The English constitution had been understood as a contract between the Crown and its subjects, from Magna Carta to the settlement of 1688, a contract that safeguarded the people’s traditional rights and freedoms. This distinguished the English from most monarchies on the European Continent, who ruled, they claimed, by divine right, which gave them absolute power. The English idea of a contract between the king and the nobility or the people did make a revolutionary presumption, that both the nobility and the people had rights which the king was bound to respect.
