With the tyrant king James VII in exile, the leaders in London had to move quickly to make sure an orderly joint coronation of William, Prince of Orange, and his wife, Mary Stuart, the daughter of James VII, could go ahead. As her uncle, Charles II, had had no legitimate heirs, she was next in line to the throne after her father. We had learnt our lessons: tyrant kings were not a good idea; neither was the divine right of a king as a controlling Head of the Church.
Before William and Mary were co-crowned in Westminster, they had to sign a vital document drawn up by the Houses of Lords and Commons, which would be enshrined as a pillar of our UK constitution, alongside the Magna Carta. On 13 February 1689, they dutifully signed The English Bill of Rights, which stated that the ‘late King James the Second [of England, and Seventh of Scotland], by the assistance of divers evil counselors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavor to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom… All which are utterly and directly contrary to the known laws and statutes and freedom of this realm…’
Through this document, a free Parliament was reinstated and absolute monarchy was abolished, as was the monarch’s interference in Church matters. A cause of even greater joy to the persecuted Puritans was clause 5, which said ‘That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.’ Protestants were now legally allowed to act in self-defence, and free election of members to Parliament was made law, as well as freedom of speech in Parliament. Only on accepting the English Bill of Rights, could William and Mary be crowned as ‘king and queen of England, France and Ireland’. They were then crowned as King William III and Queen Mary II, on 11 April, 1689.
The Scottish people waited with bated breath for their own Scottish Claim of Right Act, produced by their own people. When it came out, its grievances against James VII were more than that of the English Bill. It stated that this king did ‘Invade the fundamentall Constitution of this Kingdome and altered it from a legall limited monarchy to ane Arbitrary Despotick power’. It furthermore described him as a papist who became king without obedience to the law, and imposed Roman Catholicism in Scotland, according to his own whims, with ‘subversione of the protestant religion and the violation of the lawes and liberties of the Kingdome, inverting all the Ends of Government wherby he hath forfaulted the right to the Croune and the throne is become vacant’.
In the Scottish document, freedom of faith and Parliament in Scotland are side by side. The Scottish Bill says ‘That Prelacy [bishop-statesmen] and the superiority of any office in the Church above presbyters is and hath been a great and insupportable greivance and trouble to this Nation and contrary to the Inclinationes of the generality of the people ever since the reformatione (they haveing reformed from popery by presbyters) and therfor ought to be abolished.’ The Scots called for the freedom to protest peacefully against unjust laws, and to petition government without facing imprisonment, as well as there to be ‘freedom of speech and debate to the members’ in Parliament.
On 11 May 1689, the day of freedom had finally come for the suffering Covenanters, when William and Mary complied with the Scottish Claim of Right Act, and received the crown of Scotland. The very principles for which the faithful Covenanters had been tortured and hunted out like animals, and labelled as ‘fanatics’, would become enshrined in law.
‘But it is God who executes judgment, putting down one and lifting up another’ (Psalm 75:7, NKJV).
Image: King William III and Queen Mary, R. White, engraver, died 1703, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.