Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/371

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iCom- n .s. (1G87) granting full religious liberty to all his subjects. The belief that the grant of liberty to ail religions was ouly intended to serve as a cloak for the ascendency of one was so strong that the measure roused the opposition of all those who objected to see the king s will substituted for the law, even if they wished to see the Protestant dissenters tolerated. In spite of this opposition, the king thought it possible to obtain a parliamentary sanction for his declara tion. The parliament to which he intended to appeal .was, however, to be as different a body from the parliament which met in the first year of his reign as the bench of judges which had approved of the dispensing power had been different from the bench which existed at his acces sion. A large number of the borough members were in those days returned by the corporations, and the corpora tions 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, aud he had therefore to abandon for a time the hope of seeing it accepted even by a packed House of Commons. All, how ever, that he 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 pro bability that the king would be succeeded at no great dis tance of time by a Protestant heir. Popular incredulity expressed 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 November 5 at Brixharu. 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 (1G89). 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 loth century with the House of Lords predominating, that parliament was to be again 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 inhabit ants 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 trad ing 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 mouths only, so as to prevent the crown from exercising military discipline without their authority. Behind these legal con trivances 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 con trolled 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 ouly 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 &quot;the despotism of a man. Many causes combined to prevent this result. The land owners, who formed the majority of the House, were not elected directly, as was the case with nobility of the French States General, by their own class, but by electors who, though generally loyal to them, would have broken off from them if they had attempted to make themselves masters of their fellow-citizens. Xo less important was the almost absolute independence of the judges, begun at the begin ning of the reign, by the grant of othce 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 improve ment, however, finds its full counterpart in another great step already taken. The more representative a Govern ment 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 greater 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 mediaeval 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 More, to Bacon, to Halesj and to Jeremy Taylor. It is one which, as long as beliefs are not very divergent, keeps up a sense of brotherhood over-ruling 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 Causes in favour of liberty. Independ ence of the judges. Libert y of writing and speaking.