Sunderland pressed for the instant calling of a Parliament. But it was still plain that any Parliament would as yet be eager for war with France and would probably call on the king to put the Prince of Orange at the head of his army in such a war. To James therefore Sunderland's counsel seemed treachery, the issue of a secret design with William to place him helpless in the Prince's hands and above all to imperil the succession of his boy, whose birth William had now been brought by advice from the English lords to regard as an imposture. He again therefore fell back on France which made new advances to him in the hope of meeting this fresh danger of an attack from England; and in the end of October he dismissed Sunderland from office. But Sunderland had hardly left Whitehall when the Declaration of the Prince of Orange reached England. It demanded the removal of grievances and the calling of a free Parliament which should establish English freedom and religion on a secure basis. It promised toleration to Protestant Nonconformists and freedom of conscience to Catholics. It left the question of the legitimacy of the Prince of Wales and the settlement of the succession to Parliament. James was wounded above all by the doubts thrown on the birth of a Prince; and he produced proofs of the birth before the peers who were in London. But the proofs came too late. Detained by ill winds, beaten back on its first venture by a violent storm, William's fleet of six hundred transports, escorted by fifty men-of-war, anchored on the 5th of November in Torbay; and his army, thirteen thousand strong, entered Exeter amid the shouts of its citizens. Great pains had been taken to strip from William's army the appearance of a foreign force, which might have stirred English feeling to resistance. The core of it consisted of the English and Scottish regiments which had remained in the service of the States in spite of their recall by the king. Its foreign divisions were representatives of the whole Protestant world. With the Dutchmen were Brandenburgers and Swedes, and the most brilliant corps in the whole army was composed of French refugees.
The National Rising.
The landing seemed at first a failure. The country remained quiet. William's coming had been unexpected in the West, and no great landowner joined his forces. Though the king's fleet had failed to intercept the expedition it closed in from the Channel to prevent William's escape as soon as he had landed, while the king's army moved rapidly to encounter him in the field. But the pause was one of momentary surprise. Before a week had passed the nobles and squires of the west flocked to William's camp and the adhesion of Plymouth secured his rear. The call of the king's forces to face the Prince in the south no sooner freed the northern parts of England from their presence than the insurrection broke out. Scotland threw off the royal rule. Danby, dashing at the head of a hundred horsemen into York, gave the signal for a rising. The York militia met his appeal with shouts of "A free Parliament and the Protestant religion"; peers and gentry flocked to his standard; and a march on Nottingham united his forces to those under Devonshire who had mustered at Derby the great lords of the midland and eastern counties. Everywhere the revolt was triumphant. The garrison of Hull declared for a free Parliament. The Duke of Norfolk appeared at the head of three hundred gentlemen in the market-place at Norwich. At Oxford townsmen and gownsmen greeted Lord Lovelace and the forces he led with uproarious welcome. Bristol threw open its gates to the Prince of Orange, who advanced steadily on Salisbury where James had assembled his forces.
Flight of James.
But the king's army, broken by dissensions and mutual suspicions among its leaders, shrank from an engagement and fell back in disorder at his approach. Its retreat was the signal for a general abandonment of the royal cause. The desertion of Lord Churchill, who had from the first made his support conditional on the calling of a Parliament, a step which the king still hesitated to take, was followed by that of so many other officers that James abandoned the struggle in despair. He fled to London to hear that his daughter Anne had left St. James's to join Danby at Nottingham. "God help me," cried the wretched father, "for my own children have forsaken me!" His spirit was utterly broken by the sudden crash; and though he had promised to call the Houses together and despatched commissioners to Hungerford to treat with William on the terms of a free Parliament, in his heart he had resolved on flight. Parliament, he said to the few who still clung to him, would force on him concessions he could not endure; while flight would enable him to return and regain his throne with the assistance of French forces. He only waited therefore for news of the escape of his wife and child on the 10th of December to make his way to the Isle of Sheppey, where a hoy lay ready to carry him to France. Some rough fishermen however who took him for a Jesuit prevented his escape, and a troop of Life Guards brought him back in safety to London. His return revived the hopes of the Tories, who with Clarendon and Rochester at their head looked on the work of the Prince of Orange as done in the overthrow of the king's design of establishing a Catholic despotism, and who trusted that their system would be restored by a reconciliation of James with the Tory Parliament they expected to be returned. Halifax however, though he had long acted with the Tories, was too clear-sighted for hopes such as these. He had taken no part in the invitation or revolt, but now that the revolution was successful he pressed upon William the impossibility of carrying out a new system of government with such a sovereign as James. The Whigs, who had gone beyond hope of forgiveness, backed powerfully these arguments; and in spite of the pledges with which he had landed the Prince was soon as convinced of their wisdom as the Whigs. From this moment it was the policy of William and his advisers to further a flight which removed their chief difficulty out of the way. It would have been hard to depose James had he remained, and perilous to keep him prisoner; but the entry of the Dutch troops into London, the silence of the Prince, and an order to leave St. James's filled the king with fresh terrors, and taking advantage of the means of escape which were almost openly placed at his disposal James a second time quitted London and embarked on the 23rd of December unhindered for France.
