A History of the Constitution - The English Bill of Rights (8/30)

The English Bill of Rights (1689)

Nov 21, 2025

The English Bill of Rights (1689)

If Magna Carta was liberty’s first written oath, the English Bill of Rights was its second baptism.

Between 1215 and 1689, the English people endured centuries of religious wars, dynastic feuds, and struggles over sovereignty—each era teaching a brutal lesson about the dangers of concentrated power. The Great Charter had bound the king to the law. The Bill of Rights went further: it bound government itself to the consent of the governed.

What began as a conflict between monarch and Parliament became a philosophical triumph: the institutionalization of freedom. The English Bill of Rights marked the point where moral principle and political design fused into something that would define modern constitutionalism—law, not will; representation, not divine right.

And yet, between those two milestones—between Runnymede and the Glorious Revolution—there was a third and lesser-known spark: a brief, radical experiment in democratic thought called An Agreement of the People. Born amid civil war and religious upheaval, it was the moment when the English commoner first imagined what the Founders would later realize—a constitution made by the people, for the people, resting not on privilege or Parliament but on universal right.

What began as rebellion would, in time, become the architecture of constitutional liberty: law, not will; representation, not divine right; consent, not compulsion.

In this entry, we will explore both the Glorious Revolution and its older, lesser-known cousin.

The Road from Runnymede to Revolution

From Magna Carta to the seventeenth century, England’s political story was one of unfinished sentences. Each generation clarified a fragment of liberty’s grammar—common law, trial by jury, parliamentary consent—but never the whole text. The monarchy and Parliament remained locked in a centuries-long tug-of-war over who ultimately ruled.

The Reformation had shattered the unity of Christendom, unleashing new ideas about conscience and authority. The Renaissance revived the Roman ideal of civic virtue. And by the 1600s, the printing press had democratized ideas, spreading them faster than kings could burn them. The question could no longer be postponed: Is liberty the birthright of all, or the privilege of the few?

From that question would come civil war, regicide, and—briefly—the boldest document England had ever seen. And out of that cauldron arose the most dangerous idea of all: that legitimacy flows upward from the people, not downward from a crown.

The Century of Crisis

The 1600s in England were a crucible of competing absolutes.

King James I declared the divine right of kings, insisting that monarchs answered only to God. His son, Charles I, took that theology of authority and turned it into politics, dissolving Parliament and ruling by decree. When Parliament resisted, war broke out—the English Civil War (1642–1651)—pitting royalists against reformers, sword against scripture.

The victory of Parliament and the execution of Charles I in 1649 shocked Europe. It was the first time a king had been tried and killed by his own subjects for violating the laws of the realm. Yet the ensuing republic under Oliver Cromwell soon fell into its own brand of authoritarian military rule—proof that tyranny can wear any uniform, even that of virtue.

Amid that chaos, soldiers and citizens began to dream of something unthinkable: a political order founded on equality before the law, religious liberty, and written consent among free men.

The Levellers and An Agreement of the People

In the shadow of the Civil War, a group of English radicals known as the Levellers began to articulate a new political vision. They were not nobles or bishops, but ordinary men—pamphleteers, soldiers, artisans—who believed that God had made all men equally free and that no ruler, Parliament, or priest could claim dominion over another’s conscience.

Their leaders—John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn—became the first architects of democratic constitutionalism. They argued that legitimate government arises only from a voluntary compact among the governed, that laws must serve the public good, and that representation must be equal, accountable, and frequent.

In 1647 and again in 1649, they presented a written proposal titled An Agreement of the People to the army and Parliament. It began with the bold words:

“That the things hereafter mentioned are our native rights, and that they ought to be provided for by a law paramount and unalterable, in which we desire to be secured.”

The Agreement called for:

Regularly elected Parliaments, chosen by broader suffrage.
Equality before the law, regardless of birth or wealth.
Freedom of religion and conscience.
A written constitution limiting the reach of all future governments.

Though the Levellers failed politically—Cromwell suppressed them, and many were imprisoned or killed—their ideas survived. Their writings circulated among dissenters, reformers, and eventually across the Atlantic.

When Jefferson later wrote that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” he was echoing the Levellers’ creed. An Agreement of the People had been the first English document to make that claim explicit.

The Founders saw in their story both inspiration and warning: that liberty must be ordered, that democracy without virtue decays, but that no government is legitimate without consent.

The Restoration and the Return of the Crown

After Cromwell’s death in 1658, England’s experiment with republican rule collapsed. The army fractured, the nation wearied of instability, and in 1660 the monarchy returned under Charles II.

Yet something fundamental had changed. The execution of Charles I had forever shattered the illusion of divine right. Kings might return, but not as gods. The English conscience, once awakened, would not go back to sleep.

Charles II, a pragmatist, ruled cautiously. His brother and successor, James II, did not. A convert to Catholicism, he revived the old arrogance—suspending laws, appointing loyalists, and raising a standing army. England had escaped one tyranny only to meet another. The question, once again, became whether the law would survive the ruler.

The Glorious Revolution: Power Through Consent

In 1688, Parliament invited William of Orange and his wife Mary, James II’s Protestant daughter, to assume the throne. The transfer was bloodless—hence the title “Glorious Revolution”—but its meaning was profound.

