flight of James. solved upon flight, and, after sending the queen and the young prince away before him, he left the palace in disguise by night only to be captured and brought back the next day in safety to London. When upon the entry of the Dutch troops into the capital he was ordered to quit Whitehall, he withdrew to Rochester, whence, after writing a declaration of his motives for quitting the kingdom, he embarked for France on the 23d of December. 1 Echard, 1134; James, Memoirs, vol. ii. 273. CHAPTER III. WILLIAM AND MARY AND THE REVOLUTION-SETTLEMENT. Convention constituted of 1399, was de I. WILLIAM had already declared that his purpose in coming Second into England at the head of an army was to make possible the Parliament calling of a free parliament for the settlement of the succes- and its work; \ sion, and for the reëstablishment of English freedom and religion upon a firm basis. As there was no parliament in exist- theory that parliament ence when James' first flight suspended for a time all regular cannot be government, it was a difficult matter to determine how to as- legally semble the estates without the king's writ, from which, accord- without the king's writ; ing to the immemorial legal theory, parliament derives its being and its powers. For the third time since the Conquest the English people were now called upon to set aside that theory in favor of the earlier doctrine that parliament really derives its existence and authority from the call of the nation from which its life is drawn. The Revolution of 1399, wherein Rich- parliament ard II. was deposed and Henry IV. elected in his stead, was wherein worked out by an assembly which, though summoned by the Richard II. king's writ, was not opened by his commission, an irregularity posed and Henry IV. aggravated by the legal assumption that the assembly ceased elected; to exist when Richard ceased to be king. To meet the last difficulty the same assembly, shrinking from the name of parliament and assuming to act only by the name of the estates of the realm, was by a legal fiction summoned again under writs issued by Henry, which were not and could not be followed by any real election. To further obscure the true nature of the transaction, the deposition of Richard was veiled by pretended resignation, and the election of Henry justified by claim of the crown as a matter of right.1 But despite all such its organilegal subtilties, the fact remained that in the presence of a great emergency the national assembly, continued without the royal writ in the traditional form, deposed one king and elected 1 Lingard, vol. iii. pp. 394-398; Freeman, Growth of the Eng. Const., Hallam, Middle Ages, vol. ii. p. 214; pp. 133 and 134, and note 15. a a legal subployed to tilties em conceal defects in zation. vention Parliament out the declared two houses another, whose right to reign was thus made to rest upon a parliamentary title.1 As heretofore explained, the assembly first Con- known as the first Convention Parliament, that secured to Charles II. the right to reign, was called not by a royal writ, called with but by the authority of the Long Parliament, which had proking's writ; tected itself by positive law against either a prorogation or dissolution without its own consent. And yet in order to remove the doubt that existed as to the validity of its organization, the convention felt called upon to declare that it was in fact itself "the "the two houses of parliament, notwithstanding the want of the king's writ of summons; "2 and as an additional assurance its acts were confirmed by its successor summoned in the traditional manner. In the light of these precedents, William was called upon to convene the estates of the realm without the aid either of the king's writ or the mandate of a preceding parexpedients liament. In the presence of such difficulties he resolved, by employed by William virtue of his own de facto authority, to call together reprein calling sentatives who had in time past been honored with the confiConvention dence of the nation, in the hope that they would convoke such Parliament an assembly as would be able to authoritatively express the of parliament;" second national will. Thus it was that the prince attempted, on the 21st of December, 1688, to constitute an upper house by summoning to St. James the lords spiritual and temporal who were then in London ; and two days thereafter he invited to attend him on the morning of the 26th all gentlemen who had sat in the lower house during the reign of Charles II., together with the lord mayor of London, the aldermen, and fifty citizens, as representatives of the common council, to the end that they, as representatives of the whole nation, might advise him "as to the best manner how to pursue the ends of his declarathe ends of tion." 4 On the 25th the lords, without waiting for the action. of the popular body, presented an address requesting the prince (1) to take upon himself provisionally the administration of government; (2) to issue circular letters to all the constituent to advise him "how to pursue his decla ration;" 1 Vol. i. pp. 513, 514. 