The Glorious Revolution: Three Centuries of Freedom
William and Mary Crowned
The Magna Carta to the Glorious Revolution
The Glorious Revolution is as relevant today in Australia and the wider world as it was in England in 1688. It is arguably the most significant single advance in the provision of good government that the world has ever seen. This has been overshadowed by concentrating on its quite peripheral impact on the divisions among Christians. But the Calvinist Prince of Orange who became William III was driven by his fear of absolutist French hegemony over Europe, not by worries about Catholicism, whose leader, the Pope, was his temporal ally.
The point is that the freedoms ensured and the benefits gained from the Glorious Revolution far exceed anything gained from any other single event , including the mistakenly more celebrated French Revolution.
The Reign of Terror in the French Revolution was bad enough, but the loss of life from the resulting years of war, which ended only in 1815, compares with the First World War, and that with a smaller population. The other great so-called Revolution, the Russian, was more a coup d’état by the Bolsheviks, with equally disastrous imitations in Europe and Asia, which led to the death of about 100 million.
The American Revolution was derivative and confirmatory of the Glorious Revolution.
The Glorious Revolution was, in many ways, England’s great gift to the world. It established those fundamental principles of good governance which best allow a man to achieve and exercise his fundamental rights.
It is of particular significance not only in the constitutional development of Britain and the Commonwealth but also in the United States.
This was recognised eloquently by the Founding Fathers of the United States when they believed that their rights as Englishmen were being denied. They declared: “ We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Indeed, the American authority on global affairs, Walter Russell Mead, writes that “the Americans justified their overthrow of George III with the same arguments the English used to justify their overthrow of James II.”
The influence of the Glorious Revolution is not limited to the particular US model of government. Every year for the past two decades, the United Nations has, in its Human Development Index, measured nations according to the life expectancy, wealth and education of their people. The form of government of all of the leading ten and the leading twenty nations every year, with the exception of Switzerland, derives from those principles established long ago in the Glorious Revolution. In most cases, the form of government is based on the subsequent evolution of that model in Britain, which came after the American Revolution.
And as Mead observes, since the Glorious Revolution, the Anglo-Americans have been on the winning side in every major international conflict.
This indicates some advantages in the Anglo-Saxon system of governance. There is no evidence that this has anything to do with race, but rather, it is to do with the endorsement of what we may call political culture. Mead makes the point that not only was the United States a nation of immigrants, but so was England, even at the time of the Glorious Revolution. This augurs well for the current massive immigration into the Anglo-Saxon countries. Good sense will make most realise that the system they have come to works and works well – the great majority will have little inclination to change it.
It is important to stress that the great advantages of the Glorious Revolution were not the result of some philosophers sitting down and designing them. That was what directed the French and Bolshevik Revolutions: near-crazed men designing schemes to save the world that came close to ruining it. The style of the Anglo-Saxons is pragmatic; the style of the major continental powers has hitherto been more theoretical.
The wisdom of the Anglo-Saxons has been in allowing institutions to evolve gradually over time and through trial and error. By way of contrast to continental thought, I would refer to the story of the French énarque who, when the benefits of something we are familiar with were shown to him, said: “Yes, it may well work in practice, but does it work in theory?”
How it Began
The Glorious Revolution began with an invitation to invade England made to Prince William of Orange by certain leading Englishmen who were outraged by what they saw as the unconstitutional acts of James 11. William was not a stranger to England; he was married to James' daughter, Mary. When William did invade, support for James dissipated, and James fled to France.
The Glorious Revolution involved William calling together a Convention Parliament, which eventually invited him and Mary to take the throne, but on certain conditions which would limit his powers. This was the beginning of the English and then the British constitutional monarchy, which had the result that the British were to live in a country which was among the freest in the world.
William III, also widely known as William of Orange, was the sovereign Prince of Orange from birth, Stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic from the 1670s, and King of England, Ireland, and Scotland from 1689 until his death in 1702.
