Currents in the River of History

One of my favorite analogies compares history to a river.  The river flows without respect to artificial boundaries with currents affecting different ships in different ways.  December 16, 1689 is a red-letter date in English history.  Parliament enacted the British Bill of Rights.  Known ever since as the Glorious Revolution, the British accomplished two things.  The act permanently transferred British sovereignty from the crown to Parliament and guaranteed fundamental civil rights British citizens believed had been theirs for centuries but had never been written down.

For the British, the voyage to throw off the yoke of royal rule began in 1215 and ended in 1689.   The United States is a child of Britain so important events in the evolution from royal to Parliamentary rule affect Americans, but not in the same way.  In the timeline of American independence, the Glorious Revolution was significant, but not a bookend as it was for the British.  The Glorious Revolution affected the vessel of American liberty, but our ship had to continue navigating many new currents and rough waters from the Stamp Act to the Revolutionary War before reaching the same port of self-governance in 1783.

When William the Conqueror took the English crown in 1066, he created an absolute monarchy in which the king’s word was law.  That is a somewhat theoretical definition.  Even the most powerful king cannot be so arbitrary, at least not for long.  William and his successors relied on alliances, relatives, marriages, religious beliefs, their own wealth and other factors.  The king’s unchecked authority lasted until 1215 when the nobility forced King John II to sign the Magna Carta.  Over the long haul, the Magna Carta limited the crown in one important way, future kings needed the assent of the nobility to raise money.

In 1295, King Edward I created the first Parliament.  For strong rulers like Edward who could dominate his nobles, Parliament was not so much a limitation as a tool of marshalling money and troops for military campaigns, building projects and other royal endeavors.  However, Parliament did not remain passive for long.  English kings still retained a lot of power because they could call and dissolve Parliament at will, but not every king was as forceful as Edward.

Over the next 400 years, Parliament increasingly sought a voice in financial expenditures.  By the 1640s, King Charles I needed money and reluctantly called Parliament into session to raise taxes.  Charles soon found himself confronting openly hostile nobles unwilling to blindly finance the king.  Charles dissolved the body causing the outbreak of civil war.   Ultimately Charles lost the war and his head in 1649.  Parliament abolished the monarchy and Oliver Cromwell became a king by another name, Lord Protector.  His power formally rested in Parliament but Cromwell controlled the body much the way Edward I did.  Shortly after Cromwell’s death, the English restored the monarchy in 1660 with Charles II as king.  The balance of power had changed though and English regents ruled at the pleasure of Parliament.

Upon ascending the throne in 1685, King James II threatened to return Britain to the Catholic Church.  Ever since the founding of the Church of England by Henry VIII in 1534, Protestants and Catholics had been locked in a struggle for the soul of England.  All too often efforts to return England to the Catholic fold originated from rivals, France and Spain.  Tired of external meddling, Parliament removed the Catholic James II inviting Protestant Dutchman William of Orange and Anglican English Queen Mary II to rule jointly in 1688.  Parliament then passed the Bill of Rights the following year formally transferring English sovereignty from the crown.  British kings became figureheads.  Real power resided with Parliament.

We recognize the right to free elections, freedom of speech and the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” contained in the English Bill of Rights.  Our founders incorporated them into our Constitution.  But for Americans, the struggle for self-governance was not over in 1689 as it was in England.  The Glorious Revolution was one piece of the puzzle.  Americans interpreted Parliament’s assertion of governmental prerogative as a confirmation of the American right of local control—exercised since arrival in the New World.  When Parliament sought greater control over the colonies after the French and Indian War, the colonists cited the British Bill of Rights as a basis for resistance in their rallying cry “no taxation without representation.”

As I mentioned earlier, the allegorical river of history has no artificial borders.  We view victory in the American Revolution as a defining moment when the United States became an independent nation, but that is a man-made boundary.  Breaking the past into definable chapters makes history more understandable but can be misleading.  Though independent of Britain in 1783, the US labored under the deeply flawed Articles of Confederation.  The 1789 Constitution supposedly guaranteed American liberties the way the British Bill of Rights did.  However, the Constitution lacked a Bill of Rights though which was not added until 1791. 

We then embark into uncharted waters in deciding who enjoys the freedoms granted by the Constitution.  African Americans and women did not in 1791.  In fact, neither did all white males.  For example, only those white males who owned land could vote in Virginia until 1830.  The documents created in 1789-1791 were not really the end, but just another mile marker.  American liberty was not achieved in 1783, 1791, the end of the Civil War in 1865, or even 1918 when women received the right vote.  Thus, we can better understand our own history when we place British History (and others) into context as currents and eddies in an ever-flowing river with no real destination. We can better place important events in British History into a different perspective for Americans.