1689] William and Mary proclaimed. Bill of Rights 251 accepted the vote on behalf of Mary and himself, and within a week the pair were proclaimed King and Queen from the steps of Whitehall. With the settlement of the Crown immediate practical difficulties vanished, anarchy was averted, and a vigorous external policy was continuously pursued. But the great constitutional problems, the sphere of direct royal power, the relations of King to Parliament, to the Courts of Justice, and to the army - all these were still unsettled. A committee, appointed to secure the laws and liberties of the kingdom, with the all-accomplished Somers in the chair, had already drawn up a Declaration of Right (February 12). This resolution was afterwards expanded, renamed the Bill of Rights, and passed as a statute by the new Parliament (October). The Declaration and the Bill were intended as a final summing-up and settlement of the long struggle between King and Parliament, and as a manifesto and defence of the Revolution. The Bill of Rights therefore opens with a lengthy controversial statement as to the misdeeds of James and the virtues of William, before "asserting the ancient rights and liberties of England.” It would be difficult to say that new rights were claimed or old laws infringed. But new precedents were certainly created; for on almost all disputed points the verdict went decisively in favour of Parliament and against the King. The reason why the greatness of the change was not very obvious at the Revolution is to be sought in what took place at the Restoration. By the settlement of 1660 the powers of Parliament were greatly enlarged, and the substantial increase of its powers became apparent long before 1688. The Revolution of 1688, in increasing the power of Parliament, only moved along a path already marked out for it by the political developments of the generation immediately preceding. In this fact lies the chief explanation of the anomaly, on which Macaulay so frequently insisted, that the great changes of the Bill of Rights were accomplished without any positive change in law. The Bill of Rights denounced as illegal the assumption of a royal power of suspending or dispensing with laws, or of erecting a Court of High Commission or other special Courts. Levying money by prerogative, or keeping a standing army in peace-time without consent of Parliament, are likewise declared to be against the law. Parliament is to be free in its elections, in its subjects of debate, and "ought to be held frequently." The rights of the people as a whole are secured in the right to petition the King. The rights of the sovereign are restricted by the provision that Papists, and those marrying Papists, are de facto excluded from the throne./On these terms, and with these limitations, William and Mary are acknowledged as joint sovereigns. There were two serious omissions, subsequently removed by the Act of Settlement. No real attempt was made to exempt the judges from undue royal influence, and a clause including Sophia of Brunswick-Lüneburg in the succession was struck out by the Lords. 252 Bill of Rights.-Political theorists of the Revolution [1689 Perhaps the most striking insertion in the Bill of Rights was the provision declaring standing armies illegal, and placing the power of the sword beneath the control of Parliament. Yet an express law declared the whole power of the militia, and immemorial custom admitted the general control of the army, to lie solely with the King. Hence this provision was an innovation, and a very great one, based on the general repugnance to standing armies, initiated during the Protectorate and expressed in the Parliaments of the Restoration, but nowhere decisively asserted by statute or custom. William, who said he came to England to restore the invaded liberties of the people, not to circumscribe the acknowledged rights of the Crown, was to find the novelty of this particular provision most unpleasing. Incidentally, the parliamentary control over the army tended towards a similar control over foreign policy. Eventually, it was the most important influence in establishing and maintaining one of the fundamental maxims of our modern constitution, that the military power in the State is and must be subordinate to the civil. It is doubtless in the main true that the Bill of Rights makes few positive legal changes, but the provision as to the power of the sword is one of them. Here at least the Bill of Rights breaks with the black-letter of precedent, and asserts new principles of fundamental and far-reaching importance. To a well-informed contemporary observer the smallness of the actual change effected by the Revolution would hardly have been apparent. He must have noted the triumph of the policy of the Exclusionists in the provision excluding Papists from the Crown. During 1680-1, that party had been utterly broken; its leaders had died upon the scaffold or fled the country in disgrace. Within eight years from that date its main principle had first been championed by Halifax, the greatest of its opponents, and finally accepted by the country as a whole. The cause of this remarkable change is to be found, partly in the accidental circumstances of the Revolution, partly in the slow growth of a political theory which owed far less to Coke and the precedents of the past than to Harrington, Locke, and the philosophy of the future. The main ideas on which the Revolution was based were expressed by Harrington and Locke. Of these, the one may be said to have taught the lessons of forty years of revolution, the other to have provided the theory by which the change of government was to be defended. During the years of 1640-60 every political theory had received some application and every one in turn had been found wanting. The