English Bill of Rights (1689): Limits on the Power of the Crown

The English Bill of Rights of 1689 is one of the founding documents of constitutional monarchy. Passed after the Glorious Revolution had driven James II from the throne, it declared many of his practices illegal, guaranteed the rights of Parliament, and fixed a Protestant line of succession. Much of it is still law in the United Kingdom today.

Background

The Bill of Rights grew directly out of the Glorious Revolution. James II, a Catholic, had used royal prerogative to suspend laws, to grant exemptions from them, to keep a large army in peacetime and to prosecute seven bishops who protested. When William of Orange invaded in November 1688, James fled to France.

A Convention, elected like a Parliament, met in January 1689 to decide what should happen next. Before offering the crown to William and his wife Mary, James’s elder daughter, its members wanted to state clearly what James had done wrong and what limits the new monarchs should accept. A committee of the Commons, in which the lawyer John Somers played a leading part, drafted a list of grievances and claims of right.

From Declaration to Act

The result was the Declaration of Right, read aloud to William and Mary in the Banqueting House in Whitehall on 13 February 1689, immediately before they were offered the crown. The new monarchs accepted the crown on the same occasion. Historians still debate whether acceptance of the Declaration was formally a condition of the offer, but politically the two were closely linked.

Later in 1689 Parliament converted the Declaration into a statute, with some additions. Its formal title is “An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown”. It received royal assent on 16 December 1689.

What the Bill of Rights says

The Act opens by listing thirteen ways in which James II had tried to subvert “the laws and liberties of this kingdom”. It then sets out matching declarations of right. The most important are:

• Suspending and dispensing powers: the monarch may not suspend laws or their execution without Parliament’s consent, and the dispensing power as recently used is illegal.
• Taxation: levying money for the Crown without the grant of Parliament is illegal.
• Standing army: raising or keeping an army in peacetime without Parliament’s consent is illegal.
• Petitions: subjects have the right to petition the king, and prosecutions for petitioning are illegal.
• Arms: Protestant subjects may have arms for their defence, suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.
• Elections and debates: elections of members of Parliament ought to be free, and freedom of speech and debates in Parliament ought not to be questioned in any court or place outside Parliament.
• Justice: excessive bail and excessive fines should not be required, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted; jurors should be properly chosen, and fines and forfeitures may not be promised before conviction.
• Parliaments: Parliament ought to be held frequently.

The Act also declared illegal the Court of Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes, a body James had used to discipline the Church of England and had himself dissolved in October 1688.

Many of these clauses were presented not as new rights but as the restatement of “ancient rights and liberties”. This reflected a deliberate choice: by claiming to restore the law rather than to change it, the authors made the settlement acceptable to Tories who were uneasy about deposing a king.

The succession

The second purpose of the Act was to settle the crown. William and Mary were to reign jointly, with executive power exercised by William. After them the crown would pass to Mary’s children, then to her sister Anne and her children, then to any children William might have by a later wife.

The Act barred Catholics, and anyone who married a Catholic, from the throne, and released subjects from allegiance to such a ruler. It required each new monarch to make a declaration rejecting Catholic doctrines such as transubstantiation. When it became clear that none of these lines would last, the Act of Settlement of 1701 extended the succession to the Protestant House of Hanover.

Scotland’s Claim of Right

Scotland was a separate kingdom with its own Parliament, and it produced its own settlement. A Convention of the Estates met in Edinburgh in March 1689. Unlike the English Convention, it did not pretend that James had abdicated: it declared that he had forfeited the crown by his misgovernment.

The Claim of Right, adopted on 11 April 1689, listed his abuses and declared that no Catholic could be monarch of Scotland. It went further than the English document in some respects, condemning bishops in the Church of Scotland as a grievance, which opened the way to the restoration of Presbyterian church government in 1690. A companion text, the Articles of Grievances, attacked the Lords of the Articles, a committee through which the Crown had controlled the Scottish Parliament.

Limits of the document

The Bill of Rights was not a charter of universal human rights. It protected the liberties of Parliament and of Protestant subjects, and it reflected the religious fears of its time. Catholics were excluded from the throne, and the right to bear arms applied only to Protestants. It did not create democracy: Parliament was elected by a small minority of property-holding men.

Nor did it, by itself, guarantee that Parliament would meet regularly. What made Parliament permanent was money: the Crown’s need for funds to fight the Nine Years’ War against France meant that Parliament had to sit every year to vote taxes. The Mutiny Act of 1689 and the Triennial Act of 1694 reinforced this new reality.

Influence and legacy

The English Bill of Rights became a model for later constitutional documents. In Scotland the Claim of Right of 1689 set out a parallel list of grievances and principles. In the American colonies, lawyers and patriots invoked it as part of their rights as Englishmen.

Its clearest legacy is in the United States Bill of Rights, proposed in 1789 and ratified in 1791. The Eighth Amendment repeats its wording on excessive bail, excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishments, the Second Amendment echoes its clause on arms, and the US Constitution’s protection of legislative debate reflects Article 9. Ideas found in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published the same year, gave the settlement a wider philosophical justification.

The Act remains in force in the United Kingdom, and it is part of the law of several Commonwealth realms, including Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Article 9, on parliamentary privilege, is still cited in courts, including in modern cases about the relationship between Parliament and the judiciary.

Timeline

• 1688, 23 December: James II leaves England for France.
• 1689, 22 January: The Convention meets at Westminster.
• 1689, 28 January: The Commons declare that James has abdicated and the throne is vacant.
• 1689, 13 February: The Declaration of Right is read to William and Mary, who accept the crown.
• 1689, 11 April: Coronation of William III and Mary II; Scotland adopts the Claim of Right the same day.
• 1689, 16 December: The Bill of Rights receives royal assent.
• 1701: The Act of Settlement extends the Protestant succession to the House of Hanover.
• 1791: The US Bill of Rights, drawing on the 1689 Act, is ratified.

Why it matters

The Bill of Rights established that the British monarch reigns under the law and cannot tax, suspend laws or maintain an army without Parliament. That principle, the foundation of constitutional monarchy, shaped the British state and inspired constitutions far beyond it.