WILLIAM made ready to invade, but rather than fight his son-in-law James fled to France, tossing the Great Seal of the realm into the Thames on December 11th, 1688. Following elections in January 1689, the ‘Convention’ Parliament offered the crown to William and Mary, and a series of Constitutional amendments, including a Declaration of Rights enshrining free and regular elections and freedom of speech, and a Toleration Act tiptoeing towards religious liberty, marked a new era in English history.

The settlement was immediately challenged. The exiled James brought an army to Ireland in 1689, backed by the French, but William ultimately prevailed in the Nine Years’ War;* a series of rebellions by James’s supporters, the Jacobites, was backed by France and Spain but in 1746 the last of them was crushed.

In 1702, Mary’s sister Anne inherited a constitutional system quite unlike anything else in Europe, in which Crown and Parliament curtailed each other’s powers. Hitherto unimaginable liberties were now guaranteed to the people. There was no going back.*