XI.

CHAP. plain that the Convention was the fountainhead from which the authority of all future Parliaments must be derived, and that on the validity of the votes of the Convention must depend the validity of every future statute. And how could the stream rise higher than the source? Was it not absurd to say that the Convention was supreme in the state, and yet a nullity; a legislature for the highest of all purposes, and yet no legislature for the humblest purposes; competent to declare the throne vacant, to change the succession, to fix the landmarks of the constitution, and yet not competent to pass the most trivial Act for the repairing of a pier or the building of a parish church?

These arguments would have had considerable weight, even if every precedent had been on the other side. But in truth our history afforded only one precedent which was at all in point; and that precedent was decisive in favour of the doctrine that royal writs are not indispensably necessary to the existence of a Parliament. No royal writ had summoned the Convention which recalled Charles the Second. Yet that Convention had, after his Restoration, continued to sit and to legislate, had settled the revenue, had passed an Act of amnesty, had abolished the feudal tenures. These proceedings had been sanctioned by authority of which no party in the state could speak without reverence. Hale, a jurist held in honour by every Whig, had borne a considerable share in them, and had always maintained that they were strictly legal. Clarendon, a statesman whose memory was respected by the great body of Tories, little as he was inclined to favour any doctrine derogatory to the rights of the Crown, or to the dignity of that seal of which he was keeper, had declared that, since God had, at a most critical conjuncture, given the nation a good Parliament, it would be the height of folly to look for technical flaws in the instrument by which that Parliament was called together. Would it be pretended that the Convention of 1660 had a more respectable origin than the Convention of 1689? Was not a letter written by the first Prince of the Blood, at the request of the whole peerage, and of hundreds of gentlemen who had represented counties. and towns, at least as good a warrant as a vote of the Rump?

Weaker reasons than these would have satisfied the Whigs who formed the majority of the Privy Council. The King, therefore, on the fifth day after he had been proclaimed, went with royal state to the House of Lords, and took his seat on

the throne. The Commons were called in; and he, with many gracious expressions, reminded his hearers of the perilous situation of the country, and exhorted them to take such steps as might prevent unnecessary delay in the transaction of public business. His speech was received by the gentlemen who crowded the bar with the deep hum by which our ancestors were wont to indicate approbation, and which was often heard in places more sacred than the Chamber of the Peers.* As soon as he had retired, a Bill declaring the Convention a Parliament was laid on the table of the Lords, and rapidly passed by them. In the Commons the debates. were warm. The House resolved itself into a Committee; and so great was the excitement that, when the authority of the Speaker was withdrawn, it was hardly possible to preserve order. Sharp personalities were exchanged. The phrase, "Hear him," a phrase which had originally been used only to silence irregular noises, and to remind members of the duty of attending to the discussion, had, during some years, been gradually becoming what it now is; that is to say, a cry indicative, according to the tone, of admiration, acquiescence, indignation, or derision. On this occasion, the Whigs vociferated "Hear, hear," so tumultuously that the Tories complained of unfair usage. Seymour, the leader of the minority, declared that there could be no freedom of debate while such clamour was tolerated. Some old Whig members were provoked into reminding him that the same clamour had occasionally been heard when he presided, and had not then been repressed. Yet, eager and angry as both sides were, the speeches on both sides indicated that profound reverence for law and prescription which has long been characteristic of Englishmen, and which, though it runs sometimes into pedantry and sometimes into superstition, is not without its advantages. Even at that momentous crisis, when the nation was still in the ferment of a revolution, our public men talked long and seriously about all the circumstances of the deposition of Edward the Second, and of the deposition of Richard the Second, and anxiously enquired whether the assembly which, with Archbishop Lanfranc at its head, set aside Robert of Normandy, and put William Rufus on the throne, did or did not afterwards continue to act as the legislature of the realm. Much was said about the history of writs; much about the etymology of the word Parliament.

CHAP.

XI.

CHAP.
XI.

The members of the

take the oaths.

HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

It is remarkable, that the orator who took the most states-
manlike view of the subject was old Maynard. In the civil !
conflicts of fifty eventful years he had learned that questions
affecting the highest interests of the commonwealth were not
to be decided by verbal cavils and by scraps of Law French
and Law Latin; and, being by universal acknowledgment
the most subtle and the most learned of English jurists, he
could express what he felt without the risk of being accused
of ignorance and presumption. He scornfully thrust aside
as frivolous and out of place all that blackletter learning,
which some men, far less versed in such matters than himself,
had introduced into the discussion. "We are," he said, "at
this moment out of the beaten path. If therefore we are de-
termined to move only in that path, we cannot move at all.
A man in a revolution resolving to do nothing which is not
strictly according to established form resembles a man who
has lost himself in the wilderness, and who stands crying
'Where is the king's highway? I will walk nowhere but on
the king's highway.' In a wilderness a man should take the
track which will carry him home. In a revolution we must
have recourse to the highest law, the safety of the state."
Another veteran Roundhead, Colonel Birch, took the same
side, and argued with great force and keenness from the
precedent of 1660. Seymour and his supporters were beaten
in the Committee, and did not venture to divide the Honse
on the Report. The Bill passed rapidly, and received the
royal assent on the tenth day after the accession of William
and Mary.*

