Rosemary Hill
speaker
490 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 7 Sep
Rosemary Hill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
William of Orange landed in Devon in november sixteen eighty eight, and depending on who was writing history, this was either an invasion by a foreign power or it was the Glorious Revolution.
And this glorious revolution, as it's become known, is
And part of what is sometimes slightly misleadingly referred to as the weak version of history is always painted as a very peace well not always, but it is painted as a very peaceful, reasonable, r thoroughly English sort of a revolution.
But in fact it it was very, very turbulent.
William arrived with an enormous army.
and he immediately thereby involved England in the nine years war that he was healing on the continent.
James was not going to give up without a fight, so he was in Ireland.
England was surrounded by hostile Catholic powers in Spain and France and Ireland.
And James lost the Battle of the Boyne.
and retreated to the continent from where there would be constant Jacobite threats for well, hundreds of years really, um, in a more or less viable form.
Parliament decided that because James had basically run away, this was cast as him having abdicated.
The crown was offered to William and Mary as joint sovereigns, who took it up in February 1689 with a bill of alongside a Bill of Rights, which was going to limit the power of the monarch and tie it very firmly to Parliament.
We get the beginning of the English famously unwritten constitution, which is not.
It's not the crown anymore.
Certainly the monarch has to call parliament a lot more than they used to.
But it is this thing called the Crown in Parliament.
So it's not Parliament on its own either.
And we saw this recently tested by Boris Johnson when he tried to prorogue Parliament and didn't manage it.
And as Peter Hennessy, the great constitutional historian, puts it, the Constitution just about took it.
So for all that it isn't written and it's got a slightly mystical element, it kind of works.
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