This is in no way an argument that the English, the British, or the English-speaking people were or are endowed with any superior intellect. It was that a Dutch Prince was prepared to accept the conditions under which he and his wife might have the throne of England and that, thereafter, those in power were prepared to allow the constitutional system to develop by trial and error.
This was to have momentous consequences. David Landes says that the pre-eminence that Britain enjoyed in the Industrial Revolution resulted from the fact that the British people had “elbow room”. Far from perfect, by comparison with most communities across the Channel, the British were free and fortunate. Britain writes Landes, was soon a precociously modern industrial nation. He believes that the salient feature of a successful society is the ability to adapt to new things and ways. And one key area of change was the increasing freedom and security of the people. Yet, he says, the British still call themselves subjects of the Crown, while they have longer than anyone else been citizens.
This was due, as Thomas Babington Macaulay was to put it, to an “auspicious union of freedom and power.” That freedom was taken to the colonies. Before the War of Independence, the American colonies were the freest the world had yet seen. What was achieved, a great governmental, military, financial and diplomatic revolution, was in many respects unintended, and the benefits took some time to become apparent.
King William III was not, as is frequently assumed today, principally driven by a concern for Protestantism. He was instead driven by the need to oppose what he saw as the hegemonic tyrant French King Louis XIV and the need to ensure England never allied herself with France.
His was a correct assessment of the ambitions of Louis XIV, who showed himself as ambitious for European domination as Napoleon would and as Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin subsequently demonstrated.
William did not come to England as a despot. He was long accustomed to the complex negotiations necessary as a Stadholder of the United Provinces. High taxation and a huge military establishment were seen as necessary to protect their liberties and were approved by vote in representative assemblies.
Limited Government, the Forerunner of Democracy
It would be wrong to assume that the Glorious Revolution introduced democracy to Britain, at least as we know it. Nor, for that matter, did the American Revolution. Suffrage in England and Scotland was limited, with the aristocracy and the Sovereign enjoying special rights. But even as Sovereign, William never enjoyed the rights over other Britons that many of the American Founding Fathers had over those of their fellows whom they owned as their slaves.
The essential point is that the Glorious Revolution introduced conditions essential for good, limited government, something which the American Revolution affirmed.
This was a liberal constitution which came to provide a stable, limited government with adequate checks and balances against the abuse of power. Those checks and balances comply with Acton’s subsequent warning that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
That a liberal constitution requires that government be limited is something which socialists have never appreciated. Because much of Western political philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was dominated by socialist thought ( and still is under the guise of, for example, militant environmentalism), this means that little attention has been given to a feature absolutely essential to any society which is governed under a liberal constitution.
This is because the right to private property is protected under the law.
Indeed, Hernando De Soto has demonstrated that the protection of property rights in a formal property system, and one with adequate records, is crucial to economic development, and indeed, its absence in many third-world countries explains many of their barriers to development.
In the context of the debate over the Bush administration’s policy to impose democracy across the world, Fareed Zakaria has most notably advanced the argument that democracy works best in societies when it is preceded by "constitutional liberalism."
This is, of course, the essence of the British and American experience.
Constitutional liberalism, with the people enjoying basic freedoms, including the protection of their property, and stable limited government with adequate checks and balances, came before democracy.
This point was not fully appreciated in the occupation of Iraq. I do not speak here on the invasion, which can be argued to be a continuation of the war that Saddam Hussein began with the invasion of Kuwait.
It was in the attempt to introduce democracy to Iraq that the lessons of history were not fully appreciated. This, I suspect, was the point made by Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, when he said there were "occasions when people in the U.K. would wish that those in responsible positions in the U.S. might listen and learn from our experiences."
Prince Andrew was undoubtedly referring to Britain’s long experience in government at home and in the empire. This teaches that good limited government requires not only the rule of law but also a panoply of checks and balances, sufficient to prevent abuse but not so great as to cause instability or paralysis in government. As Zakaria argues, democracy can really only come when a liberal constitution is well and truly in place.
