Glorious Revolution

A revolution does not require an uprising in the streets; the Glorious Revolution removed a king from power with almost no fighting at all, and its outcome mattered more for what it wrote into law afterward than for how it removed him.

In 1688, a group of English nobles invited William of Orange, husband of King James II's Protestant daughter Mary, to intervene against a Catholic king who had alienated Parliament and the political establishment. James fled to France that December with little resistance offered on his behalf, and the following year the new monarchs, William III and Mary II, accepted the Bill of Rights of 1689 as the price of the throne. The Bill barred a Catholic from ever becoming monarch again and, more consequentially for the shape of government that followed, established that the crown could not suspend laws, levy taxes or keep a standing army without Parliament's consent.

That settlement fixed the terms of English constitutional monarchy for the centuries that followed, and it did so gradually rather than by a single constitutional document: executive power migrated from the crown to ministers who needed the confidence of the House of Commons over the following two centuries, a convention rather than a law, and this atlas's own entry on the United Kingdom treats 1689's assertion of parliamentary supremacy as the constitutional root of a state that would not take its final legal shape for another century. Japan's Meiji Constitution of 1889 later built the same basic structure, a monarch bound by law with power exercised through an elected government, by deliberate design rather than by this kind of accumulated precedent.