Glorious Revolution: A History from Beginning to End

On August 28, 2019, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson asked Queen Elizabeth II to prorogue Parliament. She approved the request. The elaborate ritual of the queen granting the prime minister permission to do what he intended to do anyway demonstrates how the legacy of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 made the British Parliament, not the monarch, the ultimate source of power in government. But it was not always so.

Under the Stuart kings, battles between Parliament and the throne were far from unusual, with no ceremonial rituals to preserve popular fictions regarding who was in power. King Charles I believed ardently in the divine right of kings and went to his execution firmly convinced that he was God’s anointed. His second son, James II, believed the same. However, James II was a Catholic, and his succession to the English throne following the death of his brother Charles II set in motion a series of cataclysmic events which culminated in a largely bloodless revolution to bring James’s daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, to the throne as Protestant sovereigns.

Under the eleven-year Interregnum following the execution of King Charles I, Parliament got a taste of power, and ordinary men perceived that God might choose rulers from among their own class. The path to parliamentary supremacy over pedigreed royalty, although ultimately achieved without bloodshed, was strewn with religious intolerance, petty rivalries, titanic clashes of ideology, and a belief in the rights of Parliament to govern without royal interference. The evolution of parliamentary supremacy over royal birthright redefined human social evolution, laying the groundwork for a bold new experiment in government that would make democracy the crowning achievement of the modern age.

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Lydbog: 2. august 2026