If we return to the British experience, not only did they transmit the benefits of the Glorious Revolution to their first empire in the Americas. They repeated this with their subsequent empire and first to the settled colonies. To these, they transmitted their evolved constitutional monarchy now under the Westminster system. (It can be argued, and I shall advance this below, that this model is, on balance, superior to that which the Americans adopted.)
The Australian Canadian and New Zealand colonies were soon given the same free institutions, allowed to run themselves, to federate if they wished, and in the case of Australia, they were even given the golden key to their constitution, the right to amend this.
No other colonies in other empires ever had these, quite often because the imperial power –did not enjoy them at home. The English-speaking world enjoyed a benefit in advance of others.
According to Andrew Roberts, this is the reason why English-speaking countries today account for more than one-third of global GDP despite their combined population being only 7.5% of the world’s population.
Living under a liberal constitutional system is reflected in the political judgement of the English-speaking world. Once again, it is not that English-speaking people are more intelligent. It is that accustomed to a liberal constitutional system, the electorate becomes capable of sophisticated judgement and is suspicious of those who challenge the constitution. These electorates typically reject extremes at either end of the political spectrum. The electors can of course, be misled, but they are less inclined than others to render heroic status to their leaders or to be swayed by adventurism.
Accordingly, it is no coincidence that the communist and fascist parties never attracted any significant support in English-speaking countries, in contradiction to many of the apparently sophisticated European continental countries. By maintaining a liberal constitution, the result is that the electorate becomes a guardian of that system.
The Principles of the Glorious Revolution
William Blackstone, in his ‘Fundamental Laws of England, published in 1760, enumerates a stream of signal documents which declare what he saw as the “absolute rights of Englishmen.” It was these rights which the American colonists believed they had taken with them to the new land, and it was those rights which they claimed King George III was infringing.
He saw these documents, all of a constitutional nature, as the spring from which parliament and the common law came. They begin with the Magna Carta, its various confirmations, the Petition of Right and the Habeas Corpus Acts under Charles 1. They culminated with the Bill of Rights of 1689 and the Act of Settlement of 1701.
Let us go to the Bill of Rights of 1689, “An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown.”
In summary, the Bill of Rights established the fundamental principles of government in what is the first version in England of a modern constitutional monarchy, which I shall call the Constitutional Monarchy Mark 1. In this model, the King agrees that only the King-in-Parliament can legislate, the King thus having the power of veto. Unlike the present Westminster system, the King also retained control of the executive government. This is the model on which the American Republic is based, an irony to which we shall return.
The Bill of Rights was a revolutionary document in that with the landing of Prince William of Orange, the stadholder of the Netherlands United Provinces, the legitimate King, James II, fled to France. It was William who called what became known as the Convention Parliament, and it was that Parliament which offered the throne to William and his wife Mary, James' daughter.
Queen Mary II was the eldest daughter of James II and his first wife, Anne Hyde. In 1677 she married her first cousin, William, Prince of Orange. Following the Glorious Revolution and her father's flight to the continent, in 1689 she was crowned Joint Sovereign of Great Britain with her husband William III.
Constitutionally, this was irregular, to say the least. If James did in fact, abdicate, the Crown would have gone to the young Prince James, the Prince of Wales who was with him in France, and not to his daughter, Princess Mary, William’s wife. Hence, it is properly called a revolution but, in comparison to most, a mild one.
The Bill of Rights begins with a recital referring to the Declaration of Rights, which was read to the Sovereigns before the Crown was formally offered to them. Then follows a general accusation against James II, that “by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom.” This was no doubt recorded to justify the constitutional irregularity in the offer of the Crown to William and Mary. This device was followed by the American revolutionaries in the accusations made against King George III in the Declaration of Independence.
Then follow thirteen specific allegations, principally that he claimed the power to dispense with the laws of England. Among the accusations is one which will interest Australians, that of “levying money for and to the use of the Crown by the pretence of prerogative for other time and in another manner than the same was granted by Parliament. “ In other words, James is accused of raising taxes without parliamentary approval and ruling without supply.
