Western Civilization II / Unit 2 WC2 0119 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading the Bill of Rights, 1689
The idea
A constitutional document tells you what a regime had suffered, because each clause forbids something the last king did. To read the Bill of Rights, ask two questions of any clause: what power does it deny the crown, and which of James II's acts does it answer. The text read is the Avalon Project's, at Yale.
In practice
Four clauses, paraphrased. First, suspending laws or their execution by royal authority without parliament's consent is illegal: the answer to James's dispensing with the Test Act. Second, levying money for the crown by pretence of prerogative without grant of parliament is illegal: the answer to Charles I's forced loans. Third, keeping a standing army in peacetime without parliament's consent is against law: the answer to James's army. Fourth, elections ought to be free, parliament's debates may not be questioned outside it, and parliaments ought to be held frequently: the answer to eleven years without one. Together the clauses make parliament the crown's permanent partner and put the sovereign under the law.
Where people slip
The Bill declares ancient rights, in its own words; the framers claimed to restore, not invent. On the exam, a king who may not tax, suspend laws or keep an army without parliament is sixteen eighty-nine, and the viewpoint behind it is Locke's, whom the witness links to the Bill and unit 05 reads.
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