We keep scoring a seventeenth-century civil war with a late-twentieth-century conscience. That is the habit I want to break. To today's mind the treatment of Catholics after the Boyne was awful. It was. The penal laws were a stain, and no serious person should pretend otherwise. What does not follow is the lazy next step, the one our education system now treats as thought. Because the losers suffered, the winners must have been wrong about the thing they were fighting over. They were not. The fight of 1688 to 1702 was about whether a king sits above the law. On that question the Catholicism James II had joined to the French throne was firmly on the wrong side. Papal supremacy and the sacred right of kings were not private opinions. They were huge blocks to the development of civic society. The settlement that removed James, bound the crown, and put Locke into print was another step as big as Magna Carta in representative government for ordinary men and women, people like you and me. I despair of an education system that cannot hold both thoughts at once.
1. The wrong century
The comparison people reach for is 1960. Jesus wept. 1960 was a real decade with real achievements, and it is worth listing them so nobody can say the argument is a sneer at the recent past.
The United States passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and broke the legal architecture of Jim Crow. Britain abolished the death penalty for murder. The Race Relations Acts began to put a floor under public conduct. The contraceptive pill changed the lives of women. Vatican II opened windows that had been shut for four hundred years. Most of Africa and much of the remaining European empires completed formal independence. The National Health Service, already a dozen years old, became the settled way a rich country treats the sick. Men walked on the moon. Censorship of the theatre fell. Homosexual acts between men were decriminalised in England and Wales. Those are not small things. A decent country should be proud of them.
They are also not 1688.
The 1960s improved the terms on which people already living inside a constitutional order could claim equal membership of it. That is a moral advance. It is not the invention of the order. You can widen the franchise, strike down a colour bar, and put a man on the lunar surface only if you already live in a polity where power is granted, limited, and argued over in public. The 1960s stood on that floor and redecorated the house. The revolutionary decade that closed the seventeenth century built the floor.
Put the two lists side by side and the presentist habit looks as silly as it is. 1964 told the American South that the law would no longer bless a racial caste. 1689 told a king that he could not suspend the law, raise a peacetime army, or take a pound in tax unless Parliament said so. 1965 gave the vote a new enforcement machinery. 1689 made free elections a condition of the crown. 1969 put a flag on the moon. 1694 created the Bank of England and taught a state how to borrow in daylight instead of by forced loan. 1962 gathered bishops in Rome to speak more kindly to the modern world. 1689 gathered the English Parliament and the Scottish Estates to tell a monarch that the compact could be dissolved. One decade civilised a settlement. The other made the settlement.
I own the comparison. I do not duck 1960. I refuse to let it sit in judgment on 1690 as if the later kindness were the whole of political wisdom.
2. What was actually settled
Start with the documents, not the murals.
James II and VII was removed. In England the Convention Parliament said he had abdicated the government. Parliament bound the crown. No tax without consent. No peacetime standing army without Parliament. Free elections. Speech in Parliament. No cruel and unusual punishment. Protestants might have arms for their defence as allowed by law. The subject might petition the king. Ecclesiastical courts would not be restored as engines of state. Those clauses are in the Bill of Rights of 1689. They are still the grammar of a free country.
The Toleration Act of the same year was narrower than later generations wished. It eased the life of Protestant dissenters and left Catholics outside the door. That is part of the record. So is the Mutiny Act, which put the army on an annual parliamentary leash. So is the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, after which the English press was no longer licensed in advance. So is the Triennial Act of 1694, which stopped a king from parking a tame parliament for a generation. So is the Bank of England, chartered in 1694, which tied public credit to parliamentary grant. So is the Act of Settlement of 1701, which fixed the Protestant succession and made judges removable only by address of both Houses. William died in 1702. By then the crown had been turned from a possession into an office.
Locke published the Two Treatises of Government as the theory of that settlement. Government is a trust. Rights do not come from the king. A ruler who breaks the laws dissolves the compact between ruler and ruled. Locke had written much of it earlier, in the shadow of Exclusion and exile. He published it when the argument had been won in the field and in the lobbies. That timing matters. The book is not a poem about 1688. It is the account of why 1688 was lawful.
Jefferson later used the bones of that settlement. The Declaration's right to throw off a government that has broken its trust is Locke in American English. The Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution lifts a sentence almost whole from the English Bill of Rights. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. That is not a vague influence. That is a copied line. The American constitution is a different machine from Westminster. Nobody serious should say otherwise. The idea that power is granted and can be limited is the same idea. Every later constitutional government that treats power as a trust stands in that line.
This was not democracy as we now use the word. The men who sat in 1689 were property. Women did not vote. Catholics were shut out of office. The point is not that they built heaven. The point is that they bound a king. Representative government for ordinary men and women, people like you and me, grows from that binding. It does not grow from a Stuart who thought the law was a mood.
