The Glorious Revolution and the British Empire

The Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 was, in its consequences, the most important constitutional event in British history before the Reform Act of 1832. It reshaped the relationship between Parliament and crown, settled the religious question for a century, and — through a series of acts passed in 1689 and 1701 — created the framework within which the British Empire would be governed for the next 200 years. It also produced, in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), the theoretical scaffolding of a constitutional language that would be used by the American revolutionaries of 1776 and the British reformers of the nineteenth century. The British Empire, in any serious sense, was a post-1688 construction.

The Causes of the Revolution

The revolution had multiple, interlocking causes. The most immediate was the crisis over the succession: the birth of a son to James II and his Catholic second wife, Mary of Modena, in June 1688, seemed to threaten the establishment of a permanent Catholic dynasty in England. James’s attempts to suspend the Test Acts, his use of the dispensing power to employ Catholics in public office, and his prosecution of the Seven Bishops in 1688 had alienated much of the Anglican establishment.

Behind this immediate crisis lay a longer-running tension between crown and Parliament. James had pursued an increasingly independent foreign policy, allied himself with Catholic France under Louis XIV, and treated Parliament with contempt. The Whig and Tory elites, despite their differences, both feared Catholic rule and were prepared to act. The invitation to William of Orange, the Protestant husband of James’s daughter Mary, was signed by seven leading English politicians — Shrewsbury, Devonshire, Danby, Lumley, Bishop Compton, Russell, and Sidney — and reached The Hague in June 1688.

The Overthrow of James II

William of Orange landed at Brixham in Devon on 5 November 1688 with a force of around 15,000 men and a fleet of 500 ships — an expedition almost as large as the one Philip II had sent against England a century earlier. James’s army was inferior in numbers and unreliable in composition: many Catholic officers were suspected Jacobites, and many Protestant officers had already defected to William. The prince’s progress through western England to the Thames was almost unopposed, and on 11 December James fled to France, throwing the Great Seal of the realm into the Thames as he went. He was allowed to escape — partly through the deliberate negligence of his Dutch guards, partly because no one wanted the fate of Charles I repeated.

In January 1689 a Convention Parliament declared that James had “abdicated” the government and that the throne was “vacant.” It offered the crown jointly to William and Mary, who accepted it, and on 13 February 1689 the new monarchs were crowned. James II and his family would spend the rest of their lives in exile, plotting a restoration that ultimately came to nothing.

The Bill of Rights and the Constitutional Settlement

The Bill of Rights, passed by Parliament in December 1689, was the defining constitutional document of the revolution. It declared the suspension of laws by the king without Parliament’s consent to be illegal; the maintenance of a standing army in peacetime without Parliament’s consent to be illegal; that elections should be free; that Parliament should meet frequently. It also articulated a long list of specific grievances against James — the prosecution of the Seven Bishops, the use of the ecclesiastical commission, the levying of taxes without parliamentary consent.

The Toleration Act of 1689, passed in the same legislative session, granted limited religious freedom to Protestant Dissenters, although it maintained the legal disabilities of Catholics. The Mutiny Act of 1689 established the principle that the maintenance of a standing army required annual parliamentary authorisation — a principle that still governs the British military today. The Act of Settlement of 1701 determined the succession after the death of William and Mary, excluding Catholics from the throne and placing the crown in the Hanoverian line. The cumulative effect of these statutes was a fundamental rebalancing of the English constitution in favour of Parliament and property, and against the prerogative powers of the crown.

Locke and the Ideology of Resistance

The most important theorist of the revolution was John Locke, whose Two Treatises of Government (1689) provided a philosophical justification for the overthrow of James. Locke’s argument — that governments were instituted by the consent of the people to secure their natural rights, that a ruler who violated the trust placed in him could be legitimately resisted, and that the people retained a residual right of revolution — would be developed by eighteenth-century writers into the common sense of British and American constitutionalism.

Locke was also an investor in the Carolina colony, a member of the Council of Trade, and a major shareholder in the Bank of England. He was not, in the conventional sense, an opponent of empire. But the constitutionalism he articulated was, in its implications, a charter for the limitation of arbitrary imperial authority. The American revolutionaries of 1776 would invoke Locke’s language explicitly; the British imperial reformers of the nineteenth century would use it implicitly.

The American Dimension

The revolution had immediate and significant effects on the American colonies. The most dramatic was the collapse of the Dominion of New England, the administrative consolidation imposed by James II in 1686. The unpopular government of Sir Edmund Andros was overthrown in April 1689 when news of the revolution reached Boston, and similar revolts occurred in New York, where the Catholic lieutenant-governor Francis Nicholson was overthrown and replaced by Jacob Leisler, a Protestant merchant who ruled the colony in a chaotic fashion until 1691.

The longer-term effect was to entrench the principle of chartered colonial government. William III and Mary II granted new charters to Massachusetts (1691) and other colonies, and the practice of royal government — in which the king appointed the governor — became the norm in the non-charter colonies. The constitutional principles of 1688 — parliamentary sovereignty, the rights of subjects, the rule of law — would, over the following century, become part of the political vocabulary of the colonial elites. They would be invoked again, with revolutionary effect, in 1776.

The Religious Settlement

The revolution established the legal framework for religious toleration in England and shaped the religious settlement of the American colonies. The Toleration Act of 1689 granted freedom of worship to Protestant Dissenters, although it preserved the established position of the Church of England and the legal disabilities of Catholics. In the colonies, the revolution led to the establishment of the Church of England in several previously Dissenter-dominated colonies, including Virginia and Maryland, and to the creation of new Anglican dioceses. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (founded 1701) was the principal instrument of Anglican missionary activity in the colonies.

The revolution also marked a low point in the treatment of Catholics in the empire. The Test Act provisions, which excluded Catholics from public office, were maintained, and the penal laws against Catholic worship were enforced with new vigour. Catholic communities in England, Ireland, and the American colonies found themselves on the defensive, and the political disabilities of Catholics would not be fully removed until Catholic Emancipation in 1829. For the Irish Catholics, in particular, the revolution brought not liberty but defeat, and the subsequent Williamite war in Ireland (1689–1691) was, in Patrick Sarsfield’s bitter phrase, the moment when “the curse of Cromwell” was replaced by “the curse of William.”

Historiographical Note

The Glorious Revolution has been read in strikingly different ways. The Whig interpretation, going back to Macaulay’s History of England (1848), treated 1688 as a clean and decisive moment in which English liberty was rescued from Stuart tyranny. The revisionist reading, of which J. R. Western’s Monarchy and Revolution (1972) is the most distinguished example, treated the revolution as a contingent, even anachronistic event whose “settlement” was the product of exhaustion as much as principle. A more recent historiography, represented by Tim Harris’s Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy (2006) and Steve Pincus’s 1688: The First Modern Revolution (2009), has insisted that 1688 was a more radical event than the revisionists allowed, with substantial popular participation and a coherent programme of political and religious reform. Pincus in particular has argued, controversially, that 1688 was not a conservative restoration but the first modern revolution — the moment when English politics was reorganised on the basis of public opinion, religious toleration, and the financial revolution that produced the Bank of England. The debate is not closed, but the older, comfortable Whig version is no longer tenable.

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