1689
William and Mary Crowned
The Convention Parliament offered the crown jointly to William and Mary on condition they accept a Declaration of Rights limiting royal prerogatives. They agreed. Parliamentary supremacy was now a constitutional fact, and England had quietly become a parliamentary monarchy while Europe was still absolute. The Glorious Revolution, nearly bloodless in England, redrew the relationship between sovereign and subject forever.
Treaty of Nerchinsk
Russian and Qing diplomats, meeting on the Amur frontier with Jesuit interpreters, signed a treaty in Latin that settled the border between the two empires for the first time. Russia withdrew from the Amur valley; both sides agreed to regulated trade at Kiakhta. Two massive land empires had met and, amazingly, compromised.
English Bill of Rights
Parliament codified the terms of William and Mary's accession into a statute: no suspension of laws without parliamentary consent, no taxation without parliament, no standing army in peacetime, free elections, free speech in parliament. English constitutional government had its written foundation, a century before the American version, and the document became a model for every subsequent declaration of citizens' rights.
Locke Publishes Two Treatises of Government
John Locke, returning from exile in Holland, published anonymously a pair of philosophical treatises arguing that legitimate government rested on consent and the protection of natural rights to life, liberty, and property. His words would fuel the American and French revolutions nearly a century later, providing the intellectual ammunition for every subsequent argument that sovereignty belongs to the people.
Toleration Act
The new English parliament passed an act granting freedom of worship to Protestant dissenters, though not to Catholics or Unitarians. It was a limited measure, but it effectively ended the persecution of Baptists, Quakers, and Presbyterians. English religious uniformity, enforced since the Reformation, was quietly over, and the principle of toleration had gained its first permanent foothold in English law.