The American Bill of Rights did not emerge from thin air in 1789. It was the end of a chain that runs from Runnymede in 1215 through Westminster in 1689. The English Bill of Rights is the closest link in that chain - a document the founders had read, quoted, and built on for decades before the Constitution existed.
In November 1688, William of Orange landed in England with a Dutch army at the invitation of English nobles who had decided King James II had to go. James had suspended Parliament, maintained a standing army in peacetime, prosecuted Anglican bishops for seditious libel, and was credibly suspected of planning to restore Catholicism as the state religion. He fled to France in December without abdicating - Parliament later declared this abdication by desertion.
Parliament assembled as a Convention and offered the throne jointly to William and his wife Mary, James II's Protestant daughter. The offer came with conditions. Parliament drafted a Declaration of Rights listing the violations James had committed and the rights Parliament asserted against the Crown. William and Mary accepted the Declaration before their coronation. In December 1689, Parliament enacted it into statute as the Bill of Rights.
The document was not a grant of rights from a generous monarch. It was a set of conditions a Parliament imposed on a king it had chosen, in exchange for giving him the throne. That structural fact - rights extracted from power, not granted by it - is the model the American founders studied and applied.
The English Bill of Rights runs to thirteen clauses asserting parliamentary rights and limiting royal prerogative. The clauses most directly relevant to the American founding are these:
That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law. That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law. That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. That jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned, and jurors which pass upon men in trials for high treason ought to be freeholders.
Read those four clauses and then read the 2nd, 3rd, 6th, and 8th Amendments to the United States Constitution. The language is not identical - it was rewritten, refined, and extended through a century of colonial practice. But the principles are the same, and in several cases the specific wording survived almost intact. "Cruel and unusual punishments" is lifted directly from the English document into the 8th Amendment without modification.
| Amendment | English Bill of Rights · 1689 | U.S. Bill of Rights · 1791 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2nd | Subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law. | A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. | English Clause 7 Yale Avalon |
| 3rd | That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law. | No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner. | English Clause 6 Yale Avalon |
| 6th | Jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned, and jurors which pass upon men in trials for high treason ought to be freeholders. | In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State. | English Clause 11 Yale Avalon |
| 8th | Excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. | Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. | English Clause 10 Yale Avalon |
| 1st | That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament. | Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. | English Clause 9 Yale Avalon |
The English Bill of Rights was not obscure to the founders. It was standard reading in colonial law practice. Every colonial lawyer who studied Blackstone's Commentaries - which meant virtually every colonial lawyer of the founding generation - encountered the 1689 document as part of the inherited English constitutional tradition.
Jefferson and Adams both referenced it explicitly when building their case against Parliament in the 1770s. The colonial argument was not that Parliament was violating abstract natural rights - it was that Parliament was violating specific, named, documented English rights that the colonists had inherited as English subjects. The English Bill of Rights was the primary documentary evidence for what those rights were.
George Mason had the document at hand when he drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights in May 1776. The Virginia Declaration's prohibition on excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishment - Section 9 - is the English Clause 10 rewritten in the American context. Mason's draft preceded the Declaration of Independence by six weeks and Madison's Bill of Rights by thirteen years. It is the bridge between the English document and the American one.
That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
The American Bill of Rights is often presented as an invention - a set of rights the founders created in 1789 to protect the people from the government they had just built. The primary record tells a different story. Most of the specific rights in the American Bill of Rights had been stated, in legal form, in England in 1689. Several had been stated even earlier, in Magna Carta in 1215.
What the founders did in 1789 was not invent these rights. They universalized them. The English Bill of Rights protected Protestant subjects. The Virginia Declaration protected the citizens of Virginia. The American Bill of Rights, in principle, protected everyone subject to federal authority. The 14th Amendment in 1868 extended that protection against the states. The substance traveled unchanged. The scope expanded with each restatement.
The chain is: Magna Carta (1215) → Petition of Right (1628) → English Bill of Rights (1689) → Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) → United States Bill of Rights (1791). Every link is a primary source document held at an institutional archive. The archive holds all of them. The documents speak for themselves.
If you learned something new or just enjoyed the content, please share it and follow along on X and Substack. This page runs on a passion for our shared history, and a steady supply of caffeine. If you're able, consider buying a coffee. It goes a long way toward keeping the content coming, and helps the project grow into new mediums down the road. My sincere thanks.