Can you imagine a King of England creeping out of his palace in the middle of the night, in disguise, and dropping the Great Seal of the realm into the River Thames as he fled? That is exactly what James II did in December 1688. Within a few weeks his daughter and her Dutch husband were sitting on his throne, and Parliament had written down, for the first time, a list of things no English monarch could do without its consent. The Whigs who won called it the Glorious Revolution, and the name has stuck ever since.
The Glorious Revolution: Quick Facts
- Date: November 1688 to February 1689
- Where: England, followed by war in Scotland and Ireland
- Important figures: King James II, William of Orange (William III), Mary (Mary II), Princess Anne, John Churchill, the "Immortal Seven"
- Main cause: James II's efforts to win power and toleration for Roman Catholics, and the birth of his Catholic son
- Outcome: James fled to France; William and Mary became joint monarchs; the Bill of Rights of 1689 limited the power of the Crown
The Glorious Revolution: The Main Players
- James II: King of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1685. A brave soldier and admiral in his youth, and a convert to Catholicism, he was stubborn, humourless and convinced he was right.
- William of Orange: Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, James's nephew and son-in-law, and the leading Protestant opponent of Louis XIV of France. He wanted England on his side in the coming war with France.
- Mary: James's eldest daughter, raised a Protestant, married to William since 1677, and until June 1688 the heir to the throne.
- The "Immortal Seven": the six noblemen and one bishop who signed the invitation to William in June 1688.
A Catholic King
To understand 1688 you have to remember how frightened most English Protestants were of Catholicism. Within living memory there had been the Civil War, and within the memory of their grandparents, the Gunpowder Plot. Across the Channel, Louis XIV had just revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and driven hundreds of thousands of French Protestants out of the country. To many Englishmen, Catholicism meant absolute monarchy, persecution and foreign domination.
So when Charles II died in 1685 and his openly Catholic brother became James II, the country was nervous, but it gave him a chance. James was fifty-one, and his heirs were his two Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne. A Catholic king would come and go, people thought, and a Protestant queen would follow. When the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II's illegitimate son, led a Protestant rebellion in the West Country that summer, few people joined him. His army was destroyed at Sedgemoor, Monmouth was beheaded, and Judge Jeffreys' "Bloody Assizes" sent around three hundred of his followers to the gallows and hundreds more to slavery in the West Indies.
James took his victory as a sign that he could do as he liked. He kept a large standing army camped at Hounslow Heath, just outside London, and appointed Catholic officers to it in defiance of the Test Act, which banned Catholics from public office. When Parliament objected, he suspended it. He appointed Catholics to the Privy Council, the universities and the lord lieutenancies of the counties, and in 1687 he issued a Declaration of Indulgence suspending the laws against Catholics and Protestant dissenters. Toleration sounds admirable to us today, and James may have sincerely believed in it, but most of his subjects saw it as a first step towards a Catholic England.
The Seven Bishops and the Warming Pan
In April 1688 James reissued the Declaration and ordered every clergyman in England to read it from the pulpit. The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, and six other bishops petitioned the king to withdraw the order. James had them arrested, sent to the Tower, and tried for seditious libel. When the jury acquitted them on 30 June 1688, London erupted in celebration, and even the soldiers at Hounslow cheered.
By then something far more alarming had happened. On 10 June James's second wife, the Catholic Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward. Suddenly England faced not a single Catholic king but a Catholic dynasty, because the baby boy came ahead of his Protestant half-sisters in the succession. Almost at once a rumour spread that the queen had never been pregnant at all, and that a baby had been smuggled into her bed in a warming pan. There was no truth in it (plenty of people had witnessed the birth), but the story was too useful to die. Princess Anne herself encouraged it.
The Invitation
On 30 June, the same day the bishops were acquitted, seven leading men sent a secret letter to William of Orange inviting him to come to England with an army. They were the Earls of Danby, Devonshire and Shrewsbury, Lord Lumley, Henry Compton (Bishop of London), Edward Russell and Henry Sidney. History knows them as the "Immortal Seven." They promised that most of the nation would welcome him.
