Sketches from English History

had not been done in vain. Slowly, but surely, an opposition to the prevailing régime arose and grew both in the Parliament and in the nation. It culminated in the formation of the great Whig party (1679), while the supporters of the king took the name of Tories. The Whigs were temporarily overthrown in consequence of the factious spirit of their leaders in fomenting the Popish Plot and in trying to exclude the popish duke of York, later James the Second, from the succession to the crown. But they rose again under James, and when that monarch attempted to subvert the laws by means of a standing army, a packed bench of judges, and a packed House of Commons, Whigs and Tories united in inviting William, prince of Orange, to invade the country and assist in restoring the ancient liberties of the nation. Soon after William's landing James, deserted by all parties, fled to France, and the Convention Parliament, which was called, declared that he had abdicated, and elected William and Mary to fill the vacant throne. The Declaration of Right, which took the form of a statute in the Bill of Rights, fixed in definite terms the relations between king and Parliament and between Parliament and the people; and a later statute, the Act of Settlement (1700), “made the English sovereign as much the creature of an act of Parliament as the pettiest tax-gatherer in his realm."

Thus the revolution of 1688 was accomplished, "the least violent and the most beneficent of all revolutions." The result of causes which had been in operation for centuries, it definitely established the leading principles of the constitution, both in theory and in practice. The change of sovereign was one of the lesser benefits it conferred. It swept away forever, besides much other political rubbish, the doctrines of the divine right of kings, of absolute royal authority, and of the passive obedience of the subject, which had so long obstructed constitutional progress. It transferred the paramount authority in the State from the king to the House of Commons, and gave the nation guarantees of liberty so simple, broad, and strong that they could neither be evaded nor revoked. It fitly closed a long era of constitutional struggle, and at the same time prepared the way for a new development.

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