refusal to aid aboli tion of the penal laws and the Test; tender, born June 10, 1688; sumed that London, hastened to offer the prince either assurances of sup port, or counsel against compliance with the king's demand. William's William's firm response that "I cannot concur in what your majesty desires of me," left no room for doubt as to his posi tion upon the vital question by which the nation was then convulsed. In the following December a proclamation ap peared in the "Gazette" that Mary of Modena, the catholic princess whom James had married two years after Anne James III., Hyde's death, was again pregnant; and on the 10th of June, or old Pre- 1688, in the midst of the indignation excited by the committal of the bishops to the Tower, the queen, then only thirty years old, gave birth to a son, the ill-fated prince generally known in history as James III., or the old Pretender. Thus it was that the prospect, so long assured, of a protestant succession was suddenly blasted by the advent of a catholic heir, just at the moment when James' fierce and persistent attack upon the established church he had promised to defend was fast driving protestant the nation to open resistance. In the presence of the emergency leaders as thus presented the leaders of the protestant cause resolved, a fraud had in the teeth of facts no longer disputed, to assume that the birth of a male heir to James was a deliberate invention, and then to invite William to come in arms not only for the defence of English liberty and religion, but also for the restoration of the reign of law which had broken down under the king's attempts to coerce the church and remodel the magistracy in open defiance of existing statutes. Under the pressure of this common danger tories and whigs, high churchmen and nonconformists, putting aside for the moment all differences, drew together; and on the 30th of June, the very day on which the verdict in favor of the bishops was rendered, the leaders of the coalition subscribed in cipher an invitation to William to come at once at the head of an army strong enough to justify his friends in rising to sustain him.2 Danby signed as the chief of the tories, Devonshire as the leader of the general body of whigs and non-conformists, Compton, bishop of London, as the representative of the high churchmen; and to their names were added those of the earl of Shrewsbury, of Lord Lumley, of Edward the cousin of Lord Russell, and of Henry the been prac tised; invitation to William signed June 30; 1 Green, Hist. of the Eng. People, 2 See Burnet, vol. iii. p. 265. vol. iv. p. 22. brother of Algernon Sidney. Tempted less, perhaps, by the prospect of securing the English crown for his wife than by the hope of ending with England's aid the supremacy of France win back by conces in Europe, the ruling passion of his life, William resolved to his acceptaccept the invitation; and as soon as the assent of those in ance; Holland who opposed his plans could be obtained, he began to gather a fleet with forces sufficient for the enterprise. Thus menaced, James suddenly gave way; and in the hope of winning James' atback the confidence he had lost, he began before the end of tempt to September to reverse all of his recent acts by appealing for aid the nation and counsel to the bishops whom he had so lately prosecuted; síons; by sending back in state its forfeited charter to the city of London, and by restoring to other cities and towns their ancient privileges; by the dissolution of the ecclesiastical commission; and by the restoration of Dr. Hough and the Fellows to their places in Magdalen College, and the removed deputy lieutenants and magistrates to their offices in the counties. When Sunderland pressed James to go a step further by calling a parliament, the king, suspicious of a treacherous design. to place him absolutely in William's hands, drew back; and before the end of October he dismissed Sunderland from office. At that moment it was that William's declaration arrival of reached England, promising freedom of conscience to catholics declara and toleration to protestant non-conformists, and demanding tion; the calling of a free parliament for the settlement of the succession, and for the reëstablishment of English freedom and religion upon a secure basis.1 On the 5th of November the he landed prince landed at Torbay at the head of a force including re- Novem presentatives from every part of the protestant world, which, ber 5; after a momentary hesitation, was so swelled by adherents. from every quarter as to make its advance a peaceful and triumphal progress. In the midst of the panic that ensued, Grafton and Churchill deserted the king and went over to the enemy's camp, where they were soon joined by Prince George and Princess Anne; while the royal army, broken by dissensions and distrust, after shrinking from an engagement with William's forces, was disbanded. Thus abandoned, James re1 Burnet, vol. iii. p. 286; Dumont, vol. vii. pt. ii. pp. 198, 205. He was "called in to vindicate practically those maxims of liberty for which, in good and evil days, England had contended William's at Torbay flight of solved upon flight, and, after sending the queen and the young James. 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 declaration1 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 work; legally 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 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- constituted 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 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. 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 Henry IV. legal subployed to tilties em conceal defects in zation. 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 Parliament 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 dis vention out the declared two houses of parliament;' solution 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 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 employed by William 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." 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. 8 On the 11th of December about the prince a declaration of their willingness to aid him in calling a free parliament. Clarendon, Diary, p. 224; Ba rillon, December 22. 4 Kennet, p. 505; Clarendon's Diary, December 21, 1688; Burnet, vol. i. p. 803, and Onslow's note. |