James II, brother of Charles II, came to the throne in 1685. A Catholic, he tried to put fellow Catholics in senior positions and rule without Parliament. In 1688 a group of Protestant nobles invited his Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange, to invade. William landed at Brixham in Devon; James fled to France with little resistance, and Parliament declared the throne vacant.
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William and his wife Mary II — James II's daughter — were jointly crowned in 1689. The Bill of Rights of the same year set out the conditions of their rule: no monarch could levy taxes or maintain a standing army in peacetime without Parliament's consent, and no Catholic could ever sit on the throne. This is the constitutional settlement that still underpins British government.
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