The Glorious Revolution, Part 2
You've had your revolution; now how do you make it glorious?
Last week, I retold the story of the first part of the Glorious Revolution - how King James II of England lost so much of his subjects' confidence that they invited in William III of the Netherlands to invade, how almost all of James's army deserted to William, and how James himself had to flee the country.
But perhaps the most interesting part of the Glorious Revolution lies ahead: how it became not just a bloodless military conquest of England, but a moment that defined what the government would be afterwards. This is what made it truly glorious.
In practice, William was now the de facto ruler of England. He was welcomed into London by cheering crowds, there had been spontaneous uprisings across England in his favor, and also he had the only army left in the kingdom. And, he now wanted to be King of England.
But in legal theory, things were much more unsettled - and that mattered to the leaders of England. James was the only legal king. Everyone remembered how Parliament had executed King Charles I, and how after that the Commonwealth had been unsettled by every underpinning of government suddenly being thrown into question. Nobody wanted to do anything too reminiscent of that.
The Lords and leaders of the previous Commons sent out a circular letter to elect a "Convention Parliament" without royal sanction1.
The Convention Parliament considered a regency leaving James technically the king, but nobody wanted that, so it was clear he would have to be deposed. This was a huge step; there was no precedent for deposing a monarch since the Middle Ages. But, it was inevitable - it was only formalizing what had already happened on the ground.
After some debate, Parliament agreed to leave unsettled how he was deposed:
Whereas the late King James the Second... did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom ... And whereas the said late King James the Second having abdicated the government and the throne being thereby vacant...
Parliament probably would've offered the crown to Mary, who was the legal heir if you pretended James had died and disregarded his son. But, she refused to reign without her husband co-reigning; and he refused to participate in the government without reigning in his own name. So, Parliament did another all-but-unprecedented thing: they named William and Mary as joint monarchs.
But, before this Act passed, one Member of Parliament spoke up: before declaring William king, they should write a Bill of Rights to "secure ourselves from arbitrary government" like James's in the future. It was immediately popular, and the House of Commons started writing the Bill of Rights. They were all framed as "the true, ancient and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom", and some of them had in fact been longstanding rights. Others had been arguable up to this point - but now, Parliament would firmly establish them.
William didn't like the delay, much less the implicit condition on the crown, but when Parliament insisted, he accepted it. What's more, he would swear the oath that Parliament demanded, "to Govern the People of this Kingdom of England and the Dominions thereto belonging according to the Statutes in Parliament Agreed on." And so, William and Mary took their crowns under the Bill of Rights.
Of the two joint monarchs, William was clearly the one actually reigning; Mary was content to live in his shadow.
But just as clearly, Parliament was the one actually doing most of the governing. After Parliament quickly declared war on France, William was happy to spend his attention on that war, and on a related war with pro-James forces in Ireland. This was the largest continental war England had been involved in for generations, and started a new level of foreign military involvement which would continue through World War Two.
To do this, William needed money. By ancient tradition, only Parliament could authorize taxes - and unlike with previous kings, they only authorized them for a year, or a couple years, at a time. This gave teeth to the provision in the Bill of Rights that "for the amending, strengthening and preserving of the laws, Parliaments ought to be held frequently." Despite grumblings, William did keep re-summoning it. Before the Glorious Revolution, Parliament had met twice in the last eight years. Ever since then, Parliament has met at least once every year. And, following another precedent set under William, they've kept reviewing government finances.
William - a Calvinist himself, not Anglican - also pressed Parliament to open up religious liberty. And, now secure in the Protestant succession, they did to some extent. They abandoned the idea that every Englishman should be Anglican. It was now perfectly legal for Protestant "Nonconformists" to worship as they wanted. While Roman Catholicism remained officially illegal, the law was rarely enforced. And, although the Test Act still said all government officials needed to be Anglicans - if Nonconformists were willing to take Communion in the Anglican church once a year, they could even be counted as Anglicans under the Test Act and hold office. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a huge step forward for religious liberty.
I can totally understand why the English upper classes for being so hostile to a Roman Catholic king. In part, yes, it was because Protestantism had become part of the English national identity. Pluralism was almost unknown in that era. The fragile peace after the Reformation had established that each country would have its own state church. In England, one of the Acts of Parliament establishing the Reformation expressed that they were throwing off Papal authority because "this realm of England is an empire" - in other words, because of England's stature and dignity as a realm, it and its king should govern its own Church. When written, this was mere flattery, but in the generations since, English people began to believe in it.
But beyond that, English people quite correctly saw that most Roman Catholic monarchs were more absolute rulers and would chafe at the powers of the English Parliament. If a monarch (like King James) was so impressed by France as to adopt their religion, it stood to reason he might also try to adopt French absolute rule. Roman Catholic theology, the English people thought at the time, was more in line with absolute monarchy.
What they didn't see was that many Protestant monarchs would also chafe at the English Parliament.
This post-Civil-War settlement was a new thing. Charles I had gone to his execution-block confident that he'd acted as a king should. And he had precedent on his side - every one of his predecessors back to the Reformation had exercised powers that would cause this Parliament to quail. Abroad in the staunchly Protestant Netherlands, William III had constantly quarreled with his legislature, and upon gaining the English throne would continue quarreling with the English Parliament - even if he usually let them win in the end.
