After the Norman Conquest of 1066, the central governing body of the Kingdom of England was established as a curia regis, or Great Council. The curia regis conducted the business of the state, whether legislative, judicial, or diplomatic. Its membership was the tenants-in-chief (i.e., the baronage, including bishops and abbots) as well as other members of the court. The barons held their land under various forms of feudal land tenures under the king, and were responsible for providing knights and soldiers for the king’s royal army.

In 1188, a precedent was established when the Great Council granted Henry II the Saladin tithe (tax) to help fund a crusade. In granting this tax, the Great Council acted as representatives for all taxpayers. The likelihood of resistance to national taxes made consent politically necessary, so it was convenient for the king to present the Great Council as a representative body capable of consenting on behalf of all within the kingdom.

King John alienated his Great Council by his partiality in dispensing justice, heavy financial demands, and abusing his right to feudal beliefs and aids (financial duties required by the king through feudal obligation). Unsuccessful with his invasions of France, he repeatedly taxed the barons of England without the consent of the Great Council.

First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury to make peace between the unpopular King John and a group of rebel barons, the Magna Carta promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift and impartial justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown. It was to be implemented through a council of 25 barons.

The Magna Carta was based on three assumptions: (1) the king was subject to the law, (2) the king could only make law and raise taxation (except customary feudal dues) with the consent of the community of the realm (a form of council), (3) that the obedience owed by subjects to the king was conditional and not absolute. Clause 12 stated that certain taxes could only be levied "through the common counsel of our kingdom", and clause 14 specified that this common counsel was to come from bishops, earls, and barons.

The Great Council began to act as the voice of the community of the realm (which included knights, freeholders, and representatives of the "commons"). While early councils only included high nobles, the need for broader consent for taxation led to a more representative structure. During the reign of Henry III, these councils began to be called Parliaments.

Edward III came to the throne in 1327, and from that point, the representatives of the counties (knights of the shire) and of the towns (burgesses) became a permanent part of Parliament. After 1332, they sat together in one chamber and were known as the House of Commons. After 1341, these Commons deliberated separately from the King and his nobles.

When King Charles I ascended to the throne, he continued to collect customs and duties by the royal prerogative (meaning without the Parliament’s consent), as well as imprison his opponents without trial. These decisions went against the principles of the Magna Carta.

During this period in the rule of Charles I, and without the consent of Parliament, the King decided to turn a medieval period law requiring coastal counties to provide ships to the Crown, into a money tax levied against all the counties, including inland counties. He also made large changes to the Book of Common Prayer in both Scotland and England, leading to the Bishops’ War against him.

With the use of Ship Money by the King to fund everyday government expenses without the consent of Parliament (along with increased debt caused by the Bishop’s War), Parliament gathered and passed the Ship Money Act, which outlawed the imposition of the medieval tax called “Ship Money” without parliamentary approval.

Oliver Cromwell led soldiers who believed King Charles I had exercised power beyond the authority of the crown. At the heart of the war was a challenge to the idea that the monarch held absolute power. The war ended with the defeat of the royalists. King Charles was put in custody.

At the end of the English Civil War, hard-liners opposed to the king’s rule expelled many members of Parliament. The remaining members, known as the Rump Parliament, put the king on trial in Westminster Hall. He was found guilty of attempting to “uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people.” The court then condemned Charles I to death. He was executed in Whitehall.

Oliver Cromwell proved to be as tyrannical as some kings, saying such things as “Your Magna Carta cannot control actions taken for the safety of the Commonwealth”. He died in 1658, and his son, Richard, took his place, who was quickly removed from power. Parliament restored the monarchy by proclaiming that King Charles II had been the lawful monarch since the execution of Charles I in January 1649. Charles returned from exile on 23 May, 1660. He entered London on 29 May, his birthday.

Drawing on the ancient rights of the Magna Carta, and worried about the repercussions of their efforts to exclude James (the Roman Catholic brother of King Charles II) from the throne, Parliament passed the Habeas Corpus Act. This protected against unfairly imprisoning people by requiring a court to examine the lawfulness of a prisoner's detention and thus prevent unlawful or arbitrary imprisonment, as guaranteed in Article 39 of the Magna Carta.

Locke’s first treatise was aimed squarely at refuting the work of another 17th-century political theorist, Sir Robert Filmer, whose Patriarcha (1680, though probably written in the 1630s) defended the theory of the divine right of kings.

In his second of Treatises on Government, Locke defined political power (based on concepts of general morality) as the:

right of making Laws with Penalties of Death, and consequently all less Penalties, for the Regulating and Preserving of Property, and of employing the force of the Community, in the Execution of such Laws and in defence of the Common-wealth from Foreign Injury, and all this only for the Publick Good.

Locke’s premise was that, according to the Laws of Nature, all men are equally granted rights of life, liberty, and property (the owning of one’s own body or as acquired through one’s own labor). These rights are not given to the people by the government; rather, they are naturally occurring in all people, and governments are created to secure them. If the executive power fails to provide the conditions under which the people can enjoy their rights under natural law, then the people are entitled to remove it, by force if necessary.

King James II (a Catholic) held a political ideology that was based on the principle of divine right, and that Parliament’s function was to obey. Not appreciating the extent to which his power depended on the landed gentry accepting both his position of divine right and his faith, James II’s policies began to destabilize the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. William of Orange, married to Mary (James II’s daughter) invaded England, and at the war’s conclusion, James II fled to France.

After negotiations, Parliament ultimately offered the crown to both William and Mary. At their coronation, William and Mary both agreed to uphold the Church of England, as well as to "govern the people of this kingdom of England, and the dominions thereunto belonging, according to the statutes in Parliament agreed on, and the laws and customs of the same".

Parliament passed the English Bill of Rights, which, like the Magna Carta, set out certain basic civil rights and changed the succession to the English crown. Based on Locke’s political theories, the Bill included a constitutional requirement for the Crown to seek the consent of the people as represented by Parliament, restricting the power of the monarch and protecting the individual rights of the people.

Locke’s Two Treatises on Government were published (anonymously ) as one volume shortly after the Glorious Revolution. It served as a foundational text of political philosophy and had a tremendous effect on the history of Western political philosophy. Locke was, after all, a radical and revolutionary thinker.

Written in England by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, this series of 114 essays was published under the pseudonym “Cato”. They condemned corruption and a lack of morality within the British political system, as well as warned against standing armies, tyrannical rule, and the abuse of power. First published in newspapers in London and later published in book form, they were very popular in America, and many of the essays were republished in American newspapers right up to the time of the American Revolution.

John Dickinson anonymously published a series of 12 essays collectively called “Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies”. In the letters, Dickinson argued, amongst other things, that the Townshend Acts were illegal because they were intended to raise revenue, a power held only by the colonial assemblies. As a direct result of the popularity of Dickinson’s letters, there were calls and petitions for the boycotting of imported goods throughout the colonies. The eventual result of the unity amongst the colonies against a common enemy was the First Continental Congress. When Congress was called, however, Dickinson quickly realized that much progress needed to be made towards the solutions that he wrote about in his letters.

Thomas Paine anonymously published Common Sense– making the case for American independence from Great Britain. Common Sense sold 120,000 copies in its first three months, and by the end of the Revolution, 500,000 copies were sold, with an estimated 20 percent of colonists owning a copy.