sovereignty were left undecided.

Politically, Charles took the path of

expedience and placated his erstwhile enemies rather than his longsuffering
friends. He then spent twenty-five years squirming under his selfimposed
restraints and trying to wriggle out of his dependence upon
parliament; it is a measure of his and his brother's partial success in freeing
themselves - in, for instance, keeping a standing army without parliamentary
sanction, or suspending and dispensing with the operation of various
laws - that the Convention Parliament of 1689 devoted itself to the task of
tying William to various conditions "more strictly . . . than other princes
had been before."9 The resulting Declaration of Rights may have been "an
implied contract" between William and his new subjects. That was
certainly what radical Whigs in the Convention Parliament intended. The
declaration spells out James IPs misdeeds, asserts the nation's ancient
liberties, declares William and Mary king and queen, and sets forth the
immediate succession. But William did not promise to respect these liberties
before he was crowned - they were simply read to him and his queen at a
curious ceremony in the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall. Later, the declaration
became a statute, the Bill of Rights, with the additional proviso that
the monarch cannot be, nor be married to, a Roman Catholic. The royal
assent may have been assumed to be a promise to respect these rights: yet
the act had no provisions to ensure that these pious and rather airy
principles were enforced.10
Many would also see the religious settlement of 1662 as a missed
opportunity, but the "Toleration Act" of 1689 was at best a partial remedy
for religious division. It extended no right of toleration, it simply "indulged"
or exempted Protestant Dissenters from the penalties of a long list
of statutes, all of which remained in force. Even to qualify for these
exemptions, Nonconformists had to register and take a series of oaths. The
country's estimated 60,000 Roman Catholics, of course, gained nothing
from the Act. The civil disabilities borne by non-Anglicans such as exclusion
from all public office and from the universities remained in place; and
in 1711 and 1714 Tory parliaments enacted serious limitations on the
toleration enjoyed by Protestant Dissenters. Nor can the Toleration Act of
1689 be said to have been popular. Many moderate Nonconformists had
aspired to reunion with the Church of England. But moves for a reunion or
"comprehension" failed, and so the Toleration Act applied to perhaps four
times more Protestants than had originally been intended: in 1715-18 it
was estimated that there were 338,000 Dissenters out of a national
population of 5.4 million.
Another direct consequence of the Revolution of 1688-89 was England's
involvement in the front line of major European wars for eighteen of the