This is forbidden both under the Westminster system and in the United States but with different consequences. In the Westminster system, a government which cannot obtain supply must advise a general election or resign.
Thus, on 11 November 1975, the Australian Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, withdrew the commission of the then Prime Minister, E.G. Whitlam, for trying to do this, to govern without a grant of supply.
In his reasons, Sir John said:
“Because of the principles of responsible government, a Prime Minister who cannot obtain supply, including money for carrying on the ordinary services of government, must either advise a general election or resign. If he refuses to do this I have the authority and indeed the duty under the Constitution to withdraw his Commission as Prime Minister.”
In summary, and in case anyone doubted the illegality of King James’ actions, the Bill of Rights declares that all of these “are utterly and directly contrary to the known laws and statutes and freedom of this realm.”
Then follows the justification for the invitation to William and Mary to take the throne and the calling of the Convention Parliament.
This was that after William landed, and so many went over to William, that James burned most of the writs prepared for the new Parliament, cast the Great Seal into the Thames and then fled to France.
Parliament debated as to whether he had thus abdicated or, alternatively, was incapable of acting. There was talk of regency, but this was rejected when it was realised that under a regency, James could always return to the Throne. He was now even less acceptable, living with the young Prince of Wales in France under the protection of Louis XIV, who had revoked the Edit of Nantes, which had allowed the protestant Huguenots some liberties.
Accordingly, the Bill of Rights declares that the “late King James the Second” – almost as if he were dead – “having abdicated the government and the throne being thereby vacant, his Highness the Prince of Orange (whom it hath pleased Almighty God to make the glorious instrument of delivering this kingdom from popery and arbitrary power)” had called an election for the House of Commons which met and formulated the conditions under which they would offer the throne to William and Mary.
The Bill of Rights then records that “they said Majesties did accept the crown and royal dignity of the kingdoms” and that certain principles were accepted. It was noted in particular that the King and Queen could not, under the prerogative, dispense with the application of the laws, that a standing army would not be maintained in England without parliamentary consent, that the Monarch would not interfere in elections, nor rule without supply, that subjects were would be free to petition the King, and that they were to be protected from cruel and unusual punishments, and fines and forfeitures without trial. Parliamentary privilege was established, and Protestants were entitled to bear arms for their defence.
The Parliament had clearly tired of the Stuart Kings. They looked across the Channel, and they did not care for what they saw, the absolutist France of Louis XIV. In particular, they did not like the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which led to the persecution and flight of the Huguenots. They linked their problems with the Stuarts to Roman Catholicism, and so Roman Catholics were to be barred from the Throne, Parliament claiming that experience had demonstrated “that it is inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this protestant kingdom to be governed by a papist prince."
Battle of the Boyne
In the year following the passing of the Bill of Rights, William defeated King James in Ireland at the famous Battle of the Boyne. This ended any real hope of a Stuart restoration, at least during James’ life.
While this battle is best remembered today in Ireland for its religious connotations, it is important to understand that it was far more about the throne than religion.
Catholics and Protestants were to be found on both sides, with William’s elite Blue Guards fighting under the papal banner. William was allied with both Catholic and Protestant powers in the League of Augsburg, which had papal support and was directed against Louis XIV of France.
In fact, the news of James' defeat was celebrated in the Vatican.
The battle was regarded as more significant on the continent than in Britain. Two days later, an Anglo-French Fleet was defeated by the French at the Battle of Beachy Head, and that was of greater concern to the English.
The Act of Settlement
After the death of Queen Mary and then the deaths of her sister Anne’s son, Prince William of Gloucester, William and Parliament felt the need to restate the succession. This was to ensure that the Crown did not return to James’ line.
Accordingly, the Act of Settlement of 1701 vests the succession in the Electress Sophia of Hanover, a granddaughter of James I, and her Protestant heirs. The Act still determines the succession to the throne of the United Kingdom and of all the Commonwealth Realms, whether by reference to the Act as a British statute or as a patriated part of the particular Realm's constitution.
