 History of England, CHAPTER X, PART XIII. The Declaration began by recapitulating the crimes and errors which had made a revolution necessary. James had invaded the province of the legislature, had treated modest petitioning as a crime, had oppressed the church by means of an illegal tribunal, had, without the consent of Parliament, levied taxes and maintained a standing army in time of peace, had violated the freedom of election, and perverted the course of justice. Proceedings which could lawfully be questioned only in Parliament had been made the subjects of prosecution in the King's Bench. Partial and corrupt juries had been returned, excessive bail had been required from prisoners, excessive fines had been imposed, barbarous and unusual punishments had been inflicted, the estates of accused persons had been granted away before conviction. He, by whose authority these things had been done, had abdicated the government. The Prince of Orange, whom God had made the glorious instrument of delivering the nation from superstition and tyranny, had invited the estates of the realm to meet, and to take counsel together for the securing of religion, of law and of freedom. The lords and commons having deliberated had resolved that they would, first, after the example of their ancestors, assert the ancient rights and liberties of England. Therefore it was declared that the dispensing power, lately assumed and exercised, had no legal existence, that, without grant of Parliament, no money could be extracted by the sovereign from the subject, that, without consent of Parliament, no standing army could be kept up in time of peace. The right of subjects to petition, the right of electors to choose representatives freely, the right of Parliaments to freedom of debate, the right of the nation to a pure and merciful administration of justice according to the spirit of its own mild laws, were solemnly affirmed. All these things the Convention claimed in the name of the whole nation as the undoubted inheritance of Englishmen. Having thus vindicated the principles of the Constitution, the lords and commons, in the entire confidence that the Deliverer would hold sacred the laws and liberties which he had saved, resolved that William and Mary, Prince and Princess of Orange, should be declared King and Queen of England for their joint and separate lives, and that, during their joint lives, the administration of the Government should be in the Prince alone. After them the crown was settled on the posterity of Mary, then on Anne and her posterity, and then on the posterity of William. By this time the wind had ceased to blow from the west. The ship in which the Princess of Orange had embarked lay off Margate on the eleventh of February, and on the following morning anchored at Greenwich. She was received with many signs of joy and affection, but her demeanour shocked the Tories, and was not thought faultless even by the Whigs. A young woman, placed by a destiny as mournful and awful as that which had brooded over the fabled houses of labdacus and pellops, in such a situation that she could not, without violating her duty to her God, her husband, and her country, refuse to take her seat on the throne from which her father had just been hurled, should have been sad or at least serious. Mary was not merely in high but in extravagant spirits. She entered White Hall, it was asserted, with a girlish delight at being mistress of so fine a house, ran about the rooms, peeped into the closets, and examined the quilt of the state bed, without seeming to remember by whom those magnificent apartments had last been occupied. Burnett, who had till then thought her an angel in human form, could not, on this occasion, refrain from blaming her. He was the more astonished because, when he took leave of her at the Hague, she had, though fully convinced that she was in the path of duty, been deeply dejected. To him, as to her spiritual guide, she afterwards explained her conduct. William had written to inform her that some of those who had tried to separate her interest from his still continued their machinations. They gave it out that she thought herself wronged, and, if she wore a gloomy countenance, the report would be confirmed. He therefore entreated her to make her first appearance with an air of cheerfulness. Her heart, she said, was far indeed from cheerful, but she had done her best, and, as she was afraid of not sustaining well a part which was uncongenial to her feelings, she had overacted it. Her deportment was the subject of reams of scurrility in prose and verse. It lowered her in the opinion of some whose esteem she valued, nor did the world know till she was beyond the reach of praise and censure, that the conduct which had brought on her the reproach of levity and insensibility was really a signal instance of that perfect disinterestedness and self-devotion of which man seems to be incapable, but which he sometimes found in women. On the morning of Wednesday the thirteenth of February the court of Whitehall and all the neighbouring streets were filled with gazers. The magnificent banqueting-house, the masterpiece of Inigo embellished by masterpieces of rubens, had been prepared for a great ceremony. The walls were lined by the yeoman of the guard. Near the northern door, on the right hand, a large number of piers had assembled. On the left were the commons with their speaker attended by the mace. The southern door opened, and the prince and princess of orange side by side entered, and took their place under the canopy of state. Both houses approached, vying low. William and Mary advanced a few steps. Halifax on the right, and pole on the left stood forth, and Halifax spoke. The convention, he said, had agreed to a resolution which he prayed their highnesses to hear. They signified their assent, and the clerk of the House of Lords read in a loud voice the declaration of right. When he had concluded, Halifax, in the name of all the estates of the