English Bill of Rights

Context

The English Bill of Rights owes its existence to events that led up to the Glorious Revolution, also known as the English Revolution. Many of the bill's provisions directly address contentious political issues of this tumultuous period.

Following the death of King Charles II on February 6, 1685, his brother, James, a staunch Catholic, ascended the British throne and became James II of England and Ireland as well as James VII of Scotland. James's Catholicism immediately posed several problems, since England had been confirmed as a Protestant Anglican nation over a century earlier by the Second Act of Supremacy and the Act of Uniformity. These acts formed the basis of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement of 1559, which established the sovereign as “supreme governor” of the Anglican Church and compelled the English people to attend Anglican Sunday services. However, despite England's Anglicanism, James was crowned amid objections that were muted for a number of reasons. First, only twenty-five years had passed since the English monarchy had been restored in 1660 after the collapse of the Protectorate, the period of Oliver Cromwell's direct personal rule as lord protector. Supporters of the monarchy and royal prerogative feared that the legitimacy of the Restoration itself might be threatened if James were denied the throne. Second, aristocratic families, notably Tory, held sacrosanct the principle of lineage and hereditary succession because it supported their own hereditary titles. Third, widespread aversion to reviving the turmoil associated with the English Civil War (1642–1651), which for many English was still within living memory, restrained the likelihood of dissent.

Perhaps those memories were stirred during the summer of 1685, less than five months after James became king, when the illegitimate Protestant son of Charles II, the Duke of Monmouth, James Scott, failed in his violent attempt to usurp the throne. Therefore, initial reticence toward challenging James' succession was not altogether surprising, despite worries that he might later use his royal prerogative to grant greater tolerance to Catholics and reintegrate them into civic life in defiance of the Corporation Act of 1661, which made membership of town corporations dependent upon taking of the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England, and the Test Act of 1673, which imposed a similar test on public and military officeholders.

In addition to signaling the possibility of religious strife, the reign of James II commenced amid profound constitutional debate regarding the precise status of the monarch in relation to Parliament and the people whom its members represented. The supremacy of Parliament as the sovereign decision-making body over the king had been debated during the reign of Charles I. Some members of Parliament, especially those who were Whigs, had already detected absolutist traits in James II's behavior and wanted to safeguard the sovereignty of Parliament with statutory force. Initially, though, most members of Parliament and leading lights of the aristocracy adopted a wait-and-see policy, provided that James would not overstep his powers as king. Also, James did not yet have a male heir, and many believed that the Crown would eventually revert to a Protestant, in particular, James's oldest daughter, Anne, who had been raised as an Anglican rather than a Catholic.

A number of James's actions, however, soon showed that he shared the Stuart penchant for absolutist rule—in particular, by using his dispensing power to exempt subjects from the force of statute laws. He also actively promoted Catholic participation in civil life, which could have led to a “Catholic Restoration.” He began filling his court with Catholics, including his private Jesuit confessor, Sir Edward Petre, and a representative from the papacy, Ferdinando d'Adda. Further, on April 4, 1687, James exercised his dispensing power by issuing the Declaration of Indulgence, which circumvented penal laws against Catholics and Protestant dissenters. James then issued a revised Declaration of Indulgence on April 27, 1688, and ordered Anglican clergymen to read it aloud in their churches. William Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and six other bishops—together known as the “Seven Bishops”—refused to read the declaration to their congregations. Because they petitioned the king to rescind the order to have the declaration read, they were quickly arrested and tried for seditious libel. In June they were acquitted to rapturous celebration by largely Anglican crowds.

The “Seven Bishops” case alienated James's Tory supporters, who came to fear a Catholic rebellion, especially in light of the fact that the hysteria surrounding false allegations of a “Popish plot” in 1678 to assassinate Charles II, involving Jesuit priests and numerous Catholic nobles, had still not fully subsided. Furthermore, the effects of King Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, ending toleration of French Protestants in his kingdom, added to the climate of suspicion and fear. Thus, James's use of his dispensing power to promote Catholics against existing statutory law, his persecution of prominent Anglican clergymen, and his desire for a large standing army, combined with events abroad, united two opposing political factions, the Whigs and Tories, against him. The spark that triggered the sequence of events culminating in the deposal of James and the installation of William and Mary came on June 10, 1688, when James's wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a male heir, James Edward. The possibility of a Catholic succession to the British throne was, for most English Protestants, simply untenable.

In response to the threat of a Catholic royal succession, seven representatives of England's leading Protestant families, nicknamed the “Immortal Seven,” with tacit support from the Anglican Church, made a direct appeal to Prince William of Orange. William was James II's Protestant son-in-law; he was married to James's younger daughter, Mary, who like her sister, Anne, had been raised a Protestant. Mary was also William's cousin, since William's mother was the daughter of Charles I. The letter, dated June 30, 1688, signaled the beginning of a new chapter in English political history. As stadtholder (“head of state”) of five of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, William of Orange was fiercely Protestant and keenly interested in maintaining war with the absolutist Catholic French monarch, Louis XIV, in order to defend Dutch interests.

On November 5, 1688, William landed at Brixham on Tor Bay in southwestern England with a vast armada of ships. Ahead of his arrival, he had dispatched agents to distribute leaflets written in English that stated his intention to rescue England for the Protestant cause. Bad weather had impeded James II's fleet in the Thames estuary, and after the defection to William of several high-profile commanders, James's army gradually lost confidence. William's forces proceeded toward London with little resistance; meanwhile, James himself was captured. On December 23, 1688, James was allowed to flee to France. The peers of the realm suggested recalling all members of Parliament from the reign of Charles II to decide how to deal with what amounted to an interregnum. On February 13, 1689, the Declaration of Rights was read aloud to William and Mary, who swore oaths in support of it, and they were crowned King William III and Queen Mary II on April 11, 1689. Following the coronation, the declaration was reworked and renamed the Bill of Rights. Finally, after much negotiation in the House of Commons and House of Lords, especially over the monarch's dispensing power, the bill was given royal assent on December 16, 1689.