Introduction

Summary

The years following the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ (1688–9) were some of the most significant in British political history. The ‘Revolution’ began on 5 November 1688 when William of Orange, backed by a 21,000-strong army, took the unprecedented step of invading England. Uprisings in the north soon followed, and by the end of 1688 James II had fled to France, where Louis XIV offered the king-in-exile his protection. In the months following James's departure from England, established royal practices were overturned, a Convention Parliament decided that James had effectively abdicated, William and his wife Mary were declared joint monarchs, and a minor Dutch prince became King of England. The extraordinary events of 1688–9 were followed by a volte-face in foreign policy that quickly led to British involvement in continental warfare for twenty-four of the next twenty-eight years. Military conflict quickly shifted the way the newly created joint monarchy functioned. Every summer, from 1690 until her death in 1694 – while William commanded the confederate armies firstly in Ireland, then in subsequent years on the continent – Mary ruled with a regency council; and during these months she played a vital role in governing the country. More importantly, in the longer term, the Revolution led to the founding of a Protestant parliamentary monarchy and, in 1707, political union between England and Scotland and the birth of Great Britain. But this form of monarchy only came about with recourse to a foreign dynasty, and parliamentary legislation that decreed James II and his Catholic heirs were ineligible to rule. The Bill of Rights (1689) determined the monarch must be Protestant, but the Act of Settlement (1701) went further and demanded that whoever inherited the Crown must ‘joyn in communion with the Church of England as by law established’, and this legislation still governs the religion of our monarchs today. The religious dogmatism within the institution of the British monarchy that continues to bind together the official Protestant church and the state has its roots in the Glorious Revolution and the settlement that came after it.