realm, requested the prince and princess to accept the crown. William, in his own name, and in that of his wife, answered that the crown was, in their estimation, the more valuable because it was presented to them as a token of the confidence of the nation. We thankfully accept, he said, what you have offered us. Then, for himself, he assured them that the laws of England, which he had once already vindicated, should be the rules of his conduct, that it should be his study to promote the welfare of the kingdom, and that, as to the means of doing so, he should constantly recur to the advice of the houses, and should be disposed to trust their judgment rather than his own. These words were received with a shout of joy which was heard in the streets below, and was instantly answered by hussars from many thousands of voices. The lords and commons then reverently retired from the banqueting-house, and went in procession to the Great Gate of White Hall, where the heralds and perseverance were waiting in their gorgeous tabards. All the space, as far as Charing Cross, was one sea of heads. The kettle-drums struck up, the trumpets peeled, and Garter King at Arms, in a loud voice, proclaimed the Prince and Princess of Orange, King and Queen of England, charged all Englishmen to pay from that moment faith and true allegiance to the new sovereigns, and besought God, who had already wrought so signal a deliverance for our church and nation, to bless William and Mary with a long and happy reign. Thus was consummated the English Revolution. When we compare it with those revolutions which have, during the last sixty years overthrown so many ancient governments, we cannot but be struck by its peculiar character. Why that character was so peculiar is sufficiently obvious, and yet seems not to have been always understood either by eulogists or by censors. The continental revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took place in countries where all trace of the limited monarchy of the Middle Ages had long been effaced. The right of the Prince to make laws and to levy money had, during many generations, been undisputed. His throne was guarded by a great regular army. His administration could not, without extreme peril, be blamed even in the mildest terms. His subjects held their personal liberty by no other tenure than his pleasure. Not a single institution was left which had, within the memory of the oldest man, afforded efficient protection to the subject against the utmost excess of tyranny. Those great consuls which had once curbed the regal power had sunk into oblivion. Their composition and their privileges were known only to antiquaries. We cannot wonder, therefore, that when men who had been thus ruled succeeded in resting supreme power from a government which they had long in secret hated, they should have been impatient to demolish and unable to construct. But they should have been fascinated by every specious novelty, that they should have prescribed every title, ceremony and phrase associated with the old system, and that turning away with disgust from their own national precedents and traditions. They should have sought for principles of government in the writings of theorists, or aped with ignorant and ungraceful affectation the patriots of Athens and Rome. As little can we wonder that the violent action of the revolutionary spirit should have been followed by reaction equally violent, and that confusion should speedily have engendered despotism's sterner than that from which it had sprung. Had we been in the same situation, had Strafford succeeded in his favourite scheme of thorough, had he formed an army as numerous and as well disciplined as that which a few years later was formed by Cromwell, had a series of judicial decisions similar to that which was pronounced by the Exchequer Chamber in the case of ship-money, transferred to the crown the right of taxing the people, had the Star Chamber and the High Commission continued to find mutilate and imprison every man who dared raise his voice against the government, had the press been as completely enslaved here as at Vienna or at Naples, had our kings gradually drawn to themselves the whole legislative power, had six generations of Englishmen passed away without a single session of parliament, and had we then at length risen up in some moment of wild excitement against our masters, what an outbreak would that have been? With what a crash, heard and felt to the farthest ends of the world would the whole vast fabric of society have fallen? How many thousands of exiles, once the most prosperous and the most refined members of this great community, would have begged their bread in continental cities, or have sheltered their heads under huts of bark in the unclear forests of America? How often should we have seen the pavement of London piled up in barricades, the houses dinted with bullets, the gutters foaming with blood? How many times should we have rushed wildly from extreme to extreme, sought refuge from anarchy in despotism, and been driven again by despotism into anarchy? How many years of blood and confusion would it have cost us to learn the very rudiments of political science? How many childish theories would have duped us? How many rude and ill-poised constitutions should we have set up only to see them tumble down? Happy would it have been for us if a sharp discipline of half a century had sufficed to educate us into a capacity of enjoying true freedom? These calamities, our revolution, averted. It was a revolution strictly defensive, and had prescription and legitimacy on its side. Here, and here only, a limited monarchy of the thirteenth century had come down unimpaired to the seventeenth century. Our parliamentary institutions were in full vigour. The main principles of our government were excellent. They were not indeed formally and exactly set forth in a single written instrument, but they were to be found scattered over our ancient and noble statutes, and, what was