Any change to the succession today needs the approval of all Parliaments of the Realms, those Commonwealth countries of which The Queen is the Sovereign.
The Act of Settlement is frequently the subject of debate, principally because of the protestant succession. But there is something far more important in this legislation, something which would have a profound effect on governance in Britain, the US, the Commonwealth and indeed the world.
This is in the provision that the “ judges' commissions be made quam diu se bene gesserit...” This means that judges were no longer to hold office “at pleasure,” that is, be dismissible by the government whenever they so wished. And, of course, a government may well wish to dismiss a judge who rules against them.
From the Act of Settlement, judges hold office now “during good behaviour”. That means they can be removed only by an address of both Houses of Parliament.
This was of signal importance. It is the source of the doctrine of the separation of powers in England, the subject of a detailed study by Montesquieu. He saw the separation of the three powers, the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, as ensuring political liberty. The separation of the judiciary had, he thought, to be real, and this was certainly the case in England.
Subsequently, the English model evolved into the Westminster system as we know it today, where the ministry must enjoy the confidence of the lower house, the House of Commons. In the meantime, the separation of powers had been carried to the United States, where the judiciary was to become a significant force and criticised for moving into the area of the legislature.
The Constitutional Monarchy Mark II.
There was to be one further development in the constitutional monarchy, which was to follow American independence. Until then, the King or Queen played an active role in the executive. The Ministers were not responsible to parliament; they were responsible to the King. So, the model the Americans took was one where the head of state was also still head of government.
Paradoxically, it was the American War for Independence, which was the beginning of what we recognise as the Westminster system, where the government is responsible to the House of Commons.
It was in March 1782 when, following the defeat of the army at Yorktown, the House of Commons voted that they "can no longer repose confidence in the present ministers." Lord North, who was Prime Minister, resigned. This was the beginning of the constitutional convention, which became firmly established in the middle of the nineteenth century, that a government must retain the confidence of the House of Commons. This of course, was the system which the British gave to their settled colonies in the mid-nineteenth century.
William as King
But noting that William was not a constitutional monarch as we know it today is not to say he was not meticulous in observing the obligations he entered into under the Declaration and then the bill of Rights. In 1698 a very foolish House of Commons wanted to cut down the size of the Army to a mere 7000 in England. They also decided to send home his beloved Blue Dutch Foot guards, Catholic and Protestant, the first to enter London and the first to plunge into the waters of the Boyne in 1690. William did not react as a Stuart king might have. He did not suspend or prorogue the Parliament.
He wrote instead what he believed would be his last speech from the throne, a speech which contained a statement as melancholy as the abdication speech of Edward VIII :
“I came into this kingdom, at the desire of the nation, to save it from ruin and to preserve your religion, your laws and your liberties. And for that end, I have been obliged to maintain a long and burdensome war for this kingdom, which, by the grace of god, and the bravery of this nation, is at present ended in a good peace, under which you may live happily and in quiet, provided you will contribute towards your own security in the manner I have recommended to you, at the opening of the sessions.”
They had not so that he would go.
But when he read his speech to the Lord Chancellor, Lord Somers, he pleaded with the King:
“This is extravagance, Sir. This is madness. I implore Your Majesty, for the sake of your own honour, not to say to anybody else what you have said to me.”
Reluctantly, William re-considered his position and accepted Somers's advice.
In 1700, Louis XIV broke his word in the Partition Treaties and allowed the vacant Spanish throne to be taken by the second son of the Dauphin, Phillipe, Duke of Anjou. The Spanish Ambassador fell to his knees and, clasping the Duke’s hand, said, “The Pyrenees have ceased to exist.”
The House of Commons foolishly recognised Phillipe, even trying to impeach the ministers concerned in the partition treaties, Somers, Portland, Halifax and Oxford. Fortunately, the House of Lords acquitted them. With the House of Commons undermining, more through stupidity than treachery, William’s balance of power strategy, Louis XIV occupied the Spanish Netherlands.
