| Date | November 5 – December 23, 1688 |
| Location | England, Scotland, Ireland |
| Caused by | Catholic succession crisis; James II's suspension of penal laws via the Declaration of Indulgence; birth of James Francis Edward Stuart; Invitation of the Seven |
| Resulted in | Deposition of James II; joint accession of William III and Mary II; Bill of Rights 1689; establishment of constitutional monarchy |
| Parties | William III of Orange and the Dutch Republic · English Parliamentarians (Whig and Tory) · James II and Jacobite loyalists · Louis XIV of France (as supporter of James in exile) |
| Lead figures | William III of Orange, Mary II, James II, Lord Churchill (Duke of Marlborough), The Seven Bishops, John Locke |
The Glorious Revolution was a constitutional coup and change of sovereign that occurred between November 5 and December 23, 1688, in England, Scotland, and Ireland. The invasion of England by William III of Orange, Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, resulted in the deposition of the Catholic King James II and the joint accession of William and his wife Mary II to the English throne, fundamentally altering the relationship between Crown and Parliament and establishing the conditions under which modern British constitutional governance would develop.
By the autumn of 1688, King James II had alienated broad sections of the English political establishment through a sustained programme of Catholic preferment and the assertion of royal prerogative in matters of religious dispensation. His Declaration of Indulgence of April 1687, which suspended penal laws against Catholics and Nonconformists, was received with deep suspicion by Anglican gentry and Whig parliamentarians alike, who regarded it less as an act of tolerance than as a vehicle for Catholic resurgence. The trial and acquittal of the Seven Bishops in June 1688 — who had petitioned against being compelled to read the Declaration from their pulpits — was celebrated publicly in London and is widely regarded as the proximate political catalyst for what followed.
The birth of James's son, James Francis Edward Stuart, on June 10, 1688, sharpened the urgency felt among Protestant interests. Where James's Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne, had previously offered the prospect of an eventual Protestant succession, the new male heir removed that expectation entirely. Within weeks of the birth, a group of seven prominent Englishmen — Whig and Tory alike — dispatched a formal letter of invitation to William of Orange, assuring him of sufficient domestic support to justify an armed crossing of the Channel. The letter, subsequently known as the Invitation of the Seven, reached William at The Hague on June 30 and was held in deliberate confidence until preparations for invasion were advanced.
William's motivations were not confined to the liberation of English Protestantism. His primary strategic objective was the enlistment of English military and financial resources into the broader European coalition against Louis XIV of France, whose ambitions threatened Dutch commercial and territorial sovereignty. The [Glorious Revolution](/wiki/glorious-revolution-1688) has accordingly been interpreted by subsequent historians as much a Dutch foreign policy operation as an English constitutional event.
### Thursday, November 5
William's fleet of approximately 500 vessels — among the largest amphibious forces assembled in northern European waters to that point — landed at Brixham on the Devon coast on November 5, 1688, a date whose Protestant symbolic resonance William's propagandists had deliberately sought. The choice of Brixham was determined primarily by wind conditions following an abortive first sailing attempt in late October, during which the fleet had been driven back by storms. William landed without serious military opposition. James, informed of the landing at Whitehall on November 6, initially prepared to resist, ordering his army to muster at Salisbury.
### November 6–19
James's position deteriorated rapidly as William advanced north and east through Somerset and Wiltshire. A significant portion of James's officer corps, including the influential Lord Churchill — later the Duke of Marlborough — defected to William between November 17 and 19, a series of desertions that effectively dissolved any prospect of a loyalist military defence. James's daughter Anne slipped out of Whitehall on the night of November 25, deepening his personal humiliation and signalling the collapse of dynastic solidarity. James himself, afflicted by recurrent nosebleeds recorded in the dispatches of his personal physician Dr. Thomas Waldron, retreated from Salisbury to London on November 23 without engaging William's forces.
### December
James opened negotiations with William in early December, dispatching commissioners to a parley at Hungerford on December 8. William's terms — free elections, Parliamentary control of taxation, and the disarming of Irish Catholic troops — were accepted in principle by James's representatives, though James simultaneously arranged the flight of Queen Mary of Modena and the infant Prince of Wales to France on December 10. James himself attempted to flee that same night, dropping the Great Seal of England into the Thames from London Bridge — an act intended to render government legally inoperable and thereby oblige William to govern in a constitutional vacuum. He was intercepted by Kentish fishermen near Faversham and returned to London, where William permitted his second escape attempt on December 23. James crossed to France and took up residence at the court of Louis XIV, formally ending the crisis.
William entered London on December 18, 1688, to public demonstrations of relief in the City and Westminster, though official celebration was muted by the administrative difficulties created by the dissolution of Parliament and the disposal of the Great Seal. A Convention Parliament — so called because it was assembled without the prior summons of a reigning monarch — met on January 22, 1689, and debated whether James had abdicated or merely vacated the throne. The distinction had significant constitutional consequences: abdication implied voluntary relinquishment, while vacancy permitted Parliament to dispose of the Crown by resolution without acknowledging any right of hereditary succession in the infant James Francis Edward Stuart.
The Convention resolved on February 6, 1689, that James had abdicated by fleeing the kingdom — a determination that historians including J.P. Kenyon and Mark Goldie have noted was politically necessary rather than legally precise, as James had in fact been permitted to leave by William and had not renounced the Crown by any formal instrument. The Bill of Rights, enacted in December 1689, codified the terms under which William and Mary held the throne and enumerated the constitutional limitations on royal authority that the Parliament of 1689 regarded as non-negotiable.
The Glorious Revolution established the constitutional precedent that the Crown held its authority subject to Parliamentary consent — a principle that, while contested in legal form throughout the eighteenth century, was never subsequently reversed by force. The Bill of Rights and the later Act of Settlement (1701), which confined the succession to Protestant heirs, together formed the legislative foundation of what became known as the constitutional monarchy. The revolution's influence extended beyond England: its doctrines of limited government and the protection of property rights informed John Locke's *Two Treatises of Government* (1689), which Locke had substantially drafted prior to the revolution but published in its aftermath, and which exercised enduring influence on Enlightenment political theory in France and the American colonies.
The events of 1688 are described as "glorious" in a formulation first recorded in the political pamphlet literature of 1689 and later consolidated in Whig historiography, most durably by Thomas Babington Macaulay in his *History of England* (1848–1861). The characterisation has been contested by later historians, who have noted that the revolution was glorious principally for the Protestant gentry and that it entailed significant violence in Ireland and Scotland, where the Jacobite cause produced armed resistance well into the 1690s. The Irish campaign of 1689–1691, culminating in the Battle of the Boyne (July 1, 1690) and the Treaty of Limerick (October 3, 1691), resulted in the dispossession of a substantial portion of the Catholic Irish landowning class and is not remembered in Ireland as a bloodless constitutional adjustment.
The tercentenary of the Glorious Revolution in 1988 was marked by exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery and a commemorative programme broadcast by the BBC, which included a reassessment of the event's Scottish and Irish dimensions. The Dutch angle of the revolution — long underemphasised in English national historiography — received renewed scholarly attention following the quincentenary events of 1988 and the publication of Jonathan Israel's edited volume *The Anglo-Dutch Moment* (1991), which argued that William's invasion should be understood as a Dutch strategic intervention rather than an English constitutional evolution. The House of Orange's role in the revolution remains a live cultural and political matter in Northern Ireland, where the Orange Order's annual marching season commemorates William's victories, most prominently the Battle of the Boyne on July 12.