1688-1689
Characteristics of the English Revolution--Views of the
various parties--The Convention--Proposal to declare the
throne vacant--The Regency question--The resolution of the
Commons--Amendment of the Lords--The crisis--Attitude of
Mary--Announcement of William--Resolution passed--Declaration
of Right--Tender of the crown.
It is significant of the peaceful and, so to speak, constitutional
character of our English Revolution that by far its most momentous
scenes were enacted within the four walls of the meeting-places of
deliberative assemblies, and find their chronicle in the dry record of
votes and resolutions. We have no "days," in the French sense of the
word, or hardly any, to commemorate. The gradual accomplishment of the
political work of 1688-89 is not marked and emphasised like that of
1789-92 at every stage by some out-door event of the picturesque, the
stirring, or the terrible kind--such for instance as those by which the
14th of July, the 6th of October, the 10th of August, and in a darker
order of memories, the 2d of September, have been made landmarks in the
revolutionary history of France. On every one of the days thus singled
out for glorious or for shameful remembrance, some irrevocable step was
taken--some new position gained by the advancing forces of French
democracy from which there was no retreat. We in England have no
anniversaries of the kind. We may remember, though we have ceased to
celebrate in our churches, the day in which William first set foot on
our shores; but we feel that after all it was not an "event" in the
sense of that other great Protestant deliverance with which in
month-date it so fortunately coincided, and for which the Anglican
liturgy economically set apart a common form of thanksgiving. The
discovery of the Gunpowder Plot was an incident having results of the
most permanent and unalterable character. It made all the difference
between the safety and the destruction of the Sovereign and the three
Estates of the Realm. Again, the execution of Charles I. determined
something, by committing the country to the military autocracy of
Cromwell and the powerful reaction of the Restoration. But this cannot
be said of the landing of the Prince of Orange at Torbay--the mere
opening of a drama which might have had any one of half a dozen
_dénoûments_; it can hardly even be said of the second and definitive
flight of James. The 23d of December 1688 was in one sense no more of an
"epoch-making" day than the 5th of November in the same year. It is true
that the sovereign's abandonment of his throne and country became
something more than a striking dramatic event; it was elevated into an
act of profound political import. It had or was invested with inward and
most momentous legal significance, in addition to its outward historical
prominence. But for all that it determined nothing at the moment of its
occurrence but the future of a single man. It is quite conceivable that
the mere flight of James II. should have settled no more than his own
incapacitation--that it should not even have brought about the exclusion
of his son from the succession, still less have led to the formal
recognition of a new principle in the English Constitution. True it is
that all these consequences were deducible from it as matter of
argument, and flowed from it in fact. True it is that, when James stole
down the Medway in the early morning of the 23d of December, he was
taking a step which was capable of being turned by the friends of
liberty and good government, or his own enemies,--and it was difficult
to be one without being the other,--to the disherison of his son, and
the far-reaching substitution of a statutory for a common-law monarchy.
But no less true is it that these results were very far from being
necessary or automatic in their character; that, on the contrary, they
hung for some critical days in the balance, and that the active
co-operation of human qualities in its very conspicuous and not too
common forms of courage, foresight, and political dexterity, was needed
in the last resort to secure them. It is for this reason that our
"days," our anniversaries of such merely external incidents as William's
landing or James's departure are, comparatively speaking, so
unimportant. No such incident either made or insured the making of our
existing English Constitution. The events which really made it passed,
as I have said, within the walls of two deliberative assemblies, between
January 23 and February 13, 1689, and its making was not actually
assured until this period was well-nigh expired.
How important was the political work compressed within these three
weeks will be at once apparent if now, having noted how little was
settled by the mere flight of James II., we go on to consider how great
was the variety of its possible results. James had ceased to be king _de
facto_, that was all; and the English people were pretty unanimous in
their determination that he should never be king _de facto_ again. But
was he still king _de jure_? If not, if he was not legally sovereign,
was any one? And if so, who? Upon each of these last three questions
there was room for difference of opinion, and upon at least two of them
opinion was in fact divided. A considerable section of the Tory party
were of opinion that James, although he had _de facto_ ceased to reign,
was still the only lawful king of England, in whose name, at any rate,
all royal authority should be exercised, and all royal acts of state
performed. To these men, therefore, the only legal and constitutional
solution of the problem appeared to be the creation of a Regency. They
were for raising William to the position of Regent, and empowering him
to preside over the actual government of the country in this capacity
during the life of his father-in-law.