For all that Parliament was trying to find ancient precedents for the limits they were putting on the king's powers, their constitutional monarchy was an unstable new thing. To establish Parliament's power, they had killed King Charles I, but finding a king who would live with it was another matter.
It wasn't the Protestant Succession that would finally give them a stable limited monarchy. It was finding a king who didn't care about being King of England.
After William and Mary and their successor Queen Anne (Mary's sister) all failed to have a surviving child, Parliament gave the throne to their distant cousin George Elector of Hannover. King George I didn't like England and was happy to leave the work of government to Parliament and his ministers as much as he could. They happily took it. Robert Walpole, First Lord of the Treasury under George I, is regarded by historians as the first Prime Minister of Great Britain2.
Unlike under Cromwell's "Commonwealth," England had kept a king. The traditions remained in place. But like King Charles's Parliament had fought for, they'd found a king who didn't even want to interfere with the powers of Parliament. And, in the new Prime Minister, they'd found a single man who could act more decisively than the whole Parliament - but who was responsible to that Parliament.
Thus, the Parliament and Ministers of Britain ensconced themselves as the real power in the kingdom. By the time George's great-grandson George III tried to take back some power, he was no longer able to. He wasn't yet the powerless symbol that the British Crown is nowadays - that would come later, most prominently under Queen Victoria - but George III was much closer to the current King Charles III than to Charles I. If there was one event that set England on this course, it was the Glorious Revolution.
The Bill of Rights frames this as "King James the Second having abdicated the government and the throne being thereby vacant."
The Glorious Revolution is, in fact, the one time where the British government still accepts the throne was vacant. There's a maxim of English law that "England always has a king." Legally speaking, the moment the king dies, his successor immediately becomes king. The official regnal years of the new king start from that day. Even when Parliament executed Charles I and his son was in exile in France, his friends immediately started addressing him as king - and current law holds that the entire period of the Commonwealth and Cromwell was officially during his reign as Charles II.
But the one exception is the Glorious Revolution. The regnal years of James II stop on 11 December 1688 when he fled London, and the regnal years of William and Mary do not start until 13 February 1689 when the Convention Parliament offered them the Crown. During that time, the throne was officially vacant.
This set the precedent that the King could forfeit his crown. Charles I's trial and execution had been ruled illegal when his son was restored to the throne, but now the principle of a king forfeiting the crown was written in permanent form. Further, it set the precedent that Parliament could define the succession to the crown as it wanted3. Accordingly, even today, the succession is defined by Act of Parliament. When people wanted to make succession gender-neutral, that took an Act of Parliament; when Edward VIII wanted to abdicate, even that took an Act of Parliament.
And beyond that, the Glorious Revolution also set a strong precedent for protecting individual rights. Previously, before the English Civil War, Parliament had coerced Charles I into signing a number of laws protecting individual rights; and then after the war had started, they passed even more sweeping Ordinances without his approval. The Ordinances from during the war were ruled void when the monarchy was brought back, but all the earlier Acts signed by King Charles survived.
Now, though, they systematized it: over William's objections, Parliament waited to proclaim him king until they had written and he had agreed to a Bill of Rights. This wasn't a written constitution in the modern sense - it could be repealed by a future Act of Parliament4. But, it gave William and Mary the crown on the implicit condition that they approved this Bill of Rights. The crown was now founded, in some real sense, on the Bill of Rights.
Just under ninety years later, the English colonies in America would take this precedent farther. The colonists had already used the Glorious Revolution to claim much power for their own colonial legislatures, similarly to how Parliament had claimed power over England. Britain had at first gladly let them have it. Eighty-some years later, when George III and the British government tried to claim more power over the colonies, Americans cited the precedent of the Glorious Revolution while fighting back. After writing a Declaration laying out how the King had violated their rights, they - just like their ancestors - declared him deposed and organized a Convention to institute a new government for themselves.
The Glorious Revolution is glorious not just because it was almost bloodless, but because of what it meant. It showed that, from then on, not the king but the people's representatives in Parliament would rule England. It set out the people's rights in one strong Bill of Rights which was clear and indisputable, and brought the first sustained steps in England toward religious liberty.
There had been steps in this direction before, such as the Commonwealth after Charles I's execution. But, they were temporary. The Commonwealth was ruled null and void when the king was restored. The Glorious Revolution meant that England would continue in this direction.
What's more, it didn't just mean this in England. It inspired the American Revolution, and then the English and American successes inspired further reforms and revolutions around the world. That is why, with full sincerity, I call it a Glorious Revolution.
This was a major step in itself; Parliaments were always summoned by a king. But, there was some precedent - another Convention Parliament had been summoned after Cromwell’s death, to vote to bring back Charles II as King.
Under Queen Anne, the Act of Union formally united England and Scotland into the new Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1688, Scotland was legally a separate realm with the same king but its own Parliament. Also staunchly Protestant, and following England's example, they wrote their own Claim of Right and crowned William and Mary on that basis.
Technically, that precedent had already been set under Henry VIII when Parliament explicitly empowered him to choose which of his children would succeed in what order. The Glorious Revolution firmed it up.
In fact, I don't believe the English Bill of Rights has been partly repealed, but some details of the identical and simultaneous Scottish Bill of Rights have - e.g. the declaration "that the allowing popish books to be printed and dispersed is contrary to law."
I was under the impression that the English constitution could still be amended by a simple act of Parliament, without requiring the elaborate process it takes to amend the American constitution. If accurate, that doesn't strike me as adequate protection for individual rights.