Thousands crowded the banks, and craved a blessing from the fathers of the church. In the river itself, lines of boats were formed, and a shout arose "God bless your lordships". Even the officers and soldiers of the Tower bent their knees, and solicited a blessing. In their confinement they received visits from the highest nobles of the land, and what enraged the king more than all was, a deputation to the bishops of Nonconformist ministers.

On the second day of their imprisonment, June 10th, a son was born to the king. This increased the public excitement, for at the time it was currently reported, and perhaps generally believed, that no child had been born, but that the king was palming upon the nation a supposititious child, for the purpose of furthering his designs against Protestantism. This event, together with the king's proceedings against the bishops, proved the occasion of the revolution which shortly followed.

15. The Seven Bishops tried and acquitted. June 30, 1688. On the first day of term, June 15, the bishops were brought before the Bench; they pleaded not guilty, and were admitted to bail on their own recognisances. Their liberation was celebrated with joyous peals, and in the evening by bonfires in the streets. The trial commenced June 29, before the Court of King's Bench; Sawyer, Finch, Maynard, Pembroke, Pollexfen, Levinz, Treley and Somers, all men of great legal ability appeared for the defence. The information charged the prisoners, that they had written and published a seditious libel in the county of Middlesex. With some difficulty the writing was proved, and that it had been published in Middlesex, but the most important point remained-was it a false, malicious, and seditious libel? This opened up for debate the great constitutional questions, the right of the king to dispense with statutes, and the right of subjects to petition for redress of grievances. It was argued for the defence that the petition was not false, for every fact in it had been proved true from the journals of parliament; neither was it malicious, for the defendants had not ‚sought the occasion of strife, but were forced into their situation by the government; neither was it seditious, for it had been delivered privately into the hands of the king alone; neither was it a libel, but a decent petition, such as by the laws of all civilised states a subject could with propriety present to the sovereign.

The side for the prosecution was weak in legal ability, and weaker still in argument; indeed theirs was a weak case altogether. In summing up, two of the four judges charged in favor of the bishops, for which at the end of the term they were dismissed. Night was setting in, when the jury retired to consider

their verdict. Arnold the king's brewer held out, till six in the morning. When the court met at ten, the foreman returned a verdict of not guilty. Deafening shouts filled the court, ten thousand repeated them on the outside, and the Thames carried on the cheer to the Tower. The bells rung out their peals of joy. At night the streets were full of bonfires, windows were illuminated, and his holiness burnt amidst a blaze of rockets and squibs. In every direction the news travelled post. Even the soldiers in camp at Hounslow gave way to shouts of joy, to the surprise and disgust of James who was present.

SECTION V. THE REVOLUTION OF 1688.

1. The Prince of Orange invited to come over with an armed force, June 30, 1688. Russell, afterwards Earl of Orford, had a month or two before gone over to the Hague, to advise the Prince to cross to England with an army. William, with his usual caution, refused to do so, unless he had a distinct invitation from a few persons representing great interests. Russell returned and obtained a statement to the effect that nineteen out of twenty of the common people longed for a change; that the upper classes, though careful not to commit themselves, were of the same mind; that if the prince would land with an armed force, he would be joined by the people, and part of the army; and that the present was the favorable moment. This paper was signed in cipher by the Earls of Danby, Devonshire, and Shrewsbury, Lord Lumley, Bishop Compton, Henry, brother of Algernon Sydney, and Edward Russell, cousin of Lord W. Russell. Fortunately for the designs of William, the political state of Europe at this juncture was such as to enable him to carry on his preparations, without at first exciting suspicion. In 1686, several of the continental princes had formed the League of Augsburg, under the pretext of maintaining the peace of the Empire, but in reality to oppose the power of France. This confederacy was put in motion in 1688, by the death of the Elector of Cologne. Louis secured the election of his nominee, the Cardinal of Furstenburg, but the pope made objections, and the election was void. The French monarch put his army in motion to aid his cause; William, under pretence of covering his own states, formed a camp of twenty thousand men, and ordered the fleet to be raised to seventy sail. These preparations made the French ambassador suspect the prince to have another object in view, and James received repeated warnings, but he remained incredulous, and professed his displeasure that Louis should have offered him protection.

2. William declares his design, and James attempts to conciliate his subjects, Oct. 1688. When William had

completed his preparations, a declaration was published, Sept. 30, addressed to the people of England. It set forth that the prince, by his near relationship to the kingdom of England, felt imposed on him the duty of protecting the civil and religious liberties of its people. His appearing in arms in England, would therefore not be with the thought of conquest, but only to secure the assembling of a free and legal parliament, to which should be left the decision of all questions, public and private. To his allies, the Emperor and the King of Spain, William wrote to say, that his voyage to England was at the request of the English nobility, for the purpose of effecting a reconciliation between the king and his subjects.

James woke up in amazement. The bishops were sent for, Oct. 2, to advise the king; they recommended that proper persons be entrusted with the government, that the wrongs committed be redressed, that a parliament be called, and that the king return to the Church of England. As if to quicken the king, riots broke out in London, which ended in the destruction of several Romish chapels. The old charters of London had been restored a few days before, and on the day following the riots, Oct 8, the Ecclesiastical Commission was dissolved; on the 15th, the President and Fellows of Magdalen were restored, and a few days later, Father Petre and the Earl of Sunderland removed from the council. On the 18th a proclamation appeared in the Gazette restoring the forfeited franchises of all the municipal corporations. For the defence of the state, a fleet of thirty-seven sail, under the Earl of Dartmouth, took its station off the Gunfleet, and an army, raised to forty thousand men, was placed under the command of Lord Faversham.

