The Glorious Revolution was the overthrow of King James II of England in 1688 and his replacement by his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange, who ruled as joint monarchs. The revolution permanently ended the possibility of absolute monarchy in England and established Parliament as the supreme governing authority in the country. It also produced the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which formally limited the power of the Crown for the first time in law. Historians consider the Glorious Revolution to be one of the most significant turning points in the political history of Europe, and its influence extended far beyond England itself.
Glorious Revolution – Background and Causes
To understand the Glorious Revolution, it is important to understand the long struggle between the English Crown and Parliament that preceded it. Throughout the 17th century, English kings had repeatedly clashed with Parliament over questions of taxation, religion, and royal authority. King Charles I, who ruled from 1625 to 1649, took this conflict to its most extreme point. His attempts to rule without Parliament and to impose his religious preferences on England and Scotland led to a civil war between royalist and parliamentary forces. Parliament won the war, and in 1649 Charles I was put on trial and executed, an event that shocked the entire European world.
England was governed as a republic for a period before the monarchy was restored in 1660 under Charles II, the son of Charles I. Charles II was a Protestant in public, though he privately sympathized with Catholicism, and he managed to maintain a working relationship with Parliament for most of his reign. When he died in 1685, he was succeeded by his brother, James II.
James II was openly Catholic, and his accession immediately raised serious concerns among England’s predominantly Protestant population and its Protestant political establishment. In the early years of his reign, James II took a series of steps that alarmed Parliament and the Church of England. He appointed Catholics to senior positions in the army and government, issued a Declaration of Indulgence that suspended the laws which excluded Catholics and nonconformist Protestants from public life, and made clear his intention to promote Catholicism within England. Many leading figures in Parliament and the Church feared that James intended to bring England back under Catholic rule and to establish the kind of absolute monarchy that Louis XIV exercised in France.
For a time, many of those who opposed James II were willing to wait out his reign, calculating that his Protestant daughters Mary and Anne would eventually succeed him and restore a Protestant monarchy. That calculation changed dramatically in June 1688, when James II’s Catholic wife gave birth to a son. The birth of a male heir meant that the prospect of a Catholic succession stretching indefinitely into the future now appeared real. Action could no longer be postponed.
Glorious Revolution – The Invitation and William’s Invasion
A group of seven prominent English nobles and bishops, later known as the Immortal Seven, sent a secret letter to William of Orange in the Dutch Republic inviting him to bring an army to England. William was the husband of James II’s eldest Protestant daughter, Mary, and was already a major European figure in his own right as the leader of the Dutch Republic and one of the most determined opponents of French expansion in Europe. He had his own strong reasons for wanting England to be governed by a Protestant monarch aligned against France rather than a Catholic one sympathetic to Louis XIV.
William accepted the invitation and assembled a substantial invasion force. He landed on the southwestern coast of England at Torbay on November 5th, 1688, with an army of around 15,000 men. As he marched toward London, James II’s support collapsed with remarkable speed. Senior military commanders defected to William, including John Churchill, one of James’s most trusted generals. Even James’s daughter Anne abandoned her father and joined the opposition. James II, finding himself almost completely isolated, fled to France in December 1688, throwing the Great Seal of England into the Thames River as he left. William of Orange entered London without significant resistance.
Glorious Revolution – Settlement and the Bill of Rights
With James II having fled, Parliament declared that his departure amounted to an abdication of the throne. William and Mary were offered the Crown jointly, subject to their acceptance of a Declaration of Rights that had been drawn up by Parliament. William and Mary accepted these terms and were crowned as joint monarchs in April 1689. Later that year, the Declaration of Rights was formally enacted into law as the Bill of Rights of 1689, one of the most important constitutional documents in English history.
The Bill of Rights placed clear and formal limits on royal power for the first time. Under its terms, the monarch could no longer suspend laws passed by Parliament, levy taxes without Parliament’s consent, maintain a standing army in peacetime without parliamentary approval, or interfere in the election of members of Parliament. It also guaranteed the right to free speech within Parliament, the right to petition the monarch, and protection against excessive bail and cruel punishment. Furthermore, it barred Catholics or anyone married to a Catholic from ever inheriting the English throne, ensuring that the Protestant character of the monarchy was legally protected going forward.
The Bill of Rights did not create a fully democratic system of government. The vast majority of English people still had no right to vote, and Parliament itself was dominated by wealthy landowners and aristocrats. However, it established the principle that royal power was subject to the law and that Parliament’s authority was supreme. This was a fundamental and lasting change in the nature of English government.
Glorious Revolution – Why It Was Called Glorious
The revolution earned the name Glorious primarily because it was achieved with remarkably little violence within England itself. James II fled rather than fight, the transition of power was swift, and the constitutional settlement that followed was reached through negotiation rather than war. In this respect, the Glorious Revolution stood in stark contrast to the English Civil War of the 1640s, which had been enormously destructive and had ended with the execution of a king.
It should be noted, however, that the term Glorious is somewhat misleading when the broader picture is taken into account. The revolution was far from bloodless in Ireland and Scotland, where significant fighting took place between supporters of James II, known as Jacobites, and forces loyal to William and Mary. In Ireland in particular, the conflict was prolonged and violent, culminating in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, where William III defeated a Jacobite army supported by French troops. The Irish campaign left a lasting legacy of sectarian division that continued to shape Irish history for centuries afterward.
Glorious Revolution – Significance
The significance of the Glorious Revolution for the history of England, Europe, and the wider world is considerable. Within England, it permanently settled the question of whether the country would be governed by absolute monarchy or constitutional government. After 1689, no English or British monarch would ever again attempt to rule without Parliament, and the principle of parliamentary sovereignty became the foundation of the British political system that has endured to the present day.
The revolution also had a profound impact on political thought across Europe and beyond. The Glorious Revolution provided Enlightenment thinkers, most notably the English philosopher John Locke, with a powerful real-world example of their ideas in action. Locke published his Two Treatises of Government in 1689, arguing that governments existed to protect the natural rights of citizens and that people had the right to overthrow rulers who failed to do so. His ideas, grounded partly in the events of the Glorious Revolution, went on to influence the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, making the Glorious Revolution one of the most consequential political events of the modern era.
Furthermore, the Glorious Revolution stands as the clearest example in European history of a country successfully rejecting absolute monarchy and establishing constitutional government during the Age of Absolutism. While rulers such as Louis XIV, Peter the Great, and Frederick the Great were consolidating total power on the European continent, England moved decisively in the opposite direction. As such, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 marks one of the most important turning points in the political history of the western world.
