Limiting Power: The Glorious Revolution, the Dutch Republic and Constitutional Government

Two answers to the same problem

In the 1600s, rulers everywhere needed more money for armies. In France, the king found ways to raise taxes without asking an assembly. In England, the monarch needed Parliament to approve taxes, and that dependence led to a century of conflict. The English answer, along with the Dutch one, became a model for limited, constitutional government, an idea that reaches all the way to Canada's Parliament and Charter.

From civil war to Restoration

In the 1640s, King Charles I and Parliament fought a civil war over taxes, religion and royal power. Parliament won. In 1649 Charles was tried and executed, and England became a republic (the Commonwealth). Oliver Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658, backed by the army.

Many people tired of military rule. In 1660 the monarchy was restored under Charles II. But the old question remained: who had the final say, king or Parliament? In 1679 Parliament passed the Habeas Corpus Act, which made it harder to jail people without bringing them before a court. Debates in these years also produced England's first political parties, the Whigs (who wanted to limit the Crown) and the Tories (who stressed loyalty to it).

The Glorious Revolution, 1688–1689

James II became king in 1685. He was Catholic in a mainly Protestant country, kept a large standing army and suspended laws without Parliament. When his son was born in June 1688, many feared a line of Catholic kings. Seven leading politicians invited the Dutch leader William of Orange, who was married to James's Protestant daughter Mary, to intervene.

William landed with a large army in November 1688. James's support collapsed and he fled to France. Parliament offered the throne jointly to William III and Mary II, on conditions written into the Bill of Rights (1689):

• The monarch may not suspend laws or raise taxes without Parliament.
• No standing army in peacetime without Parliament's consent.
• Free elections and freedom of speech in Parliament.
• No excessive bail, and no "cruel and unusual punishments".
• Subjects may petition the king.
• No Catholic may become monarch.

The Toleration Act (1689) allowed most Protestant dissenters to worship freely, but not Catholics or Jews on equal terms. In England the change was nearly bloodless. In Ireland and Scotland there was war: William defeated James at the Battle of the Boyne (1690), and harsh penal laws then excluded Irish Catholics from land ownership, office and many professions. Calling the revolution "glorious" reflects an English Protestant perspective.

After 1689: Parliament on top

The Act of Settlement (1701) set the Protestant succession and made judges harder to remove. The Acts of Union (1707) joined England and Scotland into Great Britain. From 1721 to 1742 Robert Walpole led the government as the first prime minister (the title was informal then). Ministers met as a cabinet and needed a majority in Parliament. This is the root of responsible government, which British North America won in the 1840s.

John Locke: natural rights and consent

John Locke's Two Treatises of Government was published in 1689, as a defence of the revolution. Locke argued:

• People are born with natural rights to life, liberty and property (he often wrote "estate").
• Governments are created by the consent of the governed to protect those rights.
• If a government violates them, the people have the right to resist and replace it.

These ideas later shaped the American Declaration of Independence (1776). But perspective matters: Locke helped write the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which gave colonists absolute power over enslaved Africans, and he held shares in the Royal African Company, a slave-trading company. His ideas of universal rights were not applied universally, a contradiction historians examine closely.

Other ways to limit a ruler

• The Dutch Republic. After winning independence from Spain, seven northern provinces formed a federal republic. Each province sent delegates to the States General. A stadtholder from the House of Orange often led the army, but wealthy merchant families (the regents) ran the cities. Amsterdam was a centre of world trade, banking and printing. The Republic was relatively tolerant: Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal, Huguenots and dissenters found refuge, and books banned elsewhere were printed there. In the Disaster Year of 1672 France invaded; the republican leader Johan de Witt was killed by a mob, and William of Orange became stadtholder, the same William who took England's throne in 1688.
• Poland-Lithuania. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a "republic of nobles". Nobles (about one in ten people, an unusually large share) elected the king and any single member of the parliament (the Sejm) could block a decision with the liberum veto. This protected noble liberty but made the state weak. Its powerful neighbours, Russia, Prussia and Austria, began partitioning it in 1772.