But when five gentlemen of Kent, fearing invasion, petitioned Parliament to provide for the adequate defence of the Realm, they were arrested.
The brave Daniel Defoe, guarded by sixteen ‘gentlemen of quality”, strode into the Commons and handed the Speaker his ‘Legion’s Memorial’, reminding them they were the elected servants of the people.
The nation demanded, writes historian Bryan Bevan, that ‘if the King of France would not listen to reason, King William must be asked to declare war on him.”
The Lords, differing from the Commons, implored the King to act.
The result was the Treaty of Grand Alliance and the War of Spanish Succession 1701-1714).
As a consequence, France's dominance over continental Europe ended, with William’s concept of the balance of power recognised in the Treaty of Utrecht.
The Glorious Revolution and Australia
The principles of the Glorious Revolution are central to the Australian constitutional system for at least three reasons. First, the settlers brought with them the laws of England Second, the British soon introduced the Westminster system to Australia, and it became one of the pillars of our nation. This process began before the Eureka Stockade, sometimes incorrectly presented as its cause. By the middle of the nineteenth century, most of the Australian colonies were self-governing under the Westminster system, in a way in which the colonies of other powers were not.
Third, it is a mistake to think of our Constitution only in terms of the Federal Constitution. As Bolingbroke said, the constitution is “that assemblage of laws, institutions and customs, derived from certain fixed principles of reason, directed to certain fixed objects of public good that compose the general system, according to which the community hath agreed to be governed.”
Our constitutional system includes the principles in the Bill of Rights, the Act of Settlement as well as our Federal and State Constitutions. I should make one caveat: not all parts are entrenched. Some significant parts of the constitutional system can be changed by an Act of Parliament. In any event, when Australians agreed, as the preamble to the Constitution Act records, humbly relying on the blessings of Almighty God, to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown, they did so knowing that golden thread from Magana Carta through the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement was fully comprehended in our constitutional settlement.
One of the facile critiques of our constitution is that it is silent on some matters which are assumed, for example, the cabinet and the office of the prime minister. This has no foundation and may only be advanced to justify some ill-thought-out change. The Constitution was never intended as a “stand-alone” constitutional primer. It was always intended to complement and not to replace the laws incorporating what was known as the e fundamental rights of Englishmen and to import these fully into the Australian constitutional system. Australia is, as one noted American authority on global affairs writes, “one of the most democratic and egalitarian societies in the world.”
The Glorious Revolution and the United States.
When the American Founding Fathers set about designing their constitutional model, they did not come to their task in a vacuum.
They were, after all, the thirteen freest countries the world had ever known.
They were and saw themselves as heirs to Blackstone’s Fundamental Laws of England and beneficiaries too of the Glorious Revolution.
And James 11 had tried to remove their representative government. William and Mary restored it.
It was the belief of the Americans that a subsequent English government was denying them their rights.
It was not so much the Great Proclamation which prevented the colonists from taking more Indian land. Nor was it the decision in Somerset’s Case concerning a runaway American slave. There, Lord Mansfield had found, probably apocryphally, that “the air of England was too pure for a slave to breathe. Let the black go free.”
Perspicacious American slave owners knew that this common law ruling would not doubt in time spread to America.
These two irritations were reason enough to try to establish an independent slave-owning state, free to take Indian land. But that alone was not enough. Rather it was the ham-fisted way that the English government unilaterally required the Americans to make a quite fair contribution to their defence against the French.
“No taxation without representation” was their remarkably effective slogan.
Michael Barone argues that the Glorious Revolution was the inspiration for the resulting War of Independence and the formation of the United States of America.
The alternative model was not attractive to the Americans. This was a time when Europe was moving towards absolutism, with the great example being in her dominant power, where the Sun King, Louis XIV, was unchallenged.
Absolutism, apparently modern and efficient, seemed as much the way of the future as the gullible would later think the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany or Mao’s China.
But out of one corner of Europe, as Barone puts it, an alternative had emerged.
This was a “constitutional monarchy with limits on government, guaranteed rights, relatively benign religious toleration, and free market global capitalism.”
