today we're looking at the glorious revolution
hello welcome to the daily bell ringer please don't forget to subscribe and take a look at the
questions down in the description so the glorious revolution and sometimes called the bloodless
revolution or the revolution of 1688 was a revolution in which the king of england king james
ii was overthrown and replaced on the throne now you might be asking yourself why are we covering
british politics or the monarchy when the daily bell ringer primarily focuses on american history
well the glorious revolution will have a huge political impact that will influence the american
colonists and arguably plant the seed that will eventually grow into independence from britain
there were both political and religious reasons why the glorious revolution took place and in 1685
king james ii took the throne james was a catholic and if you remember years before in the 1500s
king henry viii had broken away from the catholic church and formed a protestant church the anglican
church of england and made the king himself the head of the church now remember protestants were
those who protested against the catholic church so that's how we get the name protestants now since
the church of england was established anyone who disagreed with the church technically was
also disagreeing with the king since the king was the head of the church so many religious
groups began to be punished including people such as the pilgrims the puritans you know who
came to america but also catholics were persecuted just for being catholic and the tensions between
catholics and protestants just grew in england throughout the 1600s and when james ii became king
he began making rules that favored catholics in 1687 he issued the declaration of indulgence
which suspended laws that punish catholics now of course british parliament which
was basically the british problem which is basically the law-making body of the british
government was primarily made up of protestants and of course they did not approve of what james
was doing and so later in 1687 james did get rid of parliament and he planned to create a new one
that would support him now james ii had a daughter named mary who was a protestant and many began to
argue that she should become the new monarch but to complicate things in 1688 james ii had a son
named james that now would be the rightful heir to the throne and james ii announced that that child
would be raised catholic and furthermore james ii was developing a close relationship with france
who historically had been an enemy of britain so this upset many of the citizens of britain
and so now all of england is in an uproar over who's going to be king or who should be king
add to the mess several british leaders wrote to william of orange who was a prince in the
netherlands and they basically said they would give him their allegiance if he promised to
invade england and remove james ii from the throne william ii was already kind of considering this
and so in november of 1688 he landed dutch forces in england james ii assembled an army and set out
to confront william of orange's forces however much of james james ii's army deserted him and
went over to the dutch side and so james retreated to london and then fled the country leaving the
throne empty and going to france where he died in 1701. now in the meantime the british needed
to fill the throne and parliament was reassembled and when they reassembled they had pressure from
willing the orange to make him the monarch and so they decided to create what they called a
joint monarchy with william as king and james's daughter mary is the queen however this this
would be a new type of monarchy where some a lot of the power of the monarch would be taken away
and parliament would hold a lot of that power and the monarchy would be accountable to parliament
so william and mary signed what they became what became known as the british bill of rights which
gave the parliament power again and it opened up elections it guaranteed that the monarch would
not be catholic and it gave freedom of speech to parliament now this this was an important step in
england because it began to move the country away from an absolute monarchy where the king or the
monarchy held all the power and began to gave more power to the people or began to move them towards
a constitutional monarchy where again the people had more power now in the american colonies when
they received news of the glorious revolution it prompted them to begin to question the power of
the monarchy and really began to foster ideas of possibly being able to govern themselves or
you know having self-government and of course it would be for it wouldn't be for another 70 years
before the colonies would declare independence from britain but one could argue that the glorious
revolution planted the seed of what eventually would become independence and the creation of the
united states of america so with that hopefully you learned something and thanks for watching
you