1620: The Mayflower Compact, an agreement between the Pilgrims, on forming a government between themselves, based on majority rule, is signed. 1628: During a period of renewed interest in Magna Carta, the Petition of Right was passed by the Parliament of England. It established, among other things, the illegality of taxation without parliamentary consent and of arbitrary imprisonment. 1642–1651: The idea of the political party with factions took form in Britain around the time of the English Civil War. Soldiers from the Parliamentarian New Model Army and a faction of Levellers freely debated rights to political representation during the Putney Debates of 1647. The Levellers published a newspaper (The Moderate) and pioneered political petitions, pamphleteering and party colours. Later, the pre-war Royalist (then Cavalier) and opposing Parliamentarian groupings became the Tory party and the Whigs in the Parliament. 1679: English Act of Habeas Corpus, safeguarding individual freedom against unlawful imprisonment with right to appeal; one of the documents integral to the constitution of the United Kingdom and the history of the parliament of the United Kingdom. 1682: William Penn wrote his Frame of Government of Pennsylvania. The document gave the colony a representative legislature and granted liberal freedoms to the colony's citizens. 1689: The Bill of Rights 1689, enacted by Parliament, set out the requirement for regular parliaments, free elections, rules for freedom of speech in Parliament, and limited the power of the monarch. It ensured (with the Glorious Revolution of 1688) that, unlike much of the rest of Europe, royal absolutism would not prevail. 1689: John Locke published the Two Treatises of Government, attacking monarchical absolutism and promoting social contract theory and the consent of the governed. Eighteenth and nineteenth century milestones 1707: The first Parliament of Great Britain is established after the merger of the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland under the Acts of Union 1707, succeeding the English parliament. From around 1721–42, Robert Walpole, regarded as the first prime minister of Great Britain, chaired cabinet meetings, appointed all other ministers, and developed the doctrine of cabinet solidarity. 1755: The Corsican Republic led by Pasquale Paoli with the Corsican Constitution From the late 1770s: new Constitutions and Bills explicitly describing and limiting the authority of powerholders, many based on the English Bill of Rights (1689). Historian Norman Davies calls the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth Constitution of May 3, 1791 "the first constitution of its kind in Europe".