William and Mary accepted the crown not by divine decree, but by contract. In 1689, Parliament presented them with a document that declared the conditions of their rule: the English Bill of Rights.

It was not a plea but a demand—an assertion that law and liberty were inseparable, and that both now flowed from the consent of the people’s representatives.

The Text That Changed Everything

The English Bill of Rights begins with a scathing preamble, listing the abuses of James II and asserting the supremacy of Parliament. Its heart is both poetic and precise.

“That the pretended power of suspending of laws or the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal.
That levying money for or to the use of the Crown by pretence of prerogative, without grant of Parliament, for longer time, or in other manner than the same is or shall be granted, is illegal.
That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.
That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

These were not radical claims; they were reaffirmations of ancient rights. Yet they turned political tradition on its head. For the first time, a sovereign accepted the throne subject to law, with explicit conditions spelled out by the representatives of the people.

It was, in essence, a written constitution before the word existed.

What It Established

The English Bill of Rights formalized principles that are now woven into every liberal democracy:

Supremacy of Law through Parliament – The monarch could not suspend, ignore, or override laws.
Consent-Based Taxation – Money could not be raised without parliamentary approval, institutionalizing the principle of “no taxation without representation.”
Free Speech and Free Elections – Parliamentary debate was protected from royal interference; representatives could speak and vote without fear.
Due Process and Humane Justice – Prohibitions against excessive bail and cruel punishment echoed down to the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Right to Petition and Self-Defense – Citizens could address grievances to the crown and bear arms in self-defense—rudimentary expressions of participatory rights.

The monarchy, still revered, became a symbol rather than a source of sovereignty. Real power lay in Parliament and, by extension, in the people.

The Founders and the English Bill of Rights

When the American Founders studied the English constitution, they saw a model worth emulating—but also transcending. What they saw was a single continuous story: the steady transfer of authority from crown to law, from law to Parliament, and ultimately from Parliament to the people.

From Magna Carta, they learned that rulers must obey law.
From An Agreement of the People, that government must rest on universal consent.
From the English Bill of Rights, that law itself must be expressed in institutions accountable to the governed.

They admired the balance of powers described by Montesquieu, who held up England as proof that liberty could survive in a mixed government of king, lords, and commons. They absorbed the idea that written law could permanently bind authority and preserve liberty.

But they also recognized the limits of 1689. The English Bill of Rights applied mainly to Protestants and left Parliament itself largely unchecked. The Founders would correct that imbalance by dispersing power among three branches, not just one representative body, and by grounding rights not in religion or class but in human nature itself.

Still, the parallels are unmistakable. The First Amendment’s protection of petition and speech, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, and the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments are all direct descendants of this English text.

The Founders’ Bill of Rights was not a rebellion against British law—it was its completion.

Philosophy Made Law

The English Bill of Rights represents a quiet but revolutionary shift in the philosophy of government. It answered the question that haunted every age before it: Who governs the governors?

In 1215, the answer was the law.
In 1649, the Levellers said the people.
In 1689, Parliament declared both together.

That equilibrium—law rooted in popular consent—became the model the Founders adapted and improved. Where England had monarchy limited by Parliament, America would have republic limited by Constitution. In both, liberty became self-sustaining: a system where ambition checks ambition, and justice survives personalities.

This was the hinge between monarchy and modernity—the discovery that authority can be both legitimate and limited, that order can coexist with freedom. The Founders carried this revelation across the Atlantic and built upon it a republic of laws designed to outlast its founders, just as the English Bill of Rights had outlasted its drafters.

The English Legacy in the American Soul

For Americans, And Agreement of the People and the English Bill of Rights were proof that liberty is not invented—it is inherited, argued, and renewed. Every clause of the U.S. Bill of Rights echoes this ancestry:

Freedom of speech and petition—1689.
Trial by jury and due process—1215.
Consent of the governed—1649.
The right to conscience—beyond them all, the moral inheritance of every age.

Even today, when debates rage over the limits of executive power, free speech, or surveillance, we are still arguing over the same principles first written into that document more than three centuries ago.

Magna Carta had said, “The king is under law.”
The English Bill of Rights added, “And law itself must rest on consent.”
The Constitution declared, “All just power derives from the people.”

Each step was a link in liberty’s chain.

Reflection: The Law That Learns

The English Bill of Rights was not an endpoint—it was a turning point. It taught that freedom is not a condition to be achieved but a covenant to be kept. It taught that law, when written and consented to, can outlive tyranny. And it taught that the people’s conscience is the only enduring source of legitimate authority.

From Runnymede to Putney to Westminster to Philadelphia, liberty’s story is the same: men and women insisting that power answer to principle.

The Founders looked across that thousand-year arc and saw themselves not as revolutionaries, but as heirs. They carried forward the trust first inked in Latin on vellum, then shouted by soldiers in a field, then enshrined in the English Parliament.

That trust remains our inheritance—and our test.

External Links for Further Reading

Next Entry: The Reformation and the Birth of Conscience in Politics

Dan Hollaway

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