a far greater moment, they had been engraven on the hearts of Englishmen during four hundred years. That, without the consent of the representatives of the nation, no legislative act could be passed, no tax imposed, no regular soldiery kept up, that no man could be imprisoned even for a day by the arbitrary will of the sovereign, that no tool of power could plead the royal command as a justification for violating any right of the humblest subject, were held both by Whigs and Tories to be fundamental laws of the realm. A realm of which these were the fundamental laws stood in no need of a new constitution. But, though a new constitution was not needed, it was plain that changes were required. The misgovernment of the stewards and the troubles which that misgovernment had produced sufficiently proved that there was somewhere a defect in our polity, and that defect it was the duty of the Convention to discover and to supply. Some questions of great moment were still open to dispute. Our constitution had begun to exist in times when statesmen were not much accustomed to frame exact definitions. Anomalies, therefore, inconsistent with its principles, and dangerous to its very existence, had sprung up almost imperceptibly, and, not having, during many years, caused any serious inconvenience, and had gradually acquired the force of prescription. The remedy for these evils was to assert the rights of the people, in such language as should terminate all controversy, and to declare that no precedent could justify any violation of those rights. When this had been done it would be impossible for our rulers to misunderstand the law. But, unless something more were done, it was by no means improbable that they might violate it. Unhappily the church had long taught the nation that hereditary monarchy, alone among our institutions, was divine and inviolable, that the right of the House of Commons to a share in the legislative power was a right merely human, but that the right of the king to the obedience of his people was from above, that the great charter was a statute which might be repealed by those who had made it, but that the rule which called the princes of the blood royal to the throne in order of succession was of celestial origin, and that any act of parliament inconsistent with that rule was a nullity. It is evident then, in a society in which such superstitions prevail, constitutional freedom must ever be insecure. A power which is regarded merely as the ordinance of man cannot be an efficient check on a power which is regarded as the ordinance of God. It is vain to hope that laws, however excellent, will permanently restrain a king who, in his own opinion and in that of a great part of his people, has an authority infinitely higher in kind than the authority which belongs to those laws. To deprive royalty of these mysterious attributes, and to establish the principle that kings reigned by a right in no respect differing from the right by which free holders chose knights of the shire, or from the right by which judges granted rites of habeas corpus, was absolutely necessary to the security of our liberties. Thus the convention had two great duties to perform. The first was to clear the fundamental laws of the realm from ambiguity. The second was to eradicate from the minds both of the governors and of the governed the false and pernicious notion that the royal prerogative was something more sublime and holy than those fundamental laws. The former object was attained by the solemn recital and claim with which the Declaration of Right commences, the latter by the resolution which pronounced the throne vacant, and invited William and Mary to fill it. The change seems small. Not a single flower of the crown was touched, not a single new right was given to the people. The whole English law, substantive and adjective, was, in the judgement of all the greatest lawyers of Holt, and Treby of Maynard and Summers, exactly the same after the revolution as before it. Some controverted points had been decided according to the sense of the best jurists, and there had been a slight deviation from the ordinary course of succession. This was all, and this was enough. As our revolution was a vindication of ancient rights, so it was conducted with strict attention to ancient formalities. In almost every word and act may be discerned a profound reverence for the past, the estates of the realm deliberated in the old halls and according to the old rules. Paul was conducted to his chair between his mover and his seconder with the accustomed forms. The sergeant with his mace brought up the messengers of the lords to the table of the commons, and the three obeisances were duly made. The conference was held with all the antique ceremonial. On one side of the table, in the painted chamber, the managers of the lords sat covered and robed in ermine and gold. The managers of the commons stood bareheaded on the other side. The speeches present an almost ludicrous contrast to the revolutionary oratory of every other country. Both the English parties agreed in treating with solemn respect the ancient constitutional traditions of the state. The only question was in what sense those traditions were to be understood. The assertors of liberty said not a word about the natural equality of men, and the inalienable sovereignty of the people, about harmonious or Timolian, brute as the elder or brute as the younger. When they were told that by the English law the crown, at the moment of a demise, must descend to the next heir, they answered that by the English law a living man could have no heir. When they were told that there was no precedent for declaring the throne vacant, they produced from among the records in the tower a roll of parchment, near three hundred years old, on which, in quaint characters and barbarous Latin, it was recorded that the estates of the realm had declared vacant the throne of a perfidious and tyrannical plantagenet. When, at length, the dispute