The overthrow of England's Catholic king James II in 1688, accomplished by a Dutch invasion under William of Orange that a circle of Protestant English elites had invited, and remembered as the moment the English crown became a creature of Parliament and the law. The 1689 Bill of Rights fixed the terms: a monarch could no longer suspend laws, tax, or keep an army without Parliament's consent, and no Catholic could reign. It is called glorious and bloodless because it spared England a civil war, but that label holds only for England. The same takeover drowned Ireland in a bloody war and began centuries of Protestant ascendancy and Catholic grievance.
It is remembered as the revolution that shed no blood, and the name is a lie everywhere but England. In the autumn of 1688, a Protestant elite alarmed by their Catholic king invited a foreign ruler to invade. William of Orange landed in England with a Dutch army, and James II's support melted away. James fled to France, Parliament declared the throne vacant, and offered it to William and his wife Mary on conditions no English monarch had ever accepted. From then on the crown would rule under the law and the Parliament, not above them. That much was nearly bloodless, in England. But James did not surrender. He raised Catholic Ireland, and the war that followed, the siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne, was real and bitter. For Irish Catholics, William's victory meant defeat, dispossession, and a century of harsh laws. The glory and the blood belong to the same event.