This, Barone says, was a long step forward toward the kind of society we take for granted now. It was “the backdrop for the amazing growth, prosperity, and military success of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain—and for the American Revolution and the even more amazing growth, prosperity, and military success of the United States.”
“It changed England from a country in which representative government was threatened to one where it was ingrained, from a nation in which liberties were based on tradition to one in which they were based in part on positive law, from a nation where the place of religion was a matter of continued political dispute and even armed struggle to one where it was settled in a way that generally respected individual choice, from a nation that mostly kept apart from the wars of continental Europe to one that saw its duty as maintaining a balance of power there and around the world, ” he writes.
It was this English and British example of representative government that inspired the Founding Fathers of the United States and the entire world.
It was copied –with minor variations – in the British colonies, many of which would become major nations.
This improbable revolution, he argues, did much to shape the world as we know it.
Mead writes that many of the values, ideas and attitudes which are thought to be part of “ America’s unique exceptionalism” actually came from Great Britain.
In particular, he says the ideas of the Glorious Revolution have left “a deep and abiding mark on political culture as well.”
As only one example, he points out that the Declaration of Independence itself was closely modelled on the Declaration of Rights. The Glorious Revolution also guaranteed liberties.
The “right to bear arms” was very different from the feudal obligation to bear arms. Rather than being an obligation to support the king and his government, it was now “a way for the freeman to protect his property and his liberty.” Here, we see the clear origin of the Second Amendment in the U.S. Bill of Rights.
Barone also reminds us of the Third Amendment against the quartering of troops, the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, and the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment.
The Glorious Revolution did not establish religious freedom, but neither did the US Bill of Rights. It also prohibited a federally established church; it is only a more recent judicial interpretation which has changed this into mandating the separation of church and state.
And it was not just in the constitution and the law that the Glorious Revolution guided America. It was also in her institutions and even her foreign policy.
The Glorious Revolution had given Britain financial institutions similar to those of the United Provinces, which allowed it to be more effective in government, war and trade than the richer France. This preponderance of sophisticated intuitions was continued and developed in America.
The Glorious Revolution and the World.
The Glorious Revolution influenced the world in two ways. The successful Anglo-Saxon forms of governance have been copied around the world. With the exception of Switzerland and the United States, and only if we disregard their civil wars, only the Westminster system has been successful in providing limited stable government over extended periods, particularly in periods of stress.
Most of the world’s successful nations have adapted the principles of the Glorious Revolution. But the Glorious Revolution has had another influence, one on the peace and freedom of the world.
Barone writes that the revolution brought a theme to British foreign policy, which the United States inherited when she succeeded as the dominant force in the world.
This was the concept of the balance of power.
Barone sees a line from the Anglo-Dutch alliance against Louis XIV, through the opposition to Napoleon, to that against Imperial Germany and then Hitler. This continued during the Cold War and into today’s struggle against today’s terrorism.
Barone wonders, “What kind of world would there be if Britain and then the United States had not gotten into the habit of opposing tyrannical hegemonic powers?”
Whatever the world would have been like, he asserts that Louis XIV, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler Stalin and Osama bin Laden would not have been so constrained, and most may not have been defeated.
Barone concludes that William III and what he terms the improbable revolution of 1688 were indispensable in bringing into being the world we know today.
He ends with these words from Winston Churchill: “His daring and determination and perseverance should be an inspiration to any who are inclined to weariness and flagging resolve in trying times.”
Never before, and not since, has there been such a remarkable achievement in such a short time, the discovery of a model of governance which would at one and the same time assure stable government, checks and balances sufficient to prevent continuing and gross abuse of power, and freedoms which would allow a people to grow in a way which had not been seen before.