3. Forfeited, not abdicated
In Edinburgh the Estates did not say James had abdicated. They said he had forfeited the throne. That is a Scottish constitutional ideal, not an English one.
James had not fled from Scottish soil. Abdication would have been a lawyer's trick. The Convention of the Estates, drawing on a line that runs through George Buchanan, treated the crown as a contract. A king who would not take the coronation oath, who professed a religion barred by the law of the kingdom, and who turned a limited monarchy into an arbitrary despotick power, had broken the bargain. The throne was vacant because he had emptied it. William and Mary took it on those terms in May 1689.
The Claim of Right is harsher than the English Bill, and more honest about what had happened. It is also more anti-Catholic in its letter. No papist could be king. A modern reader can dislike the clause and still see the machinery. Scotland did not invite a Dutchman because it had grown bored of the Stuarts. It declared a forfeiture because a king had placed himself outside the law of the realm.
1689 is not the only father of the Scottish Enlightenment. It is a necessary one. Hutcheson, Hume and Smith are children of the eighteenth century. They needed the Union of 1707, a literate Kirk, Atlantic trade, and the long peace after the last Jacobite throw. They also needed a country in which the crown was no longer a sacred mystery. 1689 does not invent Edinburgh. It makes Edinburgh possible. As a matter of decent intellectual pride, a Scotsman ought to prefer forfeiture to abdication. It is the harder idea. It is the better one.
4. The American sentence
The American founders were not Irish columnists. They were provincial Englishmen with a library. They read Coke. They read Sidney. They read Locke. They read the Bill of Rights. When they came to write a charter that would outlive a king, they reached for sentences already tested. Jefferson did not copy the Constitution out of a 1689 statute book. He used the settlement the way a carpenter uses a square. Rights do not issue from a throne. Government is a trust. When the trustee embezzles, the beneficiaries may sack him.
If you teach children that 1690 is only a sectarian picnic on a riverbank, you teach them that the American constitution arrived by miracle. It did not. It arrived by inheritance.
5. Catholics, kings, and the Pope who would not help James
Now the part that needs nerve.
To today's mind the treatment of Catholics was awful. After Limerick the Protestant Irish parliament shredded promises made in the treaty. Catholics were barred from parliament, from the bench, from officers' commissions. Later statutes struck at land, at the education of children abroad, at the regular clergy. That is not civic society. That is a winner's code. It should be said first, and without a plea in mitigation dressed up as history.
The Catholicism James had attached himself to was not the quiet recusancy of an English manor. It was a political theology. The king held his crown from God. In the France of Louis XIV that theology had just shown its civic face. The Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685. Huguenots were dragonnaded toward the Mass. James took that party in England and in Ireland. That project was a block to civic society. Irish countrymen who said the rosary were not sitting in Versailles. Plenty of Catholics wanted no part of Louis and no part of James. They were not the party. They paid for it anyway.
Even Rome would not underwrite it. Innocent XI spent his pontificate in a bruising fight with Louis. He disliked James's methods. Dutch diplomats called him a Protestant Pope. If the Pope himself would not sponsor James's version of Catholic monarchy, you cannot tell the story as Protestants against the Catholic Church. You can tell it as limited government against sacred kingship, with Catholics standing on both sides of the line.
The Mass was not the enemy. The party of the absolute king was the enemy. The settlement's gift is still this. No king above the law. The settlement's sin is that it then wrote a second law for a whole communion. You can defend the first without blessing the second. You should.
Papal supremacy as a civil problem was not a hallucination. The mistake was to treat every Catholic subject as an agent of that jurisdiction. That is the slide from a political fear into a civil disability. 1689 makes the fear intelligible. The penal laws make the slide inexcusable.
6. What we kept, what we should have dropped
What we kept is the trustee crown. No tax without consent. No peacetime army as a royal household. Free elections. Speech in Parliament. Judges who do not sit at pleasure. A succession fixed by law. A bank that answers to a parliament. A press that does not ask permission before it prints. Government as a trust. Rights that do not come from the king. A ruler who breaks the laws dissolves the compact. That cluster is why later ages could even have a 1960s.
What we should have dropped is the idea that a communion is a fifth column by birth. The penal code did not make civic society. It postponed it. Irish history after Limerick is in large part the bill for that postponement.
A united civic order was the prize. Wolfe Tone, the Protestant founder of Irish republicanism, later reached for a version of it and failed in a different key. The United Irishmen at their best wanted Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter under one law. That is closer to the spirit of 1689 than any parade that treats the Boyne as a football score.
A founding is greater than a widening, and a founding does not get a moral free pass. That is the proportion. Teaching would sound like this. The treatment of Catholics was wrong. The political theology James had joined was also wrong. Civic society required the defeat of sacred kingship. It did not require the humiliation of a people. We kept the first necessity. We should have refused the second.
A free country is one in which the crown is a trustee. That argument was won in 1689. We still live inside it. We do not have to pretend the winners were kind. We do have to remember what they won.