The formation of the Bill of Rights

The formation of the Bill of Rights is presented as a consequence of the English Revolution’s division of the peerage and its alliance, in part, with the people. The account’s emphasis is not on drafting or particular clauses, but on the political contradiction that made the settlement possible: an aristocratic body could defend its own privileges while also resisting the crown.

Peerage and Political Background

The narrative places this outcome against a history in which the English crown watched the peerage diminish. Under Anne, it says, 565 peerages dating from the twelfth century had become extinct. The War of the Roses began the destruction of dukes, which Mary Tudor’s executions completed. James I later restored dukedoms, using court appointments to cultivate aristocratic loyalty; Charles II likewise made two of his mistresses duchesses. The account presents these policies as attempts to manage the peerage, but notes that such efforts also bred resentment among lords who resisted being bound to the monarch through royal favor.

Division During the Revolution

The decisive division came when the king summoned Parliament to Oxford and the Revolution summoned it to London. Forty-four peers sided with the king, while twenty-two sided with the Republic. The account treats this split as more than a contest within the aristocracy: the Lords’ alignment with the Commons brought the people into the political combination from which the Bill of Rights arose. It does not describe a unanimous peerage or claim that the lords acted from a single motive.

Political Significance

The narrator gives the peerage an ambivalent role. It is characterized as parasitic and arrogant toward the people, yet credited with helping prevent the concentration of power in the crown. Its resistance, in this interpretation, checked royal despotism and opened political space for a settlement associated with the people’s claims. The Bill of Rights is described as a sketch rather than a fully realized statement of those claims, and as a distant anticipation of the French revolutionary language of rights. The episode’s significance lies in this qualified achievement: a body defending inherited rank could nevertheless help constrain monarchy when its interests and popular resistance briefly converged.