Most revolutions are written in blood. The one that reshaped England in 1688 was, by the standards of such things, astonishingly quiet — so quiet that its winners proudly named it the Glorious Revolution, the bloodless revolution, the revolution that supposedly happened without a war. That is not quite true, as we’ll see, but the events of that autumn did something genuinely radical. In the space of a few months, England replaced one king with another by act of Parliament, and in doing so settled, more or less for good, the centuries-old question of whether the crown or Parliament held the upper hand.

To see why it happened, cast your mind back to where we left off. The monarchy had been restored in 1660 after the upheaval of the Civil War, but the old tensions between king and Parliament had never really been resolved, only papered over. Charles II had navigated them with cunning and charm. His brother, who became James II in 1685, had neither. James was openly, devoutly Catholic in a country that was overwhelmingly and often fanatically Protestant, and he seemed determined to push his religion to the centre of national life whether his subjects liked it or not.

For a while, the political classes gritted their teeth and waited him out. James was already middle-aged, and his heirs were his two grown Protestant daughters from an earlier marriage. The unspoken plan was simply to endure his reign and let a Protestant succeed him in due course. Then, in 1688, James’s second wife gave birth to a son — a Catholic boy who would now take precedence over his Protestant half-sisters. Suddenly the prospect was not one awkward Catholic king but a permanent Catholic dynasty. For James’s many enemies, that changed everything.

A group of leading Englishmen took an extraordinary step. They secretly invited a foreign prince to invade. That prince was William of Orange, the Dutch ruler who happened to be both James’s nephew and the husband of James’s elder Protestant daughter, Mary. William had his own reasons to accept — he was locked in a long struggle against the France of Louis XIV and badly wanted England’s resources on his side — but the invitation gave his intervention a veneer of legitimacy. He assembled a huge fleet and army and, after being turned back once by storms, landed in the south-west of England in November 1688.

And then the strangest thing happened: James’s support simply melted away. Officers deserted, nobles slipped off to join William, and the king who had ruled in the spirit of his divine-right father found that almost no one was willing to fight for him. His nerve broke. After a failed first attempt, James fled to France — and his flight was, in a way, the most convenient thing he could have done for his enemies. By abandoning the throne, he allowed Parliament to argue that he had effectively abdicated, leaving the crown vacant rather than stolen.

This is where the revolution did its cleverest work. Parliament declared that James had forfeited the throne and offered the crown jointly to William and Mary — but crucially, not unconditionally. Before they could take it, the new monarchs had to accept a document setting out the terms on which they would rule. That document, the Bill of Rights, was the heart of the whole affair. It forbade the monarch from suspending laws, raising taxes or keeping a standing army without Parliament’s consent, guaranteed free elections and free debate in Parliament, and barred any Catholic from ever sitting on the English throne.

The significance is hard to overstate. For the first time, it was established beyond argument that the English crown was not above the law but granted on conditions, and that Parliament was the body that set those conditions. The old idea of divine-right kingship, the idea Charles I had died defending, was finished. From now on, sovereignty in England effectively lay with King-in-Parliament rather than with the monarch alone. The constitutional monarchy that Britain still has today traces its real origins to this moment.

It is worth puncturing the comfortable myth a little, though. The revolution was “bloodless” only in England, and only just. In Scotland and especially in Ireland, James’s supporters fought on, and the war that followed — including the famous Battle of the Boyne in 1690 — was anything but peaceful, leaving wounds in Ireland that festered for centuries. The “glory” of the Glorious Revolution looked very different depending on where you were standing.

Still, in England the events of 1688 settled something fundamental that the Civil War had only torn open. The balance between crown and Parliament, fought over for a century, was finally fixed in Parliament’s favour, and fixed peacefully enough to hold. With that great constitutional question more or less resolved, England — soon to become Britain — was free to turn its energies outward and elsewhere. In the final part of this series we’ll look at the transformation that may have changed ordinary life more than any king or battle ever did: the coming of the Industrial Revolution.