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22 January 1689
After the flight of James II into exile in France, a convention of Lords and Commons is organised and presents a Declaration of Rights to William and Mary in the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall. In this, the convention begs William and Mary to accept the throne – Mary is James II's daughter – and declares that James's flight is an abdication. William III and Mary II are proclaimed king and queen of England, Scotland and Ireland on 13 February. The Bill of Rights makes the Declaration of Rights into law. It bans any Catholic from becoming the ruling monarch and requires Parliament to agree to taxes. It marks the beginning of a constitutional monarchy in which supreme authority is shared between crown, Lords and Commons. In 1689, there is also a Toleration Act which gives some freedom of worship to most Protestants, but excludes Catholics and Unitarians. — • — The solution lay in finding a form of words that emphasised the passivity of Parliament in the face of James's active truancy. The lawyer Sir George Treby phrased it thus: 'We have found the crown vacant. We found it so, we did not make it so.' The stress on the word 'found' saved the government from seeming to go down the path towards a repetition of Civil War instability. William stood astonished and impatient at the infernal wranglings of his English Parliament, whose deliberations seemed to his driven mind the purest argy-bargy. From A Century of Troubles by Stevie Davies (Channel 4 Books) |
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