detailed, moving from occasional grants to annual ones that required the crown to summon parliament every year to keep the army paid. In 1694 a group of merchants and the government created the Bank of England, which lent the state money secured against parliamentary taxation, effectively pooling public credit for the first time on a national scale and turning government debt into a tradeable, relatively secure asset. National debt, properly funded and serviced through parliamentary taxation rather than a king's uncertain promise, is arguably the single most consequential institutional product of the whole affair, and it is what let Britain outspend and outlast France in the wars of the following century.
The Toleration Act of 1689 permitted Protestant dissenters to worship, though not to hold office, which they achieved only through workarounds for another century. Catholics got nothing. The settlement was, in the phrase some historians use, a Protestant constitution rather than a liberal one, and its beneficiaries were a specific coalition of Anglicans and Protestant dissenters against a specific threat.
The events of 1688 produced, within two years, the most influential piece of political theory in the English language, and it is worth pausing on what it actually argued rather than what it is now assumed to have argued.
John Locke had written most of his Two Treatises of Government years earlier, during the exclusion crisis when radical Whigs had tried and failed to bar James from the succession altogether, and he held the manuscript back through years in which its authorship could have cost him his life. Published in 1689, it was framed as if written to justify the revolution after the fact, though its real composition predates it.
Locke's argument was that political authority derives from a hypothetical original contract among free and equal individuals, who retain natural rights to life, liberty and property that no government may legitimately violate, and that a government which persistently violates them may be resisted and replaced. This is a theory of popular sovereignty and conditional obedience, and it directly underwrites the idea that James forfeited his throne by breaking the trust between ruler and ruled.
It is also, notoriously, a theory built by a man who had served as an official of the Royal African Company, which trafficked enslaved people, and who defended property in terms broad enough to justify colonial land seizure from peoples who had not enclosed and cultivated it in the English manner. The theory of natural rights and the practice of empire and slavery were produced by the same mind without, as far as the record shows, any sense of contradiction on his part.
That gap between the universal language of the argument and the particular interests it served is not incidental. It runs through nearly every liberty document examined in this book, from Magna Carta's free men to the American and French declarations still to come, and Locke is where the pattern becomes explicit and theorized rather than merely practiced.
England's revolution was bloodless. The same events, exported, were not.
James landed in Ireland in 1689 with French support and Catholic Irish backing, and the war that followed to unseat him lasted two years and was fought with the brutality typical of the period. William's victory at the Boyne in 1690 is still commemorated annually by Ulster Protestants and the anniversary remains a flashpoint. The subsequent Penal Laws excluded Catholics, who were the overwhelming majority of the Irish population, from land ownership, the professions, education and the vote, on a scale and for a duration that has no equivalent in England itself. The 1688 settlement's language of liberty was, for most people in Ireland, the language of their own permanent subordination.
In Scotland the transition was managed politically rather than militarily in the lowlands, but a Highland rising in support of James was suppressed, and the massacre of a branch of the Clan MacDonald at Glencoe in 1692, ostensibly for a late oath of allegiance but actually a piece of government intimidation gone further than intended, remained a scandal for the new regime for years afterward.
The financial reckoning of Ireland deserves one more sentence. Land confiscated from Catholic owners after the Williamite war, added to confiscations from earlier in the century, meant that by 1700 Catholics, who were roughly three quarters of the Irish population, owned well under a fifth of the land. That transfer, not any clause in the English Bill of Rights, is the lasting Irish legacy of 1688.
It is worth being plain about this asymmetry: three kingdoms shared one crown, and the revolution that is celebrated as bloodless and glorious in one of them was a conquest with lasting consequences in the other two.
Firm: the parliamentary and legal record. The Declaration and Bill of Rights survive as texts and can be checked against the mythology built on them.
Firm: the fiscal history. The creation of the Bank of England, the growth of the national debt, and the annual parliamentary sessions are documented in detail and are not disputed.
Soft: the warming pan story, which was propaganda from the start and was never substantiated, though it did real political work regardless of its truth.
Contested: the name itself. Glorious Revolution was the winners' label, coined shortly afterward, and it does a great deal of framing work: it suggests bloodlessness, English agency, and a triumph of principle, all three of which understate the Dutch invasion force, understate the violence in Ireland and Scotland, and understate how narrowly this was a settlement of an elite quarrel about religion and royal power rather than a democratic moment.
A caution about the later use of this event. Whig historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries built an entire tradition around 1688 as the birth of English liberty and constitutional government, and used it to explain why England had avoided the revolutionary convulsions of chapter thirty six. That tradition is not wrong that something important changed. It is wrong to the extent it treats a narrow, contingent, and partly foreign-imposed settlement between a king and a propertied parliamentary elite as a triumph of liberty in any general sense.