A second section of the Tory party held, on the other hand, that James
having by his own act ceased to govern, had also ceased to reign. By
deliberately laying aside the sceptre he had brought about a demise of
the crown. It had simply devolved upon the person next in succession,
and that person was, they declared, the Princess Mary. There was no need
therefore for the creation of a Regent, and still less for the more
extreme and wholly unprecedented step of appointing a new sovereign. All
that was necessary was a mere formal recognition by the country of the
bare legal facts of the case. According to this party the Princess Mary
was in truth at that moment the lawful Queen of England, and nothing
more was needed than a national acknowledgment of her title.
To both of these doctrines the Whig party were equally opposed. They
held in opposition to the former, that James had ceased to reign, and in
opposition to the latter, that the crown had been not demised but simply
forfeited. The King's destruction of his own right could not have, and
had not had, the effect of transmitting them to any one else whomsoever.
They resided at that moment, whatever constitutional fictions might aver
to the contrary, in no one; and a special expression of the national
will, a special exertion of the national power, would be required in
favour of some designated successors to these rights before anybody
could be regarded, whether in fact or law, as invested with them.
Apart from all political prepossessions there can, I think, be no
serious dispute as to which was the most logical and tenable contention
of the three; and that this was distinctly that of the Whigs. The Tories
who contended that James had lost his right to the personal exercise of
the royal authority, while yet retaining so much of that authority that
any one who exercised it in his stead must be supposed to do so as his
deputy, were involved in a hopeless contradiction. In assuming to
appoint such deputy to act for a person whom they still persisted in
regarding as king _de jure_, they were themselves obviously usurping a
portion of that very _jus_ which they professed to respect. True, they
attempted to get over this objection by urging that James had placed
himself under a disability to exercise his royal authority, but they
could point to nothing in the facts of the case to support their
contention. Disability to exercise royal authority could, in the view of
the Constitution, arise from one cause alone, the same cause from which
in the view of the common law arises the disability to exercise civil
rights. The disabled King, like the disabled subject, must have become
mentally incapacitated; and James's incapacitation for the work of
government was purely moral. Setting aside the deposition and execution
of his father, which even the Whigs did not endeavour to elevate into a
regular precedent, there was no constitutional sanction for the
withdrawal of the reins of state from the hands of the monarch, on any
ground save that of insanity. Once extend this, and admit that a king
who is merely bad may be treated as though he were mad, and the Whig
doctrine is thereby absolutely conceded. As to the practical
inconveniences of a Regency exercised in the name of an actively hostile
sovereign--a sovereign who would have been sometimes in arms against his
own nominal authority, and always plotting its overthrow--they would of
course have been both grave and numerous. But it is less surprising that
the Regency party of that day should have ignored them than that they
should have been so indifferent to the complete surrender of their
political principles which was involved in the proposal to which they
committed themselves.
More logical in form, but equally untenable in fact, was the position
assumed by the other section of the Tory party. There was perhaps
nothing altogether irreconcilable with their principles in the theory
that a voluntary abandonment of the throne might operate as a demise of
the crown; but coolly to assert a right to pass over the infant Prince
of Wales on the strength of the mere idle story that he was a
supposititious child[6] was a pretension which, especially as put
forward by men who were such sticklers for constitutional fictions as to
insist that there must at any given moment be some one person or other
entitled to wear the English crown, appears little short of
preposterous.
The Whig theory of the situation rejected the fictions of both branches
of the Tory party with equal decision. There was no need, according to
the Whigs, for the country to bewilder itself in efforts to distinguish
between _de jure_ and _de facto_ sovereignty, still less to resort to
the far-fetched expedient of assuming a demise of the crown in order to
prevent the former kind of sovereignty from undergoing interruption. A
king, they held, might lose his title to the crown by a voluntary
abandonment of the throne; and he might lose that title without anybody
succeeding to it. Indeed, since the English crown devolved according to
the ordinary English laws of succession, it was impossible that anybody
should succeed to it by mere _operation of law_ during its former
wearer's life-time. If it was a principle of constitutional law that at
any given moment there must be some lawful king or queen of England in
existence, it was no less a principle of the common law that _nemo est
hæres viventis_. James, therefore, had according to the Whig theory
ceased to be sovereign, and no one else had become sovereign in his
stead: the throne was vacant. Being vacant it was for the Convention to
fill it, and the members of that body were both entitled and bound to
select the fittest successor to it, unconstrained, though not
necessarily uninfluenced, by the claims of successorship which would
have vested in this, that, or the other person under an ordinary demise
of the crown.
