Our First Revolution

The events that we celebrate this Fourth of July are familiar to most of us.

In recent years, even as some universities decline to replace scholars of America's Founding, American readers have been snapping up — and reading — terrific books about the founding fathers.

We want to know more about how our system of government was established and our liberties proclaimed. But the founding fathers did not write on a blank slate. When they began protesting the acts of George III and the British Parliament, they asserted their rights as Englishmen. Only when they became convinced that their prayers for relief would not be granted did they set out to declare their independence.

What were those rights? Many of them had their roots in the series of events generally known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, the subject of my book "Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval that Inspired America's Founding Fathers." Once, this story, of the ouster of James II and the installation of William and Mary as king and queen, was familiar to every proverbial schoolboy.

Today, as I found out when I told friends and relatives about the book I was working on, it is almost unknown to educated Americans. Yet, this First Revolution turned out to be a giant step forward for representative government, guaranteed liberties, global capitalism, and an anti-tyrannical foreign policy. That was not necessarily the intention of the actors in this drama, but it was the result they produced. We are its fortunate beneficiaries.

The story has a special resonance for New York. It was James II who, as Duke of York and Lord High Admiral, in 1664 ordered the British fleet to oust the Dutch from Nieuw Amsterdam, and when the city was captured it was renamed in his honor.

But five years later James decided to become a Catholic. This was a problem: he was the heir to the throne — his brother, Charles II, had no legitimate children — and most Englishmen were Protestants who regarded Catholicism as tyrannical. When James became king, he claimed the right to dispense with the law blocking Catholics from serving in the army or civil government. He also dissolved Parliament and set out to secure the election of one that would be a rubber stamp. This was in line with the move toward absolutism in Europe, where monarchs like Louis XIV of France were abolishing ancient assemblies as medieval anachronisms and ruling directly through bureaucracies.

The moment of truth came in June 1688, when James's second wife gave birth to a son who would take precedence over his two Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne. Into action stepped Mary's husband , William of Orange, Stadholder of the Netherlands, and, as James's nephew, fourth in line for the throne himself.

In secret William procured an invitation from seven English lords to come over to England, assembled an army of 25,000 men and a navy of 500 ships, and printed and smuggled into England 50,000 copies of a pamphlet setting forth his intention to seek a "free parliament."

After agonizing delays, his forces crossed the Channel in November — not the ideal season for a Channel crossing — and landed in southwest England and marched toward London. James, deserted by his leading general, John Churchill, who later became the Duke of Marlborough, ordered his army not to fight and fled the country, throwing the Great Seal into the Thames. William's Dutch army occupied London.

William could have declared himself king. Instead he ordered elections for a new parliament and conspicuously avoided influencing them. That parliament, after debating whether James had abdicated or was still king, voted to make William king and Mary queen. It also passed a Declaration of Right and effectively required that Parliament must meet every year.

William's prime motive was to bring England into his alliance against Louis XIV. In the centuries since then, Britain and, in time, America have waged war to prevent a tyrannical power from dominating Europe and the world. In order to finance that war, Parliament created the funded national debt and established the Bank of England. This financial system enabled Britain to defeat France, which had four times as many people, and provided the credit necessary for Britain's Industrial Revolution.

This First Revolution also had a lasting impact on the American colonies. James abolished the legislative assemblies in New England, New York, and New Jersey and might have abolished others had he stayed on the throne. William restored them.

As the historian, J. H. Elliott, has noted, one reason the Spanish colonies in the Americas had difficulty winning independence and establishing self-government is that they had no legislative assemblies, no experience with self-government. The British colonies of North America, thanks to this successful revolution, had such assemblies and the colonists — the founders — had such experience. "Without 1688," as Christopher Hitchens has written, "there would have been no 1776."

The American founders consciously imitated the makers of the First Revolution. They set up a government where power would be shared by executive and legislative branches. Provisions of the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments were copies or expansions of provisions in the Declaration of Right.

Alexander Hamilton persuaded the First Congress to establish a funded national debt and a Bank of the United States. And in the 20th century, American presidents followed the foreign policy followed by Britain for most of the time since 1689 in opposing expansionist tyrannical regimes in Europe and around the world.

We owe much to the founders. But we owe something as well to the men and women who made, what I call, Our First Revolution nearly a century before.

Mr. Barone is a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report and co-author of "The Almanac of American Politics."