• In 1688 King James II of England fled to France, fearing a revolution like the one that led to the trial and execution of his father, Charles I. The crisis was resolved when Parliament invited James’s daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, to take the throne in James’s place. This Glorious Revolution, as it was called, generated furious debate over the extent of royal power in England. Thomas Cartwright, a bishop of the Church of England, spoke out in defense of James and his God-given right to rule. Taking the opposite side, John Locke argued that sovereign power resided in the people, who could reject a monarch if he set himself above the law. In 1689 William and Mary ended the debate by signing the Bill of Rights, which enshrined the rights of Parliament and limited the authority of the monarch.

Thomas Cartwright, A Sermon Preached upon the Anniversary Solemnity of the Inauguration of Our Dread Sovereign Lord King James II

“Our religion will never suffer us to dispense with our loyalty, to serve any worldly interest or advantage; no, not for its own defense. It sets the crown fast and easy upon the King’s head, without catechizing him: for be his heart inclinable to any religion, or none, it leaves him no rival, none to insult or lord it over him. It disclaims all usurpation, popular or papal; neither pope nor presbyter may control him; none but the great God, the only ruler of princes, can over-rule him; to whom ’tis his duty, glory and happiness to be subject. Though the King should not please or humor us; though he should rend off the mantle from our bodies (as Saul did from Samuel), nay though he should sentence us to death (of which, blessed be God and the King, there is no danger), yet if we are living members of the Church of England, we must neither open our mouths, nor lift our hands against him; but honor him before the people and elders of Israel.”

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government

“But government into whosesoever hands it is put, being as I have before shown, entrusted with this condition, and for this end, that men might have and secure their properties, the prince or senate, however it may have power to make laws for the regulation of property between the subjects one amongst another, yet can never have a power to take to themselves the whole, or any part of the subjects’ property without their own consent. For this would be in effect to leave them no property at all.

. . . The constitution of the legislative is the first and fundamental act of society, whereby provision is made for the continuation of their union, under the direction of persons, and bonds of laws, made by persons authorized thereunto, by the consent and appointment of the people, without which no one man, or number of men, amongst them, can have authority of making laws that shall be binding to the rest. When any one, or more, shall take upon them to make laws, whom the people have not appointed so to do, they make laws without authority, which the people are not therefore bound to obey; by which means they come again to be out of subjection, and may constitute to themselves a new legislative, as they think best, being in full liberty to resist the force of those, who, without authority, would impose any thing upon them.”

Source: Steven C. A. Pincus, England’s Glorious Revolution, 1688–1689: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006), pp. 71–72 (Cartwright), 161–164 (Locke).

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