The British Bill of Rights was the constitutional settlement that followed the Glorious Revolution, affirming Parliament’s authority over the Crown and helping end absolutist rule in England. Its significance lay not only in the rights and limits it stated, but in the shift of power that made those limits enforceable: Parliament, rather than the monarch, would control state policy.

From revolution to settlement

After the Glorious Revolution, Parliament and William of Orange negotiated a new constitution. The settlement’s principles had been foreshadowed by William’s declaration before his invasion and were set out in the Declaration of Rights, produced by Parliament in February 1689. Parliament read it to William in the same session in which it offered him the crown. Once signed into law, the Declaration became known as the Bill of Rights.

The change followed a decisive reversal of the Stuart monarchy’s position. James’s army had disintegrated after William landed at Brixham, and James fled to France. Parliament’s ability to replace a monarch with one more acceptable to it challenged the assumption that succession was governed solely by hereditary principle. The settlement thus made the outcome of the revolution a constitutional precedent: a monarch’s position depended on Parliament’s political authority.

Limits on the Crown

The Declaration established that the monarch could not suspend or dispense with laws and reaffirmed that taxation required parliamentary consent. It also prohibited a standing army in England without Parliament’s approval. These provisions addressed powers that had been central to conflicts between the Crown and Parliament, placing royal action under legislative constraint.

Other clauses were less precise. The provision that parliamentary elections ought to be free did not define what counted as free, while the call for frequent Parliaments did not specify when they had to meet. That vagueness mattered because rules require enforcement. Under Charles II, a Triennial Act had required Parliament to be called at least once every three years, but Charles ignored it without consequence. After 1688, the new settlement did not create a specific enforcement mechanism for frequent sessions; Parliament no longer needed one in the same way, because authority and decision-making had shifted to Parliament itself.

Parliamentary authority and its consequences

William relinquished practices associated with earlier kings: he stopped interfering in legal decisions and gave up claims such as receiving customs revenues for life. Together with the new constitutional principles, these changes marked Parliament’s triumph over the monarch and the end of absolutism in England, later Great Britain. Following the 1707 union of England and Scotland, Parliament remained firmly in control of state policy.

That transfer altered the incentives behind government. Many members of Parliament had investments in trade and industry and therefore had a stake in protecting property rights, which Stuart rulers had often infringed. Parliament also approached public spending differently: whereas it had resisted higher taxes and a stronger state when the Stuarts controlled expenditure, it was willing to raise revenue and fund activities it valued. A central priority was strengthening the navy to protect members’ overseas commercial interests.

Rule of law and its limits

The settlement’s longer significance appears in the distinction between rule of law and rule by law. The Whigs could pass harsh laws against people who obstructed elite interests, but they could not simply treat enforcement as an unrestricted instrument of power. In the account of the Black Act, a jury acquitted John Huntridge after an eight- or nine-hour trial, partly because of irregularities in how evidence had been collected. The jury consisted of major landowners and gentry who might have been expected to sympathize with the authorities, yet the case demonstrated that even powerful political figures had to contend with legal procedure.

This constraint did not mean that the law treated everyone fairly in practice: many people associated with the Blacks were hanged or transported, and the law remained on the statute books until 1824. But the possibility of a fair trial, and the principle that no one stood above the law, limited selective enforcement. The book presents that constraint as a consequence of pluralist institutions: once the law served as a shared protection against arbitrary power, suspending it against ordinary people could threaten the same constitutional balance that protected elites. In this way, the Bill of Rights formed part of a political change whose effects extended beyond its clauses, helping sustain the rule of law and creating pressure for broader participation.