William III of Orange, who was the grandson of English King Charles I, and his wife (and first cousin) Mary of England, who was also a grandchild of King Charles I, became William III and Mary II of England on 11 April 1689 after a ginormous kerfuffle.
King Charles II, who had recently reclaimed the throne after his father was murdered by nefarious Puritan dictator and genocidal numpty Oliver Cromwell, died without a legitimate heir, so his throne went to his younger brother James. Ignoring both reality and recent history, King James II decided to allow his fellow Catholics and/or Protestant dissenters to have equality and religious freedom in the kingdom.
While this is laudable from a human rights perspective, it was a political porcupine; it needed to be handled carefully. James foolishly started a wholesale replacing of Anglican officials with Catholic ones, and tried to bully Parliament. This was political suicide, and the last straw was when his second wife, ardent Catholic Mary of Modena, gave birth to son and heir James Stuart on June 10, 1688. The royal couple were open in their determination to raise the heir as a Catholic, so a movement was formed with the intention of deposing James in a Glorious Revolution and placing his Protestant eldest daughter from his first marriage, Mary, and her Protestant husband on the throne in his stead.
On 30 June 1688, a group of seven Protestant nobles invited the Prince of Orange to come to England with an army … When William arrived on 5 November 1688, many Protestant officers, including Churchill, defected and joined William, as did James’s own daughter, Princess Anne. James lost his nerve and declined to attack the invading army, despite his army’s numerical superiority. On 11 December, James tried to flee to France, allegedly first throwing the Great Seal of the Realm into the River Thames. He was captured in Kent; later, he was released and placed under Dutch protective guard. Having no desire to make James a martyr, the Prince of Orange let him escape on 23 December. James was received by his cousin and ally, Louis XIV, who offered him a palace and a pension.
Having deposed her father, Mary was declared the new monarch following the Convention Parliament of 22 January 1689. However, there was a snag. Although Mary was closest to the throne (discounting her half-brother and real heir, of course), William of Orange wanted to crowned King of England, not merely crowned as king consort to his wife. The Tory’s wanted Mary to be Queen alone, and William to be her consort, but William threw such a fit (with Mary’s backing) that the Tory’s eventually had to compromise and caucus with the Whigs supporting William of Orange in the House of Commons. After William agreed to a Bill of Rights, the throne was offered to William and Mary as joint sovereigns with the proviso that “the sole and full exercise of the regal power be only in and executed by the said Prince of Orange in the names of the said Prince and Princess during their joint lives”.
Thus William and Mary were crowned in Westminster Abbey and became the Protestant rulers of the Anglo-England’s dreams.
Their reign was a successful one, and it included passage of “one of the most important constitutional documents in English history, the Bill of Rights … [which declared] that the Sovereign could not suspend laws passed by Parliament, levy taxes without parliamentary consent, infringe the right to petition, raise a standing army during peacetime without parliamentary consent, deny the right to bear arms to Protestant subjects, unduly interfere with parliamentary elections, punish members of either House of Parliament for anything said during debates, require excessive bail or inflict cruel and unusual punishments.”
The monarchs were also extremely popular with the Protestant English majority. As a show of support for William and Mary’s reign and religion, the orange variety of Dutch carrots became grown more often. Soon it became the “normal” hue for that root vegetable, so much so that carrot became synonymous with the colour orange. Nowadays many people don’t even know that carrots can grow in a rainbow of colors.
William ruled alone after Mary’s death in 1694, and the childless royals were succeeded by Mary’s sister Anne in 1702.
Following the death of Queen Anne, the Protestant country was so determined to eschew a Catholic monarch that it went all the way down to George Ludwig of Hanover, the Protestant the great-grandson of King James I of England through his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth of Bohemia.