The Bill of Rights

Parliament settled its long quarrel with the Crown in law rather than on a battlefield. The Bill of Rights of 1689 set down what Parliament could do and where a king's power stopped. Two main groups formed in Parliament in the years that followed, and one became known as the Tories, a name the Conservative Party is still sometimes called today. The decades around it opened the country in two other ways, and the first was the press: from 1695, printing no longer needed permission, so newspapers were free to publish without a government licence and the number of them climbed steadily from there.

The second was people. The first Jews since the Middle Ages settling in London did so in 1656, ending an absence of centuries. The Huguenots came next, Protestant refugees who came from France between 1680 and 1720, driven out for their religion. Many were educated and highly skilled, and they went into science, into banking and into weaving, staying to make their living here.