By the last decade of the 17th century, Britain had experienced 50 years of turmoil.

Civil war, the execution of a king, a protectorate, and then the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

But by the 1680s, conflict once more loomed between the king and his people.

In the Parliamentary Archive, there's a document which speaks of those times

and which had a profound effect on the subsequent development of parliamentary democracy.

It's the Bill of Rights of 1689.

Dr Paul Seward of the History of Parliament Trust

explains how the document ushered in a new monarch and a new political order.

It's often said that Britain doesn't have a written constitution.

Well, this is the thing that's closest to a written constitution.

It's the only real statement of how the country should be governed

within a single document. And like most constitutional documents, it has a context. It goes back

to those turbulent events of the 17th century and a major political crisis which is resolved

through this document,

which records a deal, a constitutional deal, which was done in 1689.

What were those events?

James II has a major and very difficult project in mind,

which is to bring Roman Catholicism back into the country.

England is a very strongly Protestant

country and very resistant to that project. James II tries to persuade Parliament to

remove the legal disabilities on Roman Catholics. That, of course, doesn't work. He finds

it extraordinarily difficult to persuade Parliament in 1685 to make any

...