That this was the most logical and self-consistent view of the situation
appears to me undeniable; but it is a singular illustration of the
manner in which events may transpose the relative proportions of
principles that this Whig corollary from the abdication of James
appeared to the statesmen of the time, and even it should seem to
Macaulay, a century and a half after them, to be a more pregnant
assertion of democratic doctrine, and a bolder step in its application,
than that expressed in the earlier proposition that James had ceased to
reign. Nowadays the difference between the Tories who contended that the
crown had been demised, and the Whigs who insisted that the throne was
vacant, hardly arrests the student for an instant. He is disposed to
brush the Tory fiction aside as alike irrational and unnecessary. The
real passage of the Rubicon took place in his view of the matter when it
was declared that James had ceased to be _de jure_ king, and no
subsequent assertion of popular rights in the choice of a successor
could possibly be stronger or more important than that declaration
itself. Yet whereas the Convention accepted the first of these
propositions _nemine contradicente_, the second was only adopted after
having been once actually rejected, and was in fact the subject of so
sharp a conflict of opinion as to threaten irreconcilable deadlock
between the two branches of the constituent body.[7]
The Convention met on the 22d of January, when Halifax was chosen
president in the Lords; Powle, Speaker of the Commons. A letter from
William, read in both Houses, informed their members that he had
endeavoured to the best of his power to discharge the trust reposed in
him, and that it now rested with the Convention to lay the foundation of
a firm security for their religion, laws, and liberties. The Prince then
went on to refer to the dangerous condition of the Protestants in
Ireland and the present state of things abroad, which obliged him to
tell them that next to the danger of unreasonable divisions among
themselves, nothing could be so fatal as too great a delay in their
consultations. And he further intimated that as England was already
bound by treaty to help the Dutch in such exigencies as, deprived of the
troops which he had brought over, and threatened with war by Louis XIV.,
they might easily be reduced to, so he felt confident that the cheerful
concurrence of the Dutch in preserving this kingdom would meet with all
the returns of friendship from Protestants and Englishmen whenever their
own condition should require assistance. To this the two Houses replied
with an address thanking the Prince for his great care in the
administration of the affairs of the kingdom to this time, and formally
continuing to him the same commission,[8] recommending to his particular
care the present state of Ireland. William's answer to this address was
characteristic both of his temperament and his preoccupation. "My lords
and gentlemen," he said, "I am glad that what I have done hath pleased
you; and since you desire me to continue the administration of affairs,
I am willing to accept it. I must recommend to you the consideration of
affairs abroad which makes it fit for you to expedite your business, not
only for making a settlement at home on a good foundation, but for the
safety of Europe." On the 28th the Commons resolved themselves into a
committee of the whole House, and Richard Hampden, son of the great
John, was voted into the chair. The honour of having been the first to
speak the word which was on everybody's lips belongs to Gilbert Dolben,
son of a late Archbishop of York, who "made a long speech tending to
prove that the King's deserting his kingdom without appointing any
person to administer the government amounted in reason and judgment of
law to a demise." Sir Robert Howard, one of the members for Castle
Rising, went a step further, and asserted that the throne, was vacant.
The extreme Tories made a vain effort to procure an adjournment, but the
combination against them of Whigs and their own moderates was too strong
for them, and after a long and stormy debate the House resolved "That
King James II., having endeavoured to subvert the constitution by
breaking the original contract between the King and people, and by the
advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons having violated the
fundamental laws and withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, has abdicated
the government, and that the throne is thereby vacant."
This resolution was at once sent up to the Lords. Before, however, they
could proceed to consider it, another message arrived from the Commons
to the effect that they had just voted it inconsistent with the safety
and welfare of this Protestant nation to be governed by a Popish king.
To this resolution the Peers assented with a readiness which showed in
advance that James had no party in the Upper House, and that the utmost
length to which the Tories in that body were prepared to go was to
support the proposal of a Regency. The first resolution of the Commons
was then put aside in order that this proposal might be discussed. It
was Archbishop Sancroft's plan, who, however, did not make his
appearance to advocate it, and in his absence it was supported by
Rochester and Nottingham, while Halifax and Danby led the opposition to
it. After a day's debate it was lost by the narrow majority of two,
forty-nine peers declaring in its favour, and fifty-one against it. The
Lords then went into Committee on the Commons' resolution, and at once
proceeded, as was natural enough, to dispute the clause in its preamble
which referred to the original contract between the King and the people.
No Tory of course could really have subscribed to the doctrine implied
in these words; but it was doubtless as hard in those days as in these
to interest an assembly of English politicians in affirmations of
abstract political principle, and some Tories probably thought it not
worth while to multiply causes of dissent with the Lower House by
attacking a purely academic recital of their resolution. Anyhow, the
numbers of the minority slightly fell off, only forty-six peers
objecting to the phrase, while fifty-three voted that it should stand.
