the corporations were accordingly changed. But so thoroughly
was the spirit of the country roused, that many even of the new
corporations were set against James’s declaration, and he had
therefore to abandon for a time the hope of seeing it accepted
even by a packed House of Commons. All, however, that he
Trial of the seven bishops.
could do to give it force he did. He ordered the clergy to read
it in all pulpits (1688). Seven bishops, who presented
a petition asking him to relieve the clergy from the
burthen of proclaiming what they believed to be
illegal, were brought to trial for publishing a seditious
libel. Their acquittal by a jury was the first serious blow to the
system adopted by the king.
Another event which seemed likely to consolidate his power was in reality the signal of his ruin. The queen bore him a son. There was thus no longer a strong probability that the king would be succeeded at no great distance of time by a Protestant heir. Popular incredulity expressed Revolution of 1688. itself in the assertion that, as James had attempted to gain his ends by means of a packed bench of judges and a packed House of Commons, he had now capped the series of falsifications by the production of a supposititious heir. The leaders of both parties combined to invite the prince of Orange to come to the rescue of the religion and laws of England. He landed on the 5th of November at Brixham. Before he could reach London every class of English society had declared in his favour. James was deserted even by his army. He fled to France, and a convention parliament, summoned without the royal writ, declared that his flight was equivalent to abdication, and offered the crown in joint sovereignty to William and Mary (1689).
IX. The Revolution and the Age of Anne (1689–1714)
The Revolution, as it was called, was more than a mere change
of sovereigns. It finally transferred the ultimate decision in
the state from the king to parliament. What parliament
had been in the 15th century with the House of
Lords predominating, that parliament was to be again
William III. and Mary
II., 1689.
in the end of the 17th century with the House of
Commons predominating. That House of Commons was far
from resting on a wide basis of popular suffrage. The county
voters were the freeholders; but in the towns, with some
important exceptions, the electors were the richer inhabitants
who formed the corporations of the boroughs, or a body of select
householders more or less under the control of some neighbouring
landowner. A House so chosen was an aristocratic body,
but it was aristocratic in a far wider sense than the House of Lords
was aristocratic. The trading and legal classes found their
representation there by the side of the great owners of land.
The House drew its strength from its position as a true representative
of the effective strength of the nation in its social and
economical organization.
Such was the body which firmly grasped the control over every branch of the administration. Limiting in the Bill of Rights the powers assumed by the crown, the Commons declared that the king could not keep a standing army in time of peace without consent of parliament; and they made that consent effectual, as far as legislation could go, by passing a Mutiny Act year by year for twelve months only, so as to prevent the crown from exercising military discipline without their authority. Behind these legal contrivances stood the fact that the army was organized in the same way as the nation was organized, being officered by gentlemen who had no desire to overthrow a constitution through which the class from which they sprung controlled the government. Strengthened by the cessation of any fear of military violence, the Commons placed the crown in financial dependence on themselves by granting a large part of the revenue only for a limited term of years, and by putting strictly in force their right of appropriating that revenue to special branches of expenditure.
Such a revolution might have ended in the substitution of the despotism of a class for the despotism of a man. Many causes combined to prevent this result. The landowners, who formed the majority of the House, were not elected directly, as was the case with the nobility of the French states-general, by their own class, but by electors who, though generally loyal to them, Causes in favour of liberty. would have broken off from them if they had attempted to make themselves masters of their fellow citizens. No less important was the almost absolute independence of the judges, begun at the beginning of the reign, by the grant of office to them during good behaviour instead of during the king’s pleasure, and finally secured by the clause in the Act of Settlement in 1701, which protected them against dismissal except on the joint address of both Houses of Parliament. Such an improvement, however, finds its full counterpart in another great step already taken. The more representative a government becomes, the more necessary it is for the well-being of the nation that the expression of individual thought should be free in every direction. If it is not so, the government is inclined to proscribe unpopular opinion, and to forget that new opinions by which the greatest benefits are likely to be conferred are certain at first to be entertained by a very few, and are quite certain to be unpopular as soon as they come into collision with the opinions of the majority. In the middle ages the benefits of the liberation of thought from state control had been secured by the antagonism between church and state. The Tudor sovereigns had rightfully asserted the principle that in a well-ordered nation only one supreme power can be allowed to exist; but in so doing they had enslaved religion. It was fortunate that, just at the moment when parliamentary control was established over the state, circumstances should have arisen which made the majority ready to restore to the individual conscience that supremacy over religion which the medieval ecclesiastics had claimed for the corporation of the universal church. Dissenters had, in the main, stood shoulder to shoulder with churchmen in rejecting the suspicious benefits of James, and both gratitude and policy forbade the thought of replacing them under the heavy yoke which had been imposed on them at the Restoration. The exact mode in which relief should be afforded was still an open question. The idea prevalent with the more liberal minds amongst the clergy was that of comprehension—that is to say, of so modifying the prayers and ceremonies of the church as to enable the dissenters cheerfully to enter in. The scheme was one which had approved itself to minds of the highest order—to Sir Thomas More, to Bacon, to Hales and to Jeremy Taylor. It is one which, as long as beliefs are not very divergent, keeps up a sense of brotherhood overruling the diversity of opinion. It broke down, as it always will break down in practice, whenever the difference of belief is so strongly felt as to seek earnestly to embody itself in diversity of outward practice. The greater part of the clergy of the church felt that to surrender their accustomed formularies was to surrender somewhat of the belief which those formularies signified, while the dissenting clergy were equally reluctant to adopt the common The Toleration Act. prayer book even in a modified form. Hence the Toleration Act, which guaranteed the right of separate assemblies for worship outside the pale of the church, though it embodied the principles of Cromwell and Milton, and not those of Chillingworth and Hales, was carried without difficulty, whilst the proposed scheme of comprehension never had a chance of success (1689). The choice was one which posterity can heartily approve. However wide the limits of toleration be drawn, there will always be those who will be left outside. By religious liberty those inside gain as much as those who are without. From the moment of the passing of the Toleration Act, no Protestant in England performed any act of worship except by his own free and deliberate choice. The literary spokesman of the new system was Locke. His Letters concerning Toleration laid down the principle which had been maintained by Cromwell, with a wider application than was possible in days when the state was in the hands of a mere minority only able to maintain itself in power by constant and suspicious vigilance.
One measure remained to place the dissenters in the position of full membership of the state. The Test Act excluded them from
