English Bill of Rights

Timeline

1. 1688–1689Palace of Westminster · WestminsterAfter James II fled, the Convention Parliament meeting in 1689 drew up the Declaration of Rights, listing abuses of royal power, and on 13 February granted the crown to William III and Mary II. The declaration required that the monarch not suspend laws, nor tax or maintain a standing army in peacetime without Parliament's consent, thereby binding the change of dynasty to a publicly readable list of rights, which became the basis for the subsequent statute.
2. 1689Palace of Westminster · WestminsterThe formal Parliament rewrote the declaration into the Bill of Rights, which received royal assent on 16 December 1689. Its provisions confirmed freedom of speech in Parliament, the right of petition, prohibitions on excessive fines and torture, the right of Protestants to bear arms, and required that the crown pass to Protestants. Thus the revolutionary settlement became more than accession conditions: it became a statute binding subsequent monarchs, giving written basis to parliamentary sovereignty and limited monarchy.
3. 1689–1694Palace of Westminster · WestminsterAfter the act took effect, Parliament implemented 'no standing army in peacetime without parliamentary consent' through the annual Mutiny Act, placed royal finances under parliamentary control through grants and the national debt, and the 1694 Triennial Act required regular parliamentary elections. Locke's Two Treatises of Government, published the same year, provided a philosophical formulation of resistance to tyranny and contract theory, but the act itself was a political compromise in statute, not direct legislation from Locke's text. This package of arrangements settled the Glorious Revolution from a coup into a repeatable constitutional structure.