Mary

Mary, the Protestant daughter of James II and the wife of William of Orange, was invited by Parliament to replace her father during the crisis of 1688. Her accession with William became part of a decisive political rupture: rather than restore an absolutist monarch, Parliament established a constitutional monarchy and a new setting for economic and political change.

Identity and Political Setting

Mary enters the account through her dynastic and religious position. As James II’s Protestant daughter, she offered Parliament a royal alternative to her father; as William’s wife, she was part of the joint replacement invited by Parliament when James’s attempt to reestablish absolutism provoked a new crisis and civil war. The narrative presents her chiefly in relation to these constitutional stakes, not through a personal account of her actions or character.

The invitation followed a longer struggle over royal power. Under Charles II and then James II, efforts to create absolutism continued after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. In 1688, Parliament was more united and organized than it had been in earlier conflicts. It invited William, the Dutch Statholder, and Mary to replace James, with William bringing an army to claim the throne under a constitutional arrangement made by Parliament.

The 1688 Crisis and Accession

William landed at Brixham in Devon. Two months later, James’s army disintegrated, and James fled to France. The sequence turned Parliament’s invitation into a change of government: James was displaced, and William and Mary were positioned to rule under a constitutional monarchy rather than the absolutist settlement he had sought.

Mary’s role in this account is therefore inseparable from the distinction between hereditary succession and parliamentary choice. Parliament did not merely defend its existing position against James; it selected a replacement monarch. The episode demonstrated that a reigning monarch could be removed and replaced with another whom Parliament preferred, altering the practical terms on which the crown could be inherited and held.

Constitutional Settlement

After the Glorious Revolution, Parliament and William negotiated a new constitution. The changes had been foreshadowed by William’s declaration before the invasion and were further set out in Parliament’s Declaration of Rights, produced in February 1689. It was read to William in the session in which he was offered the crown. The account describes the declaration as vague in many respects, but emphasizes that it established central constitutional principles and determined the succession in a way that departed substantially from accepted hereditary principles.

This settlement gave Mary’s accession significance beyond the identity of the monarchs. The removal of James and the choice of William and Mary made parliamentary intervention in succession a demonstrated possibility. The constitutional question was no longer simply whether a monarch possessed inherited authority, but whether Parliament could constrain royal power and determine who would rule.

Institutional Consequences

The post-1688 shift also changed the conditions under which economic policy was made. Parliament became a more responsive locus for determining economic institutions, and parliamentarians began reforms that strengthened property rights weakened under the Stuarts and favored manufacturing rather than taxing and obstructing it. In 1689, soon after William and Mary ascended the throne, Parliament abolished the hearth tax, an annual levy on each fireplace or stove that had burdened manufacturers particularly heavily, and moved instead toward taxing land.

Parliament also passed measures to expand the market and profitability of woolen textiles, and permitted a reorganization of land rights that allowed the consolidation and elimination of archaic property and user rights. Finance was another part of this institutional change: the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694, as a source of funds for industry, followed directly from the Revolution and helped lay the groundwork for expanding financial markets and banking. These outcomes form the wider significance of Mary’s place in the narrative: her accession belongs to a political rupture that enabled reforms, rather than standing as a detailed individual biography.

Historical Significance

The book treats the 1688 settlement as one example of how a critical juncture can redirect institutional development. Such junctures disrupt an existing balance of political and economic power, but do not dictate a single outcome. Their effects depend on the institutions already in place and on the groups able to act within the crisis. In England, the Glorious Revolution helped establish a more pluralistic political order and supported economic changes that would later contribute to industrial development.

This interpretation also rejects inevitability. Institutional differences accumulate through contingent conflicts and may open, disappear, or return; a critical juncture makes some of them newly consequential. Mary’s significance is thus constitutional and historical: as James’s Protestant daughter and William’s wife, she stood at the center of Parliament’s chosen alternative in 1688, while the settlement associated with her accession helped redirect the relationship between monarchy, Parliament, and economic institutions.