they had sworn to their king would be strictly fulfilled; and the most orthodox Churchmen might, without any scruple of conscience, take office under the regent.*

The opinion of Sancroft had great weight with the whole Tory party, and especially with the clergy. Α week before the day for which the Convention had been summoned, a grave party assembled at Lambeth Palace, heard prayers in the chapel, dined with the primate, and then consulted on the state of public affairs. Five suffragans of the archbishop, who had shared his perils and his glory in the preceding summer, were present. The Earls of Clarendon and Ailesbury represented the Tory laity. The unanimous sense of the meeting appeared to be that those who had taken the oath of allegiance to James might justifiably withdraw their obedience from him, but could not with a safe conscience call any other by the name of king.†

* It seems incredible that any man should really have been imposed upon by such nonsense. I therefore think it right to quote Sancroft's words, which are still extant in his own hand-writing:

"The political capacity or authority of the king, and his name in the government, are perfect, and can not fail; but his person being human and mortal, and not otherwise privileged than the rest of mankind, is subject to all the defects and failings of it. He may therefore be incapable of directing the government and dispensing the public treasure, &c., either by absence, by infancy, lunacy, deliracy, or apathy, whether by nature or casual infirmity, or, lastly, by some invincible prejudices of mind, contracted and fixed by education and habit, with unalterable resolutions superinduced, in matters wholly inconsistent and incompatible with the laws, religion, peace, and true policy of the kingdom. In all these cases (I say) there must be some one or more persons appointed to supply such defect, and vicariously to him, and by his power and authority, to direct public affairs. And this done, I say further, that all proceedings, authorities, commissions, grants, &c., issued as formerly, are legal and valid to all intents, and the people's allegiance is the same still, their oaths and obligations no way thwarted. So long as the government moves by the king's authority, and in his name, all those sacred ties and settled forms of proceedings are kept, and no man's conscience burdened with any thing he needs scruple to undertake.”—Tanner MS.; Doyly's Life of Sancroft. It was not altogether without reason that the creatures of James made themselves merry with the good archbishop's English. Evelyn, Jan. 15, 1688.

...?

Thus two sections of the Tory party, a section which looked forward to an accommodation with James and a section which was opposed to any such accommodation, agreed in supporting the plan of regency. But a third section, which, though not very numerous, had great weight and influence, recommended a very different plan. The leaders of this small band were Danby and the Bishop of London in the House of Lords, and Sir Robert Sawyer in the House of Commons. They conceived that they had found out a way of effecting a complete revolution under strictly legal forms. It was contrary to all principle, they said, that the king should be deposed by his subjects; nor was it necessary to depose him. He had himself, by his flight, abdicated his power and dignity. A demise had actually taken place. All constitutional lawyers held that the throne of England could not be one moment vacant. The next heir had therefore succeeded. Who, then, was the next heir? As to the infant who had been carried into France, his entrance into the world had been attended by many suspicious circumstances. It was due to the other members of the royal family and to the nation that all doubts should be cleared up. An investigation had been solemnly demanded, in the name of the Princess of Orange, by her husband, and would have been instituted if the parties who were accused of fraud had not taken a course which, in any ordinary case, would have been considered as a decisive proof of guilt. They had not chosen to await the issue. of a solemn parliamentary proceeding; they had stolen away into a foreign country; they had carried with them the child; they had carried with them all those French and Italian women of the bed-chamber who, if there had been foul play, must have been privy to it, and who ought, therefore, to have been subjected to a rigorous cross examination. To admit the boy's claim without inquiry was impossible; and those who called themselves his parents had made inquiry impossible. Judgment must therefore go against him by default. If he was wronged, he was

wronged, not by the nation, but by those whose strange conduct at the time of his birth had justified the nation in demanding investigation, and who had then avoided investigation by flight. He might, therefore, with perfect equity, be considered as a pretender. And thus the crown had legally devolved on the Princess of Orange. She was actually Queen Regnant. The houses had nothing to do but to proclaim her. She might, if such were her pleasure, make her husband her first minister, and might even, with the consent of Parliament, bestow on him the title of king.