The Convention.
Before flying James had burnt most of the writs convoking a new Parliament, had disbanded his army, and destroyed so far as he could all means of government. For a few days there was a wild burst of panic and outrage in London, but the orderly instinct of the people soon reasserted itself. The Lords who were at the moment in the capital provided on their own authority as Privy Councillors for the more pressing needs of administration, and quietly resigned their authority into William's hands on his arrival. The difficulty which arose from the absence of any person legally authorized to call Parliament together was got over by convoking the House of Peers, and forming a second body of all members who had sat in the Commons in the reign of Charles the Second together with the Aldermen and Common Councillors of London. Both bodies requested William to take on himself the provisional government of the kingdom, and to issue circular letters inviting the electors of every town and county to send up representatives to a Convention which met on the 22nd of January 1689. In the new Convention both Houses were found equally resolved against any recall of or negotiation with the fallen king. They were united in entrusting a provisional authority to the Prince of Orange. But with this step their unanimity ended. The Whigs, who formed a majority in the Commons, voted a resolution which, illogical and inconsistent as it seemed, was well adapted to unite in its favour every element of the opposition to James, the Churchman who was simply scared by his bigotry, the Tory who doubted the right of a nation to depose its king, the Whig who held the theory of a contract between King and People. They voted that King James, "having endeavoured to subvert the constitution of this kingdom by breaking the original contract between King and People, and by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons having violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, has abdicated the Government, and that the throne is thereby vacant." But in the Lords where the Tories were still in the ascendant the resolution was fiercely debated. Archbishop Sancroft with the high Tories held that no crime could bring about a forfeiture of the crown and that James still remained king, but that his tyranny had given the nation a right to withdraw from him the actual exercise of government and to entrust his functions to a Regency. The moderate Tories under Danby's guidance admitted that James had ceased to be king but denied that the throne could be vacant, and contended that from the moment of his abdication the sovereignty vested in his daughter Mary. It was in vain that the eloquence of Halifax backed the Whig peers in struggling for the resolution of the Commons as it stood. The plan of a Regency was lost by a single vote, and Danby's scheme was adopted by a large majority.
Declaration of Rights.
But both the Tory courses found a sudden obstacle in William. He declined to be Regent. He had no mind, he said to Danby, to be his wife's gentleman-usher. Mary on the other hand refused to accept the crown save in conjunction with her husband. The two declarations put an end to the question, and it was settled that William and Mary should be acknowledged as joint sovereigns but that the actual administration should rest with William alone. It had been agreed throughout however that before the throne was filled up the constitutional liberties of the subject must be secured. A Parliamentary Committee in which the most active member was John Somers, a young lawyer who had distinguished himself in the trial of the Bishops and who was destined to play a great part in later history, drew up a Declaration of Rights which after some alterations was adopted by the two Houses. The Declaration recited the misgovernment of James, his abdication, and the resolve of the Lords and Commons to assert the ancient rights and liberties of English subjects. It condemned as illegal his establishment of an ecclesiastical commission, and his raising of an army without Parliamentary sanction. It denied the right of any king to suspend or dispense with laws, as they had been suspended or dispensed with of late, or to exact money save by consent of Parliament. It asserted for the subject a right to petition, to a free choice of representatives in Parliament, and to a pure and merciful administration of justice. It declared the right of both Houses to liberty of debate. It demanded securities for the free exercise of their religion by all Protestants, and bound the new sovereign to maintain the Protestant religion as well as the laws and liberties of the nation. "We do claim and insist on the premises," ran the Declaration, "as our undoubted rights and liberties; encouraged by the Declaration of his Highness the Prince, we have confidence that he will perfect the deliverance he has begun and will preserve our rights against all further injury." It ended by declaring the Prince and Princess of Orange King and Queen of England. The Declaration was presented to William and Mary on the 13th of February by the two Houses in the Banqueting Room at Whitehall, and at the close of its recital Halifax, in the name of the Estates of the Realm, prayed them to receive the crown. William accepted the offer in his own name and in that of his wife and declared in a few words the resolve of both to maintain the laws and to govern by advice of Parliament.
Lewis and the Revolution.