The Glorious Revolution of 1688

Introduction

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 stands as one of the most consequential political events in British and world history. In a matter of weeks, a reigning monarch was replaced without significant bloodshed, a constitutional settlement was enacted that permanently curtailed royal power, and England was drawn into a generation-long European conflict that would reshape the continent. The revolution established principles of parliamentary sovereignty, limited government, and individual rights that would echo across the Atlantic a century later in the American founding documents and across the English Channel in the debates that preceded the French Revolution. To understand 1688, one must trace the origins of the crisis back through decades of religious strife, dynastic anxiety, and constitutional conflict that defined seventeenth-century England.

Background After the Restoration

When Charles II returned to England in 1660 to reclaim his father's throne, the nation was exhausted by civil war, regicide, and the austere experiment of Puritan rule under Oliver Cromwell. The Restoration brought relief and celebration, but it did not resolve the fundamental tensions that had torn the country apart. The monarchy was restored, but on terms that left ambiguous the precise boundaries between royal prerogative and parliamentary authority. Charles II was clever enough to navigate these tensions for most of his reign, but he never fully resolved them, and his personal and political choices planted the seeds of the crisis that would explode under his successor.

Charles II's religious policy was a constant source of friction. England was officially Anglican, defined by the Church of England established under Henry VIII and reformed under Elizabeth I. Yet Charles himself harbored Catholic sympathies, influenced by his mother Henrietta Maria, his long years of exile in Catholic France and the Spanish Netherlands, and his own temperament. He signed the secret Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV of France in 1670, in which he promised, among other things, to declare himself Catholic at some unspecified future moment in exchange for French subsidies. This secret remained hidden from Parliament and the public for years, but the atmosphere of suspicion it helped create was corrosive.

The Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, by which Charles attempted to suspend the penal laws against both Catholics and Protestant Dissenters by royal proclamation alone, alarmed Parliament. This appeared to be an exercise of the suspending power without parliamentary authorization, a dangerous assertion of royal prerogative. Parliament forced Charles to withdraw the Declaration and instead passed the Test Act of 1673, which required all holders of civil and military office to take communion according to Church of England rites and to renounce the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. The immediate effect was dramatic: Charles's brother James, Duke of York and heir to the throne, was forced to resign as Lord High Admiral, publicly revealing what many had suspected, that he was a Roman Catholic.

The revelation that the heir to the throne was a Catholic sent shockwaves through English politics. Memories of Bloody Mary's persecution of Protestants, of the Spanish Armada, and of the Gunpowder Plot were vivid in the collective Protestant imagination. Fear of a Catholic succession animated English politics for the remainder of Charles II's reign.