The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the English Bill of Rights

The Invasion England Decided to Call a Revolution

On the afternoon of 5 November 1688, the people of a Devon fishing village looked out at Tor Bay and could not see the water for ships. Something like four hundred and sixty of them, carrying fifteen thousand professional soldiers, their horses, their siege guns, and a printing press. It was the largest fleet to reach English shores since 1066, it had sailed the length of the Channel unopposed, and it belonged to a foreign head of state. Fourteen months later that same kingdom produced a document an American can read today and recognize in his bones.

Both of those things happened. The ships and the statute. This episode puts the ships first.

James II did not lose his throne because he was Catholic. England had done the arithmetic and decided to wait him out. He lost it because he claimed a power to suspend acts of Parliament altogether, made a test case of it in Godden v. Hales by dismissing six of the twelve judges of England until he had a bench that would rule the way he needed, and then, in June 1688, produced a Catholic son. This episode walks through the dispensing power, the seven bishops in the Tower, the letter seven men wrote in cipher that would have hanged every one of them, and the legal fiction the Convention built in January 1689 to remove a king it had no lawful means of removing. James had fled a foreign army at night. Parliament resolved that he had abdicated, and both the men who believed in divine right and the men who believed in consent voted for the same words for opposite reasons.

What followed was real. The crown could no longer suspend a statute, dispense with one, tax without a grant, keep an army in peacetime without consent, prosecute a man for petitioning, or dismiss a judge for a verdict. None of it has been seriously reclaimed since. But the settlement that chained the crown also built the most formidable state in Europe. Within six months England was at war with France, and by 1694 a permanent funded national debt, a bank chartered to service it, and an excise administered by professional bureaucracy were extracting on a scale James II could only have dreamed about. Binding the king is precisely what made the state creditworthy. The chains on the crown were the collateral.

And the word bloodless describes one kingdom out of three. Scotland got Killiecrankie and Glencoe. Ireland got a three-year war, and at Aughrim on 12 July 1691 something near seven thousand men died in a single afternoon, followed by a penal code aimed at Catholic land, inheritance, education, arms, office, and the vote. The episode gives three objections their full strength before answering any of them, including the sharpest one: that the colonists who claimed the rights of 1689 were not that revolution’s heirs but its rebels, since the settlement had secured those rights by making Parliament supreme, and Parliament was the body they were resisting.

This is Episode 11 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, a twenty-two episode series tracing the intellectual origins of American liberty from ancient Greece to the Bill of Rights.

The question underneath all of it: did this leave people more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS00:00 - Introduction: The Invasion of Tor Bay in 168802:22 - Episode Welcome & Housekeeping Notes04:10 - James II: The Cold Arithmetic of a Catholic Monarchy06:39 - Royal Overreach: The Suspending and Dispensing Powers09:11 - The Declaration of Indulgence & The Threat of Absolutism12:23 - Crisis Arrives: A Catholic Heir & The Trial of the Seven Bishops15:18 - The Immortal Seven Invite William of Orange17:34 - William’s Continental Strategy & The Declaration of Reasons21:35 - Defection, Desertion, and the Flight of James II24:37 - The Convention at Westminster & The Fiction of Abdication31:05 - The Declaration of Right: Offering the Crown at Whitehall33:03 - The Cost of Conscience: The Non-Juring Clergy35:10 - The English Bill of Rights: Ancient Liberties Decla