The persons who preferred this scheme to any other were few, and it was certain to be opposed both by all who still bore any good will to James and by all the adherents of William; yet Danby, confident in his own knowledge of parliamentary tactics, and well aware how much, when great parties are nearly balanced, a small flying squadron can effect, did not despair of being able to keep the event of the contest in suspense till both Whigs and Tories, despairing of complete victory, and afraid of the consequences of delay, should suffer him to act as umpire. Nor is it impossible that he might have succeeded if his efforts had been seconded, nay, if they had not been counteracted, by her whom he wished to raise to the height of human greatness. Quick-sighted as he was and versed in affairs, he was altogether ignorant of the character of Mary, and of the feeling with which she regarded her husband; nor was her old preceptor, Compton, better informed. William's manners were dry and cold; his constitution was infirm, and his temper by no means bland; he was not a man who would commonly be thought likely to inspire a fine young woman of twentysix with a violent passion. It was known that he had not always been strictly constant to his wife; and talebearers had reported that she did not live happily with him. The most acute politicians, therefore, never suspected that, with all his faults, he had obtained such an empire over her heart as princes the most renowned for their success in gallantry, Francis the First and Henry

the Fourth, Louis the Fourteenth and Charles the Second, had never obtained over the heart of any woman, and that the three kingdoms of her forefathers were val uable in her estimation chiefly because, by bestowing them on him, she could prove to him the intensity and disinterestedness of her affection. Danby, in profound ignorance of her sentiments, assured her that he would defend her rights, and that, if she would support him, he hoped to place her alone on the throne.*

The course of the Whigs, meanwhile, was simple and consistent. Their doctrine was that the foundation of our government was a contract expressed on one side by the oath of allegiance, and on the other by the coronation oath, and that the duties imposed by this contract were mutual. They held that a sovereign who grossly abused his power might lawfully be withstood and dethroned by his people. That James had abused his power was not disputed; and the whole Whig party was ready to pronounce that he had forfeited it. Whether the Prince of Wales was supposititious was a point not worth discussing. There were now far stronger reasons than any which could be drawn from the circumstances of his birth for excluding him from the throne. A child, brought to the royal couch in a warming-pan, might possibly prove a good king of England. But there could be no such hope for a child educated by a father who was the most stupid and obstinate of tyrants, in a foreign country, the seat of despotism and superstition; in a country where the last traces of liberty had disappeared; where the States-General had ceased to meet; where Parliaments had long registered, without one remonstrance, the most oppressive edicts of the sovereign; where valor, genius, learning, seemed to exist only for the purpose of aggrandizing a single man where adulation was the main business of the press, the pulpit, and the stage; and where one chief subject of adulation was the barbarous persecution of the

* Clarendon's Diary, Dec. 24, 1688; Burnet, i., 819; Proposals humbly offered in behalf of the Princess of Orange, Jan. 28, 1688.

Reformed Church. Was the boy likely to learn, under such tuition and in such a situation, respect for the institutions of his native land? Could it be doubted that he would be brought up to be the slave of the Jesuits and the Bourbons, and that he would be, if possible, more bitterly prejudiced than any preceding Stuart against the laws of England?

Nor did the Whigs think that, situated as the country then was, a departure from the ordinary rule of succession was in itself an evil. They were of opinion that, till that rule had been broken, the doctrines of indefeasible hereditary right and passive obedience would be pleasing to the court, would be inculcated by the clergy, and would retain a strong hold on the public mind. The notion would still prevail that the kingly office is the ordinance of God in a sense different from that in which all government is his ordinance. It was plain that, till this superstition was extinct, the Constitution could never be secure; for a really limited monarchy can not long exist in a society which regards monarchy as something divine, and the limitations as mere human inventions. Royalty, in order that it might exist in perfect harmony with our liberties, must be unable to show any higher or more venerable title than that by which we hold our liberties. The king must be henceforth regarded as a magistrate, a great magistrate indeed, and highly to be honored, but subject, like all other magistrates, to the law, and deriving his power from heaven in no other sense than that in which the Lords and the Commons may be said to derive their power from heaven. The best way of effecting this salutary change would be to interrupt the course of descent. Under sovereigns who would consider it as little short of high treason to preach non-resistance and the patriarchal theory of government, under sovereigns whose authority, springing from resolutions of the two houses, could never rise higher than its source, there would be little risk of oppression such as had compelled two generations of Englishmen to rise in arms against two generations of Stu