The word "deserted" was then substituted without a division for the word
"abdicated," and the hour being late, the Lords adjourned.
The real battle, of course, was now at hand, and to any one who assents
to the foregoing criticisms it will be evident that it was far less of a
conflict on a point of constitutional principle, and far more of a
struggle between the parties of two distinct--one cannot call them
rival--claimants to the throne than high-flying Whig writers are
accustomed to represent it. It would of course, be too much to say that
the Whigs insisted on declaring the vacancy of the throne, _only_
because they wished to place William on it, and that the Tories
contended for a demise of the crown, _only_ because they wished an
English princess to succeed to the throne rather than a Dutch prince.
Still, it is pretty certain that, but for this conflict of preferences,
the two political parties, who had made so little difficulty of agreeing
in the declaration that James had ceased to reign, would never have
found it so hard to concur in its almost necessary sequence that the
throne was vacant. The debate on the last clause of the resolution
began, and it soon became apparent that the Whigs were outnumbered. The
forty-nine peers who had supported the proposal of a Regency, which
implied that the royal title was still in James, were bound, of course,
to oppose the proposition that the throne was vacant; and they were
reinforced by several peers who held that that title had already
devolved upon Mary. An attempt to compromise the dispute by omitting the
words pronouncing the throne vacant, and inserting words which merely
proclaimed the Prince and Princess of Orange King and Queen, was
rejected by fifty-two votes to forty-seven[9]; and the original clause
was then put and negatived by fifty-five votes to forty-one.
Thus amended by the substitution of "deserted" for "abdicated," and the
omission of the words "and that the throne is thereby vacant," the
resolution was sent back to the Commons, who instantly and without a
division disagreed with the amendments. The situation was now becoming
critical. The prospect of a deadlock between the two branches of the
Convention threw London into a ferment; crowds assembled in Palace Yard;
petitions were presented in that tumultuous fashion which converts
supplication into menace. To their common credit, however, both parties
united in resistance to these attempts at popular coercion; and William
himself interposed to enjoin a stricter police of the capital. On
Monday, the 4th of February, the Lords resolved to insist on their
amendments; on the following day the Commons reaffirmed their
disagreement with them by 282 votes to 151. A free Conference between
the two Houses was then arranged, and met on the following day.
But the dispute, like many another in our political history, had
meanwhile been settled out of court. Between the date of the Peers' vote
and the Conference Mary had communicated to Danby her high displeasure
at the conduct of those who were setting up her claims in opposition to
those of her husband; and William, who had previously maintained an
unbroken silence, now made, unsolicited, a declaration of a most
important, and indeed of a conclusive kind. If the Convention, he said,
chose to adopt the plan of a Regency, he had nothing to say against it,
only they must look out for some other person to fill the office, for he
himself would not consent to do so. As to the alternative proposal of
putting Mary on the throne and allowing him to reign by her courtesy,
"No man," he said, "can esteem a woman more than I do the Princess; but
I am so made that I cannot think of holding anything by apron-strings;
nor can I think it reasonable to have any share in the government unless
it be put in my own person, and that for the term of my life. If you
think fit to settle it otherwise I will not oppose you, but will go back
to Holland and meddle no more in your affairs." These few sentences of
plain speaking swept away the clouds of intrigue and pedantry as by a
wholesome gust of wind. Both political parties at once perceived that
there was but one possible issue from the situation. The Conference was
duly held, and the constitutional question was, with great display of
now unnecessary learning, solemnly debated; but the managers for the two
Houses met only to register a foregone conclusion. The word "abdicated"
was restored; the vacancy of the throne was voted by sixty-two votes to
forty-seven; and it was immediately proposed and carried without a
division that the Prince and Princess of Orange should be declared King
and Queen of England.
It now only remained to give formal effect to this resolution, and in so
doing to settle the conditions whereon the crown, which the Convention
had now distinctly recognised itself as conferring upon the Prince and
Princess, should be conferred. A Committee appointed by the Commons to
consider what safeguards should be taken against the aggressions of
future sovereigns had made a report in which they recommended not only a
solemn enunciation of ancient constitutional principles, but the
enactment of new laws. The Commons, however, having regard to the
importance of prompt action, judiciously resolved on carrying out only
the first part of the programme. They determined to preface their tender
of the crown to William and Mary by a recital of the royal encroachments
of the past reigns, and a formal assertion of the constitutional
principles against which such encroachments had offended. This document,
drafted by a Committee of which the celebrated Somers, then a
scarcely-known young advocate, was the chairman, was the famous
DECLARATION OF RIGHT.