had been accommodated, the new sovereigns were proclaimed with the old pageantry. All the fantastic pomp of heraldry was there. Clarencio and Noroi, Port Cullis and Rouge Dragon, the trumpets, the banners, the grotesque coats embroidered with lions and lilies. The title of King of France, assumed by the conqueror of Cressy, was not omitted in the royal style. To us, who have lived in the year 1848, it may seem almost an abuse of terms to call a proceeding, conducted with so much deliberation, with so much sobriety, and with such minute attention to a prescriptive etiquette, by the terrible name of revolution. And yet this revolution, of all revolutions the least violent, has been of all revolutions the most beneficent. It finally decided the great question whether the popular element which had, ever since the age of Fitzwalter and Montfort been found in the English polity, should be destroyed by the monarchical element, or should be suffered to develop itself freely and to become dominant. The strife between the two principles had been long, fierce, and doubtful. It had lasted through four reigns. It had produced seditions, impeachments, rebellions, battles, sieges, prescriptions, judicial massacres. Sometimes liberty, sometimes royalty had seemed to be on the point of perishing. During many years one half of the energy of England had been employed in counteracting the other half. The executive power and the legislative power had so effectually impeded each other that the state had been of no account in Europe. The King at Arms, who proclaimed William and Mary before Whitehall Gate, did in truth announce that this great struggle was over, that there was entire union between the throne and the parliament, that England, long-dependent and degraded, was again a power of the first rank, that the ancient laws by which the prerogative was bounded would henceforth be held as sacred as the prerogative itself, and would be followed out to all their consequences, that the executive administration would be conducted in conformity with the sense of the representatives of the nation, and that no reform, which the two houses should after mature deliberation propose, would be obstinately withstood by the sovereign. The Declaration of Right, though it made nothing law which had not been law before, contained the germ of the law which gave religious freedom to the dissenter, of the law which secured the independence of the judges, of the law which limited the duration of parliaments, of the law which placed the liberty of the press under the protection of juries, of the law which prohibited the slave trade, of the law which abolished the sacramental test, of the law which relieved the Roman Catholics from civil disabilities, of the law which reformed the representative system, of every good law which has been passed during 160 years, of every good law which may hereafter, in the course of ages, be found necessary to promote the public wheel, and to satisfy the demands of public opinion. The highest eulogy which can be pronounced on the Revolution of 1688 is this, that it was our last revolution. Several generations have now passed away, since any wise and patriotic Englishman has meditated resistance to the established government. In all honest and reflecting minds there is a conviction, daily strengthened by experience, that the means of effecting every improvement which the Constitution requires may be found within the Constitution itself. Now, if ever, we ought to be able to appreciate the whole importance of the stand which was made by our forefathers against the House of Stuart. All around us the world is convulsed by the agonies of great nations. Governments which seemed like clear to stand during ages have been on a sudden shaken and overthrown. The proudest capitals of western Europe have streamed with civil blood. All evil passions, the thirst of gain and the thirst of vengeance, the antipathy of class to class, the antipathy of race to race, have broken loose from the control of divine and human laws. Fear and anxiety have clouded the faces and depressed the hearts of millions. Trade has been suspended and industry paralysed. The rich have become poor and the poor have become poorer. Doctrines hostile to all sciences, to all arts, to all industry, to all domestic charities. Doctrines which, if carried into effect, would in thirty years undo all that thirty centuries have done for mankind and would make the fairest provinces of France and Germany as savage as Congo or Patagonia have been avowed from the tribute and defended by the sword. Europe has been threatened with subjugation by barbarians, compared with whom the barbarians who marched under Attila and Alboen were enlightened and humane. The truest friends of the people have with deep sorrow owned that interests more precious than any political privileges were in jeopardy and that it might be necessary to sacrifice even liberty in order to save civilization. Meanwhile, in our island, the regular course of government has never been for a day interrupted. The few bad men who longed for license and plunder have not had the courage to confront for one moment the strength of a loyal nation rallied in firm array around a parental throne. And if it be asked what has made us to differ from others, the answer is that we never lost what others are wildly and blindly seeking to regain. It is because we had a preserving revolution in the seventeenth century that we have not had a destroying revolution in the nineteenth. It is because we had freedom in the midst of servitude that we have order in the midst of anarchy. For the authority of law, for the security of property, for the peace of our streets, for the happiness of our houses, our gratitude is due under him who raises and pulls down nations at his pleasure to the long parliament, to the convention, and to William of Orange. End of Part 13 and the end of Book 2 and Chapter 10 of the History of England by Thomas Bavington Macaulay.