The law which turned the Convention into a Parliament two Houses contained a clause providing that no person should, after the required to first of March, sit or vote in either House without taking the oaths to the new King and Queen. This enactment produced great agitation throughout society. The adherents of the exiled dynasty hoped and confidently predicted that the recusants would be numerous. The minority in both Houses, it was said, would be true to the cause of hereditary monarchy. There might be here and there a traitor; but the great body of those who had voted for a Regency would be firm. Only two Bishops at most would recognise the usurpers. Seymour would retire from public life rather than abjure his principles.

* Stat. 1 W. & M. sess. i. c. 1. See the Journals of the two Houses, and Grey's Debates. The argument in favour

of the bill is well stated in the Paris Gazettes of March 5. and 12. 1689.

i

XI.

Grafton had determined to fly to France and to throw himself CHAP. at the feet of his uncle. With such rumours as these all the coffeehouses of London were filled during the latter part of February. So intense was the public anxiety that, if any man of rank was missed, two days running, at his usual haunts, it was immediately whispered that he had stolen away to Saint Germains.*

The second of March arrived; and the event quieted the fears of one party, and confounded the hopes of the other. The Primate indeed and several of his suffragans stood obstinately aloof: but three Bishops and seventy-three temporal peers took the oaths. At the next meeting of the Upper House several more prelates came in. Within a week about a hundred Lords had qualified themselves to sit. Others, who were prevented by illness from appearing, sent excuses and professions of attachment to their Majesties. Grafton refuted all the stories which had been circulated about him by coming to be sworn on the first day. Two members of the Ecclesiastical Commission, Mulgrave and Sprat, hastened to make atonement for their fault by plighting their faith to William. Beaufort, who had long been considered as the type of a royalist of the old school, submitted after a very short hesitation. Ailesbury and Dartmouth had as little scruple about taking the oath of allegiance as they afterwards had about breaking it.† The Hydes took different paths. Rochester complied with the law; but Clarendon proved refractory. Many thought it strange that the brother who had adhered to James till James absconded should be less sturdy than the brother who had been in the Dutch camp. The explanation perhaps is that Rochester would have sacrificed much more than Clarendon by refusing to take the oaths. Clarendon's income did not depend on the pleasure of the Government: but Rochester had a pension of four thousand a year, which he could not hope to retain if he refused to acknowledge the new Sovereigns. Indeed, he had so many enemies that, during some months, it seemed doubtful whether he would, on any terms, be suffered to retain the splendid reward which he had earned by persecuting the Whigs and by sitting in the High Commission. He was saved from what would have been a fatal blow to his fortunes

Both Van Citters and Ronquillo mention the anxiety which was felt in

London till the result was known.
† Lords' Journals, March 1688.

CHAP.
XI.

Questions relating to the Re

venue.

by the intercession of Burnet, who had been deeply injured by him, and who revenged himself as became a Christian divine.*

In the Lower House four hundred members were sworn in! on the second of March; and among them was Seymour. The spirit of the Jacobites was broken by his defection; and the minority, with very few exceptions, followed his example.

Before the day fixed for the taking of the oaths, the Commons had begun to discuss a momentous question which admitted of no delay. During the interregnum, William had, as provisional chief of the administration, collected the taxes and applied them to the public service; nor could the propriety of this course be questioned by any person who approved of the Revolution. But the Revolution was now over: the vacancy of the throne had been supplied: the Houses were sitting: the law was in full force; and it became necessary immediately to decide to what revenue the Government was entitled.

It was not denied that all the lands and hereditaments of the Crown had passed with the Crown to the new Sovereigns. It was not denied that all duties which had been granted to the Crown for a fixed term of years might be constitutionally exacted till that term should expire. But large revenues had been settled by Parliament on James for life; and whether what had been settled on James for life could, while he lived, be claimed by William and Mary, was a question about which opinions were divided.

Holt, Treby, Pollexfen, indeed all the eminent Whig lawyers, Somers excepted, held that these revenues had been granted to the late King, in his political capacity, but for his natural life, and ought therefore, as long as he continued to drag on his existence in a strange land, to be paid to William and Mary. It appears from a very concise and unconnected report of the debate that Somers dissented from this doctrine. His opinion was that, if the Act of Parliament which had imposed the duties in question was to be construed according to the spirit, the word life must be understood to mean reign, and that therefore the term for which the grant had been made had expired. This was surely the sound opinion: for it was plainly irrational to

* See the letters of Rochester and of Lady Ranelagh to Burnet on this occa

sion.

Journals of the Commons, March 2. 1688. Ronquillo wrote as follows:

"Es de gran consideracion que Seimor haya tomado el juramento; porque es el arrengador y el director principal, en la casa de los Comunes, de los Anglicanos." March, 1688.