The grievances which it recapitulated in its earlier portion, fourteen
in number, were as follows:--(1) the royal pretension to dispense with
and suspend laws without consent of Parliament; (2) the punishment of
subjects, as in the Seven Bishops' case, for petitioning the Crown; (3)
the establishment of the illegal Court of High Commission for
ecclesiastical affairs; (4) the levy of taxes without the consent of
Parliament; (5) the maintenance of a standing army in time of peace
without the same consent; (6) the disarmament of Protestants while
Papists were both armed and employed contrary to law; (7) the violation
of the freedom of election; (8) the prosecution in the King's Bench of
suits only cognisable in Parliament; (9) the return of partial and
corrupt juries; (10) the requisition of excessive bail; (11) the
imposition of excessive fines; (12) the infliction of illegal and cruel
punishments; (13) the grants of the estates of accused persons before
conviction. Then, after solemnly reaffirming the popular rights from
which these abuses of the prerogative derogated, the Declaration goes on
to recite that, having an "entire confidence" William would "preserve
them from the violation of the rights which they have here asserted, the
Three Estates do resolve that William and Mary, Prince and Princess of
Orange, be and be declared King and Queen ... to hold the Crown and
Royal Dignity ... to them the said Prince and Princess during their
Lives and the Life of the Survivor of them; and the sole and full
exercise of the Royal Power be only in and exercised by the said Prince
of Orange, in the Names of the said Prince and Princess during their
Lives, and after their Deceases, the said Crown and Royal Dignity of the
said Kingdoms and Dominions to the Heirs of the Body of the said
Princess; and, for default of such Issue, to the Princess Anne of
Denmark and the Heirs of her Body; and, for default of such Issue, to
the Issue of the said Prince of Orange." Then followed an alteration
required by the scrupulous conscience of Nottingham in the terms of the
Oath of Allegiance.
On the 12th of February Mary arrived from Holland. On the following day,
in the Banqueting House at Whitehall, the Prince and Princess of Orange
were waited on by both Houses of Convention in a body. The Declaration
was read by the Clerk of the Crown; the sovereignty solemnly tendered to
them by Halifax, in the name of the Estates; and on the same day they
were proclaimed King and Queen in the usual places in the cities of
London and Westminster.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] _How_ idle this story was may best be judged by studying the
so-called evidence in its favour, as set forth in the pages of that
writer who, more perhaps than any other chronicler of the events of that
period, would have liked to establish its truth. No one, I think, can
read Burnet's account of the Queen's accouchement, so completely
demonstrating as it does the _impossibility_ of the alleged fraud,
without wondering at the strength of the partisanship and popular
prejudice which could for a moment have believed in its perpetration.
[7] The fact that the _practical_ cause of this sharp conflict was the
rivalry between the partisans of William and those of Mary is only a
partial explanation of the phenomenon referred to in the text. It is a
reason for the Convention having debated the Whig corollary so much, but
not for their debating the Whig-Tory original proposition so little. Of
course the _practical_ explanation is the simple one, that James had
made himself impossible. Both parties concurred so readily in that
opinion that they applied it without either of them pausing to consider
its scope as a precedent, and that, quite apart from all controversies
as to regency, demise of the crown, vacancy of the throne, or what not,
the first instance in which a people pronounced _any_ king
impossible--such king being of sound mind, and still asserting his
sovereignty--let in the whole modern democratic theory.
[8] It is somewhat singular that Macaulay should have taken no notice of
an address which really constituted William's sole legal, or quasi legal
title to the administration of affairs between the assembling of the
Convention (which necessarily revoked his original commission) and the
conclusion of its king-making labours.
[9] The offer and rejection of this compromise appears to me to be
additional proof of the proposition advanced in the text--viz. that both
Whigs and Tories were far more solicitous for the success of their
candidate than for the triumph of their principles. Macaulay, it is
true, contends, as from his point of view he was bound to do, that the
Whigs made no concession of principle in proposing their compromise; for
if, he argues, the Convention could elect William and Mary there must
have been a vacancy of the throne. But surely the resolution as amended
might have been treated as merely _declaratory_ of Mary's title, and
elective only so far as it associated William with her on a throne which
had become his wife's by succession, and so would never have been
vacated at all. No; it was a genuine and not a fictitious surrender of
Whig principle; and while it proved that the Whigs were prepared to
offer any such concession as would make William King, its rejection
proved that the Tories cared for no such concession as did not leave
Mary sole Queen. The gain of votes which the Whigs secured by the
compromise probably represents the proportion of peers who really cared
for the abstract principle apart from the concrete facts.