William had been preparing for this for months. He needed England's army, navy and money for his struggle against Louis XIV, and he could not risk his father-in-law allying with France. He gathered a fleet of around five hundred ships and more than fourteen thousand soldiers, the largest invasion force to sail against England since the Spanish Armada a century before. His banner carried the words "The Protestant religion and the liberties of England" and his family motto, "Je maintiendrai" (I will maintain).
The Invasion
The weather did William a great favour. A strong easterly wind, which Protestants were quick to call a "Protestant wind," carried his fleet down the Channel while keeping James's navy bottled up in the Thames estuary. On 5 November 1688, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, which cannot have been a coincidence, William landed at Brixham in Torbay in Devon.
James marched west to meet him with a considerably larger army. At Salisbury, things began to fall apart. The king suffered a series of nosebleeds so severe that he could not ride, and his officers began slipping away to join William. The most important was his favourite general, John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough. Then James learned that his own daughter Anne had fled London to join the rebels. "God help me," he is supposed to have said, "even my children have forsaken me." There were only a couple of skirmishes, at Wincanton and Reading, and the royal army fell back towards London without a real fight.
The King Runs Away
James lost his nerve completely. He sent his wife and baby son to France, and in the early hours of 11 December he slipped out of Whitehall in disguise and dropped the Great Seal into the Thames, apparently hoping that without it no new government could legally function. Unluckily for him, some Kentish fishermen stopped his boat at Faversham, mistook him for a Catholic priest trying to escape, and roughed him up before they realised who he was. He was brought back to London, where, to everyone's surprise, the crowds cheered him.
William did not want his father-in-law as a prisoner, still less as a martyr. So he had him taken to Rochester under a guard that made sure to look the other way, and on 23 December James escaped again, this time successfully, and reached France on Christmas Day. Louis XIV gave him the palace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he lived for the rest of his life.
A Revolution Settlement
Now Parliament had a problem. There was no king, and no lawful way to call a Parliament without one. A Convention met in January 1689 and, after a good deal of argument, declared that James had "abdicated the government" by fleeing, and that the throne was therefore vacant. Some members wanted Mary to reign alone, with William as her consort. William refused to be, as he put it, his wife's gentleman usher, and threatened to go home to Holland. In the end, on 13 February 1689, the crown was offered to William and Mary jointly, the only joint monarchy in English history. You can read more about them on our page on William III and Mary II.
The offer came with a Declaration of Rights, which Parliament passed into law as the Bill of Rights in December 1689. It is worth looking at what it actually said, because it still forms part of the British constitution today. Among other things, it declared:
- That the king could not suspend laws, or dispense with them, without the consent of Parliament
- That the king could not raise taxes without Parliament's consent
- That keeping a standing army in peacetime without Parliament's consent was illegal
- That elections to Parliament should be free, and that there should be freedom of speech in Parliament
- That Parliaments should be held frequently
- That excessive bail and fines, and "cruel and unusual punishments," were forbidden
- That no Catholic, and no one married to a Catholic, could inherit the throne
The last clause is still in force, although the rule against marrying a Catholic was finally dropped by the Succession to the Crown Act 2013. And the phrase "cruel and unusual punishments" found its way, a century later, into the United States Constitution. In the same year the Toleration Act allowed Protestant dissenters to worship freely in their own chapels, though not Catholics, and the Mutiny Act meant the army could only be kept in existence by Parliament voting for it each year.
How Glorious Was It?
The Whigs called it glorious because, in England at least, it was almost bloodless. That was not the whole story. In Scotland, the Jacobites (supporters of James, from Jacobus, the Latin for James) rose in arms and won the battle of Killiecrankie in 1689, and the Massacre of Glencoe followed in 1692. In Ireland, James landed with French troops and fought a two-year war that ended with his defeat at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and the Treaty of Limerick, which left the Catholic majority in Ireland under harsh penal laws for more than a century.
Historians have also argued about whether it was really a revolution at all, or simply a Dutch invasion that happened to succeed. Both views have something to them. But whatever you call it, 1688 settled a question that had been fought over since the days of Charles I: from now on, the monarch would rule with Parliament and not without it. When Queen Anne died in 1714, it was an act of Parliament that brought George I over from Hanover to take the throne, and James's Catholic son, the "Old Pretender," had to watch from exile.
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "The Glorious Revolution of 1688" https://englishhistory.net/stuarts/glorious-revolution/, September 30, 2026