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 Men went about saying that the child just born to King James was not his son at all, was no true Prince of Wales, ‘he had been smuggled into the Palace in a warming-pan’—and much other nonsense of that sort.

It suited William to believe this, or to pretend to believe it. James was well warned of what was coming, but he shut his ears, and so was quite unready to meet William and his Dutch fleet, which had a lot of English and Scottish soldiers and exiles on board it. William landed in Devonshire and moved slowly towards London. James had an army, many of whose regiments would have fought faithfully for him, if he would only have led them; but he turned tail and fled to France; and just before Christmas, 1688, William entered London.

What was to be done? Was James still king? Had Mary become queen? Who was to call a Parliament? (only a king can do this, and it seemed as if there was no King). William, however, called a ‘Convention’ (which was a Parliament in all but name), and, after some debate, this body decided that James was no longer King, but that William and Mary were joint King and Queen of England and Ireland. A Scottish Convention declared the same thing for Scotland. A document was drawn up called the ‘Bill of Rights’ which is a sort of second edition of Magna Charta. It fully expresses the idea that the Sovereign of England is a ‘limited monarch’ and that there are a great many things he may not do.

This ‘Revolution of 1688’ was mainly the work of the Whigs, and William has often been called the ‘Whig Deliverer’. Revolutions are bad things, but it is difficult to see how this one could have been avoided. James was a real tyrant, almost as impossible a ruler