The Crisis of 1688
By the late seventeenth century, England had already fought one civil war over the question of whether the king stood above the law or under it. Charles I had pressed his father James I’s doctrine of absolute monarchy — laid out in The True Lawe of Free Monarchies (1598) — to the point of overruling Parliament and breaking long-established English law. The Westminster pastor Samuel Rutherford answered him in 1644 with Lex Rex (“The Law and the King”), arguing that law itself is sovereign and that earthly monarchs are bound by it. When the Royalist armies were defeated, Charles I was tried and executed on essentially those grounds.
The Restoration of 1660 brought Charles II back to the throne, and he made his hostility to Rutherford’s argument explicit by ordering Lex Rex burned. But the principles it articulated — that government is conditional, that subjects are not the property of their rulers, and that tyranny may be lawfully resisted by lesser magistrates — had already spread through English political life. They surfaced again, decisively, when Charles II’s brother James II inherited the crown in 1685.
James II was an open Roman Catholic ruling a Protestant nation that had spent more than a century defining its political identity in opposition to Catholic absolutism on the continent. He used his prerogative to suspend laws Parliament had passed, packed the judiciary with men who would rule his way, maintained a standing army in peacetime, attempted to install Catholic loyalists in university and ecclesiastical posts, and prosecuted bishops who refused to publish his Declaration of Indulgence. To English observers steeped in the resistance literature of the previous century, the pattern was unmistakable: a king governing as if his will were law.
The Inheritance of Resistance Theory
The intellectual scaffolding for what happened next was not improvised in 1688. It had been built, layer by layer, over more than a hundred years.
The earliest layer came from the French Huguenots, the Protestant minority brutalized by the French crown after the Reformation. In 1579, writing under the pseudonym Stephen Junius Brutus, they published Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos — “A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants.” The book asked four blunt questions: whether subjects must obey rulers who command against the law of God, whether resistance to such rulers is lawful, whether resistance against rulers who oppress the public state is lawful, and whether neighboring princes may aid an oppressed people. Its answers framed resistance as not merely permitted but, in defined circumstances, obligatory — and crucially, it located the legitimate machinery of resistance in the lesser magistrates and organized representative bodies, not in unaccountable mobs.
Rutherford’s Lex Rex sharpened this into a systematic political philosophy: government is warranted by divine and natural law; sovereignty originates with the people, who may resume it in extreme necessity; the king is no father, no master, no owner, but a fiduciary officer; the safety of the people is a higher law than the king’s prerogative; and defensive war by the estates and subjects against a tyrant’s “bloody emissaries” is lawful. Forty-six of the book’s questions are devoted to dismantling, point by point, the claim that the crown stands above law.
By 1688 this body of thought — Huguenot resistance theory, Rutherford’s Scottish Presbyterian elaboration, and the broader stream Glenn Sunshine traces in Slaying Leviathan through the medieval natural-rights tradition into Protestant resistance theory and finally into the English context — was the working political vocabulary of educated Englishmen. It told them what a tyrant was, what to do about one, and who had standing to act.
The Overthrow
When James II’s wife produced a male Catholic heir in June 1688, the prospect of a permanent Catholic dynasty crystallized opposition. Seven prominent Englishmen — a mix of nobles, bishops, and parliamentarians, acting as exactly the kind of “lesser magistrates” the resistance theorists described — issued a formal invitation to William of Orange, James’s Protestant son-in-law and the stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, to bring an army to England to secure Protestant succession and traditional English liberties.
William landed at Torbay in November 1688. James’s support evaporated with remarkable speed; his army defected, his daughter Anne sided with the invaders, and James himself fled to France after a botched first attempt. Parliament declared the throne vacant — treating the king’s flight as an abdication — and offered the crown jointly to William and his wife Mary, James’s daughter.
The transfer of power was overwhelmingly bloodless in England itself, though it produced serious fighting in Ireland and Scotland. What mattered constitutionally was that Parliament had deposed a sitting king and chosen his successor, on the explicit grounds that James had broken the conditions on which English kings hold power.
The Bill of Rights of 1689
The settlement attached to the new monarchy was not a vague promise of better behavior. Parliament drafted a Declaration of Rights and required William and Mary to accept it as a condition of receiving the crown. It was enacted as the Bill of Rights in December 1689.
The document is essentially a list of James II’s specific abuses, each paired with a declaration that the abuse was illegal. Its working clauses prohibited the suspension of laws by royal authority without Parliament’s consent, prohibited the dispensing power as it had recently been used, prohibited the levying of money without parliamentary grant, prohibited a standing army in peacetime without parliamentary consent, prohibited excessive bail and cruel punishments, required free elections and frequent Parliaments, protected free speech in parliamentary debate, guaranteed the right of subjects to petition the crown, and — significantly for later constitutional development on both sides of the Atlantic — affirmed “that the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by law.”
Each of these clauses tracks a category of grievance the resistance theorists had identified: arbitrary suspension of law, taxation without consent, military force used against the political community, judicial abuse, and disarmament of the population. The Bill of Rights converted the abstract argument that the king is under the law into specific, enumerated, legally enforceable limits.
What the Settlement Established
The 1688–89 settlement did several things at once. It established that the English crown is conditional and contractual, not patrimonial — kings hold office on terms, and those terms can be enforced by Parliament acting on behalf of the political community. It established that certain rights of subjects are not gifts of the crown but pre-existing claims the crown is bound to respect. It established that armed resistance organized through legitimate institutional channels, against a ruler who has broken his trust, is not rebellion but lawful self-defense by the political body.
These were the same conclusions Rutherford had argued from Scripture and natural law, the same conclusions the Huguenots had argued under persecution a century earlier, and they became the direct working inheritance of the American colonists eighty-seven years later. When the American Founders confronted what they regarded as a similarly misguided monarch, they reached for Lex Rex, for the Vindiciae, and for the precedent of 1688 — and built their case for independence on the same foundation.