2 See above, p. 359. 8 On the 11th of December about thirty temporal and spiritual peers had joined the mayor and aldermen at the Guildhall, in the formation of a council that assumed for the moment the supreme authority, and presented to the prince a declaration of their willingness to aid him in calling a free parliament. Clarendon, Diary, p. 224; Barillon, December 22. 4 Kennet, p. 505; Clarendon's Diary, December 21, 1688; Burnet, vol. i. p. 803, and Onslow's note. 1689; bodies of the kingdom inviting them to send up in the usual way persons to represent them in a convention of estates to be held at Westminster on the 22d of January, 1689.1 Not, however, until the representatives of the counties and towns had concurred in the recommendation of the lords 2 did the prince reply to each assembly separately, assuring them that he would accept the advice they had given him.3 The elec- elections began tions which began on the 9th of January were rapidly and January 9, peacefully concluded, and at the appointed time the peers, about a hundred in number, met under the presidency of Halifax, while the commons organized themselves by calling Powle to the chair. In the course of its proceedings the assembly proclaimed itself to be "the two houses of parliament, and so second shall be and are hereby declared enacted and adjudged to be declared to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever, if they had been summoned according to the usual form."4 houses of However, notwithstanding that declaration, the succeeding par- ment." liament deemed it necessary to pass an act declaring the acts and proceedings of its predecessor valid." as ... The high convention itself to be "the two parlia of William and Mary; The assembly which thus set aside the legal theory that a Deposition of James valid parliament can only be convened by the king's writ be- and election came entangled at the very outset of its labors in the meshes of another that proved more difficult to overcome. function the convention was first called upon to perform involved no less than the deposition of James, who had declared that he had left the realm only because his life was in danger, and the election of William and Mary to the vacant throne, a proceeding that would have been at once natural and easy had the mind of the nation been swayed by the obsolete and forgotten precedents of pre-Norman times which tell us, among preother things, how the witan of Wessex once deposed Sigeberht precedents; 1690. By some strange oversight, al- Norman tive and deposable king superseded by hereditary theory; from the royal dignity and elected his relative, Cynewulf, in conception his stead.1 The fact was, however, that this early conception of an elec- of an elective and deposable king had been supplanted ages before by the hereditary theory, which, under the influence of feudal ideas, gave birth to the doctrine that the throne can never be vacant because the king never dies; that there can be no such thing as an interregnum because the reign of the heir begins the moment that of his predecessor is ended.2 To supple- that doctrine, which, according to the claim of Edward IV., mented by constituted such an indefeasible hereditary title as parliament divine right could neither ignore nor set aside, James I. added the claim and passive obedience; of divine right, supplemented in the reign of Charles II. by doctrine of the problem to be solved ; the religious dogma of non-resistance or passive obedience,5 invented by servile churchmen who were the first to repudiate it. Such was the nature of the kingship with which James claimed to be clothed when he and his infant heir were forcibly driven from the palace of their ancestors to seek shelter in a foreign land. How to dispose of the king and heir thus circumstanced was the problem with which the convention was confronted, and the attempt to solve it divided the assembly into groups, each distinguishable from the other by the possession of its own political expedient. After deducting the few blind adherents of James who desired his unconditional recall, and a handful of republicans who dreamed of reviving division of the Commonwealth, the main body of the convention was diparties; vided, as was the nation itself, into two parties, Tories and Whigs, the former being in the majority in the upper, the latter in the lower house. When on the 28th of January the battle began in the commons, the Whigs, who were there charged with the responsibility of power, attempted to solve all theoretical difficulties, not by appealing to the simple yet obsolete appealed to political precedents of the earliest times, but by boldly employing the philosophy new-fangled political philosophy of Hobbes, which rested upon the unhistorical assumption of an original contract between the nation and the king, under which the latter might forfeit his rights by misconduct. By the aid of that theory the popular party was able to unite every element of opposition to commons of Hobbes; 1 Cf. vol. i. pp. 189, 190. 2 Ibid., pp. 241, 405. 8 Ibid., p. 577. 4 See above, p. 212. |