492. Character of the Revolution of 1688.
Never was a revolution of such magnitude and meaning accomplished more peacefully. Not a drop of blood had been shed. There was hardly any excitement or uproar. Even the bronze statue of the runaway King was permitted to stand undisturbed in the rear of the palace of Whitehall, London, where it remains to this day.
The great change had taken place thus quietly because men's minds were ripe for it. England had entered upon another period of history, in which old institutions, laws, and customs were passing away and all was becoming new.
Feudalism had vanished under Charles II (S482), but political and religious persecution had continued. In future, however, we shall hear no more of the revocation of city charters or other punishments inflicted because of political opinion (SS479, 487), and rarely of any punishment for religious dissent.
Courts of justice will undergo reform. They will cease to be "little better than caverns of murderers,"[1] where judges like Scroggs and Jeffreys (SS478, 487) browbeat the prisoners, took their guilt for granted, insulted and silenced witnesses for their defense, and even cast juries into prison under penalties of heavy fines, for venturing to bring in verdicts contrary to their wishes.[2]
[1] Hallam's "Constitutional History of England," p. 138. Hallam also says that the behavior of the Stuart judges covered them "with infamy," p. 597. [2] See Hallam, and also the introduction to Professor Adams's "Manual of Historical Literature." For a graphic picture of the times, see, in Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," Christian's trial before Lord Hategood.
The day, too, had gone by when an English sovereign could cast his subjects into fetid dungeons in the Tower and leave them to die there of lingering disease, in darkness, solitude, and despair. No future king like the marble-hearted James II would sit in the court room at Edinburgh, and watch with curious delight the agony inflicted by the Scotch instruments of torture, the "boot" and the thumbscrew, or like his grandfather, James I, burn Unitarian heretics at the stake in Smithfield market place in London (S518).
For the future, thought and discussion in England were to be in great measure free, as in time they would be wholly so. Perhaps the coward King's heaviest retribution in his secure retreat in the royal French palace of Versailles was the knowledge that all his efforts, and all the efforts of his friend Louis XIV, to prevent the coming of this liberty had absolutely failed.
493. Summary.
The reign of James must be regarded as mainly taken up with the attempt of the King to rule independently of Parliament and of law, and, apparently, he sought to restore the Roman Catholic faith as the Established Church of England.