3. The Prince of Orange lands at Torbay, Nov. 5, 1688. William's armament consisted of sixty ships of war and seven hundred sail of transports, carrying four thousand five hundred cavalry and eleven thousand infantry, besides a large assortment of military stores. The leaders in the expedition were Schomberg and Ginkle, the prince's countrymen; of Englishmen of note were the Earls of Shrewsbury and Macclesfield, and the sons of the Lords Winchester, Halifax, and Danby, Admirals Herbert and Russell, and Burnet, afterwards bishop of Salisbury. On the 19th of October, the expedition sailed from Helvoetsluys with a south-west wind, intending to land in Yorkshire, where William was expected by the Earl of Danby. A strong west wind set in at night, and the fleet returned to Holland. During this respite, James called together at Whitehall, the peers, judges, lord-mayor and aldermen, for the purpose of proving by minute evidence the birth of his son. He also called upon the peers and

prelates in the capital to deny that the prince had "been invited to England by divers lords both spiritual and temporal"; some positively denied and others evaded the question. William sailed again, Nov. 1, and a "Protestant east wind" setting in, he ran to the westward, passing the royal fleet, which had been forced to seek shelter under the Long-sand, and arrived at Torbay on the 5th. As the fleet passed Dover at mid-day, it drew much attention, and a messenger with the intelligence reached London towards midnight. The troops were at once called up, and orders given to concentrate the military at Salisbury. William had no difficulty in effecting a landing; the next day his troops began to move up the country.

The

4. James is deserted, November, 1688. The prince's forces entered Exeter, Nov. 8, and were but slowly augmented by English partisans. During the time that negotiations had been going on between London and the Hague, a secret association was formed among the officers at Hounslow Heath. effect of this was soon manifest; Lord Cornbury, the son of Clarendon, earned a doubtful notoriety by being the first to desert his sovereign, carrying off with him a part of his cavalry regiment. This defection shook the confidence of the king in his army, at the same time it encouraged the friends of the prince. In the North, the standard of insurrection was raised by Danby and Lumley, by Delaware and Brandon in Cheshire, and by Devonshire in the midland counties. Many of the prelates and peers at this time, Nov. 16, sent in an address to the king, praying for a free and legal parliament, as the only means of saving the kingdom from impending calamity, James promised on the word of a king to do so, as soon as the Prince of Orange was out of the country. He now set out for Salisbury, which being reached on the 19th, he learnt the unwelcome news that the West had risen in favor of the prince.

William moved forward to Axminster on the 21st. James, after reviewing his forces at Salisbury, proposed to inspect Kirk's division at Warminster, but was prevented by a bleeding of the nose. The king afterwards found that this accidental delay was a fortunate circumstance, for a conspiracy existed to seize his person on the road. The conspirators were said to be Churchill, Kirk, Trelawny, and others of rank in the army; James however thought it prudent not to notice it. During the night of the 22nd, Grafton and Churchill deserted to the enemy, and on the morning following, Trelawney and other colonels with some of their men. The royal camp was at once broken up, and a retreat commenced; reaching Andover, Prince George and Ormond sup ped with the king, and then rode off to join the enemy. On the

night of the 25th, the Princess Anne fled from Whitehall, and escorted by Compton and Dorset, set out for Northampton. James arrived in town in the evening of the next day, and when informed of his daughter's disappearance, exclaimed, "God help me, my own children have forsaken me".

5. James opens negotiations with the Prince, December, 1688. The royal cause was already hopeless, for the fidelity of the fleet could not be vouched, the Scotch guards expressed reluctance to take part in the fray, and York, Newcastle, Hull, Plymouth, and Bristol, were in the hands of the revolutionists. In this state of things, James met a great council of peers, Nov. 27, by which he was recommended to dismiss immediately all the Roman Catholics from office, to grant a pardon without any exceptions, to open a negotiation with the Prince of Orange, and to call a parliament. A proclamation appeared on the 30th, stating that the king had ordered writs for the meeting of a parliament on the 15th of January, and had granted a free pardon to all who were in rebellion against him. Three commissioners, Halifax, Nottingham, and Godolphin, were deputed to the prince's quar ters, then at Salisbury; he however appointed Hungerford as the place of meeting, where the commissioners arrived on the 8th of December. Halifax was spokesman, and as authorised, proposed that the points in dispute should be referred to the coming parliament, and that in the meantime the prince's troops should not come within thirty or forty miles of London. William accepted these terms, but demanded on his part that all existing statutes should be obeyed; that all papists be dismissed from office; that the king's troops should fall back forty miles to the east; and that the Tower and Tilbury fort be entrusted to the city of London, and Portsmouth to a person agreeable to both parties.

6. The flight of the royal family, Dec. 1688. The very day on which the amnesty was proclaimed, James wrote to Barillon to say that the negotiation was a mere feint, and that he purposed to send off first his wife and child, and then take refuge himself in Ireland, Scotland, or France. To carry out this purpose, the Prince of Wales was sent to Portsmouth in order to be conveyed over to France, but the Earl of Dartmouth refusing to carry the heir-apparent out of the kingdom, the prince was therefore returned to Whitehall. While the commissioners were away at Hungerford, London was in a state of ferment, which was increased by what purported to be a proclamation by the Prince of Orange, calling on the people to disarm and imprison the Roman Catholics. It was a forgery, but it accomplished its purpose. James now arranged for the escape of his wife and child. On the night of the 10th, they were carried over from Whitehall to Lam