It now only remained to give formal effect to this resolution, and in so doing to settle the conditions whereon the crown, which the Convention had now distinctly recognised itself as conferring upon the Prince and Princess, should be conferred. A Committee appointed by the Commons to consider what safeguards should be taken against the aggressions of future sovereigns had made a report in which they recommended not only a solemn enunciation of ancient constitutional principles, but the enactment of new laws. The Commons, however, having regard to the importance of prompt action, judiciously resolved on carrying out only the first part of the programme. They determined to preface their tender of the crown to William and Mary by a recital of the royal encroachments of the past reigns, and a formal assertion of the constitutional principles against which such encroachments had offended. This document, drafted by a Committee of which the celebrated Somers, then a scarcely-known young advocate, was the chairman, was the famous Declaration of Right.
The grievances which it recapitulated in its earlier portion, fourteen in number, were as follows:—(1) the royal pretension to dispense with and suspend laws without consent of Parliament; (2) the punishment of subjects, as in the Seven Bishops' case, for petitioning the Crown; (3) the establishment of the illegal Court of High Commission for ecclesiastical affairs; (4) the levy of taxes without the consent of Parliament; (5) the maintenance of a standing army in time of peace without the same consent; (6) the disarmament of Protestants while Papists were both armed and employed contrary to law; (7) the violation of the freedom of election; (8) the prosecution in the King's Bench of suits only cognisable in Parliament; (9) the return of partial and corrupt juries; (10) the requisition of excessive bail; (11) the imposition of excessive fines; (12) the infliction of illegal and cruel punishments; (13) the grants of the estates of accused persons before conviction. Then, after solemnly reaffirming the popular rights from which these abuses of the prerogative derogated, the Declaration goes on to recite that, having an "entire confidence" William would "preserve them from the violation of the rights which they have here asserted, the Three Estates do resolve that William and Mary, Prince and Princess of Orange, be and be declared King and Queen ... to hold the Crown and Royal Dignity ... to them the said Prince and Princess during their Lives and the Life of the Survivor of them; and the sole and full exercise of the Royal Power be only in and exercised by the said Prince of Orange, in the Names of the said Prince and Princess during their Lives, and after their Deceases, the said Crown and Royal Dignity of the said Kingdoms and Dominions to the Heirs of the Body of the said Princess; and, for default of such Issue, to the Princess Anne of Denmark and the Heirs of her Body; and, for default of such Issue, to the Issue of the said Prince of Orange." Then followed an alteration required by the scrupulous conscience of Nottingham in the terms of the Oath of Allegiance.
On the 12th of February Mary arrived from Holland. On the following day, in the Banqueting House at Whitehall, the Prince and Princess of Orange were waited on by both Houses of Convention in a body. The Declaration was read by the Clerk of the Crown; the sovereignty solemnly tendered to them by Halifax, in the name of the Estates; and on the same day they were proclaimed King and Queen in the usual places in the cities of London and Westminster.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] How idle this story was may best be judged by studying the so-called evidence in its favour, as set forth in the pages of that writer who, more perhaps than any other chronicler of the events of that period, would have liked to establish its truth. No one, I think, can read Burnet's account of the Queen's accouchement, so completely demonstrating as it does the impossibility of the alleged fraud, without wondering at the strength of the partisanship and popular prejudice which could for a moment have believed in its perpetration.
[7] The fact that the practical cause of this sharp conflict was the rivalry between the partisans of William and those of Mary is only a partial explanation of the phenomenon referred to in the text. It is a reason for the Convention having debated the Whig corollary so much, but not for their debating the Whig-Tory original proposition so little. Of course the practical explanation is the simple one, that James had made himself impossible. Both parties concurred so readily in that opinion that they applied it without either of them pausing to consider its scope as a precedent, and that, quite apart from all controversies as to regency, demise of the crown, vacancy of the throne, or what not, the first instance in which a people pronounced any king impossible—such king being of sound mind, and still asserting his sovereignty—let in the whole modern democratic theory.
[8] It is somewhat singular that Macaulay should have taken no notice of an address which really constituted William's sole legal, or quasi legal title to the administration of affairs between the assembling of the Convention (which necessarily revoked his original commission) and the conclusion of its king-making labours.
[9] The offer and rejection of this compromise appears to me to be additional proof of the proposition advanced in the text—viz. that both Whigs and Tories were far more solicitous for the success of their candidate than for the triumph of their principles. Macaulay, it is true, contends, as from his point of view he was bound to do, that the Whigs made no concession of principle in proposing their compromise; for if, he argues, the Convention could elect William and Mary there must have been a vacancy of the throne. But surely the resolution as amended might have been treated as merely declaratory of Mary's title, and elective only so far as it associated William with her on a throne which had become his wife's by succession, and so would never have been vacated at all. No; it was a genuine and not a fictitious surrender of Whig principle; and while it proved that the Whigs were prepared to offer any such concession as would make William King, its rejection proved that the Tories cared for no such concession as did not leave Mary sole Queen. The gain of votes which the Whigs secured by the compromise probably represents the proportion of peers who really cared for the abstract principle apart from the concrete facts.