It was this model which both allowed economic progress and the gradual introduction of democracy in a way that other governance models promised but never delivered. And this was the basis of both the American system, which has been the basis of the rise of that union, and of the Westminster system, which has been so widely and successfully adapted in so many countries.
by Prof David Flint
[This essay was first published as “Three and twenty years of Freedom,” with footnotes deleted, in the journal Quadrant, November 2008, pp 40-47, Volume LII, Number 11. We acknowledge the editor’s kind permission to republish the essay ]
1 Conversation with Philp Dwyer, 10 April 2008, author, Napoleon. The Path to Power 1769-1799, 2008
2 Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking People Since 1900, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 2006 at p637.and
3 The Declaration of Independence: 4 July 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen states of the United States of America.
4 Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007, p.48
5 http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/hdr_20072008_summary_english.pdf, accessed 3 May 2008.
6 Meade op.cit., p.5
7 Mead, op.cit., p.48.
8 A student or graduate of the L'École nationale d'administration (ENA), one of the most prestigious of the French “grandes écoles” from which come the nation’s leading civil servants.
9 David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (1998)
10 Tomas Babbington Macaulay, The History of England, Penguin Classics, 1079, p.51
11 Michael Barone, Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers,2007, p.225
12 Barone, op.cit., pp., 226, 221.
13 Letter arguing against the promulgation of the doctrine of Papal infallibility sent to Bishop Mandell Creighton in April 1887.
14 The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else 2000
15 Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, 2004.
16 “From Prince Andrew, critical words for the U.S. on Iraq,’ by Stephen Castle, International Herald Tribune, 4 February 2008
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/04/america/andrew.php, accessed 17 April 2008. See also Michael Eisenstadt and Eric Mattewson, US Policy in Post Saddam Iraq,2003
17 Andrew Roberts, op.cit., p 637
18 Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Law of England, from the Avalon Project at Yale Law School, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/blackstone/blacksto.htm (full-text), accessed 11 April 2008
19 An Act declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject, and settling the Succession of the Crown, 1 Will. & Mar. sess. 2 c. 2
20 Fn.3, op. Cit.
21 Governor-General’s Statement of Reasons http://www.ozpolitics.info/guide/topics/dismissal/dismissal-reasons/ accessed 3 May 2008.
22 Barone, op. Cit. p 172
23 Mead, op.cit., p.29
24 It was at the Battle of Aughrim on 12 July 1791 that almost all of the Irish Catholic and old English aristocrats, who had been dispossessed of lands to accommodate the plantations under Elizabeth I and Oliver Cromwell, died, and it was this battle which was originally celebrated on 12 July.
25 (12 & 13 Wm 3 c.2)
26 Statute of Westminster, 1931( UK), preamble.
27 Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1748, translated by Thomas Nugent, revised by J. V. Prichard Based on a public domain edition published in 1914 by G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., London, http://www.constitution.org/cm/sol.htm accessed 3 May 2008
Rendered into HTML and text by Jon Roland of the Constitution Society
28 Bryan Bevan,King William III. Prince of Orange, the first European, 1997,p. 168
29 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3qh3OEtTmI , accessed 7 July 2008
30 Bevan, loc. Cit.
31 Bevan, op.cit., p.169
32 Bevan, op.cit, p.174
33 Bevan, loc. cit.
34 Viscount Bolingbroke, On Parties (1735),p. 108.
35 Mead op. cit., p. 118
36 Barone,op.cit., p236-237
37 The Proclamation of 1763 was made on 7 October 7, 1763, by King George III at the conclusion of the Seven Years' War. The Proclamation, in effect, reserved land west of the Appalachian Mountains to the Indians.
38 R. v. Knowles, ex parte Somersett (1772) 20 State Tr 1; (1772) Lofft 1
39 Barone, op.cit.,p.7
40 The most celebrated was by Lincoln Steffens, who, after returning from a visit to Russia in 1921, said, "I have seen the future, and it works."
41 Barone, loc.cit.
42 Barone,op.cit.,p. 8
43 Barone, op.cit., p. 229
44 Barone, loc.cit.
45 Mead op.cit., p.47
46 Barone, op.cit., p. 232
47 Barone, op.cit., p. 240
48 Barone, op.cit., p. 243