conviction had gradually been enforced that the old monarchy, with all its practical disadvantages, was superior to the new republic with all its theoretical perfections. Monarchy, though somewhat limited by the increased influence of Parliament, emerged from the welter of anarchy powerful and venerated. Regicide became, in the eyes of the nation, the most odious of crimes, and this belief was based on reasonable as well as upon sentimental grounds. For Harrington, while advocating 1689] Harrington and Locke 253 fantastic schemes for a republic, had contrived to demonstrate the practical advantages of a monarchy. This was the unforeseen result of his assertion that the sole test and proof of good government was the connexion of property with power. To confine the franchise to propertyholders would manifestly produce a government based on experience and stability. So argued Harrington, and his readers drew an unexpected inference. The characteristics of the old monarchy had been inequality of possessions, gradation of classes, the supremacy of rich over poor, of land over capital. What were all these but the reign of property, which produced securities for stable government? It was this tendency in political thought, that largely accounts for the sudden and total disappearance of republicanism, which is so remarkable a phenomenon in 1688. William excluded all regicides from his amnesty; and in the vast flood of pamphlets called forth by the Revolution it is hard to find one of note or importance which may be called republican. The union of property and power produced a just balance in the State, and for this discovery, though it was also to be found in the later pamphlets of Milton, Harrington was regarded as the Columbus of political science. His ideas permeate the whole Revolution settlement, in which there is but little appeal to absolute or general principle, and hardly a whisper of parliamentary reform. Private property in land is the basis of all authority; power is rigidly confined to an aristocracy of freeholders, and the reign of property is acknowledged and complete. "For the divine right of Kings," writes Lord Acton," it [the Revolution] established the divine right of freeholders; and their domination extended for seventy years under the authority of John Locke, the philosopher of government by the gentry." It is true to say that there existed few or no republicans in 1688, if that term designates men who desired to abolish the hereditary monarchy. But, if it means men who asserted the doctrine of popular sovereignty, then there were many such, of whom the most eminent was Locke. His "Two Treatises on Government" were not published till the summer of 1689. But he had been the intimate of Shaftesbury, and, as the friend of Somers and other leading Whigs, had first-hand knowledge of the ideas of the Revolution settlement. Indeed the inconsistencies and contradictions, the imperfections, and the over-emphasis, of his work betray too clearly that his theory was intended to apply to practical political needs. It was in fact chiefly in practical applications that the originality of Locke consisted. There was nothing very new in his doctrines of contract between king and people, of limitations on royal power and extensions of popular sovereignty, and of the justification for the deposition of kings. But ideas which had floated in the brains of solitary thinkers, or had amused the intellects of scholastics, were used by Locke for the practical purpose of glorifying and defending an actual and not an imagined Revolution. 10 254 Locke and the Original Contract [1689 It must always be regretted that Locke did not directly measure blades with Hobbes. In the Leviathan the latter had written the greatest work on political thought as yet produced in England, and the ablest defence of absolute monarchy ever published in Europe. But his cynical attack on the clergy had alienated the Establishment, and extreme loyalty found its philosopher not in Hobbes but in Filmer. The Patriarcha of Sir Robert Filmer - a popular exposition of the doctrines of Divine Right and passive obedience - had been written in 1642 and published in 1680. It was adopted in all its tenets by the University of Oxford, and became generally popular with the royalist party. Hence Locke set out with the primary intention of destroying "Sir Robert" and "his wonderful system," rather than of confuting Hobbes. Locke easily disposed of Filmer and "the hereditary jurisdiction of Adam," and it was only in constructing his own theory in the second part of his treatise that he came indirectly into contact with Hobbes. The end of all government is the good of the people, and the good of the people Locke defines as "the preservation of (private) property," to "secure which men enter into society." On that ground and with that object people meet together and make an Original Contract to submit to a common recognised authority. This contract is broken, and the society dissolved, when private property and personal liberty are endangered. With an absolute Prince the people cannot be assured of this preservation and these rights, for the absolute sovereign, being above law, is not bound to respect it. Hence the people as a whole are the best judge whether the general good is being endangered and whether the social contract is near to breaking. To avoid a reckless sanction of revolution, Locke carefully defines the cases in which resistance is justifiable, in the instance of a hypothetical State, whose constitution is transparently based on the English. These cases are: first, when a single person sets his own arbitrary will in place of the laws which are the will of society; next, interference with the electors or ways of election; then, the delivery of the people into the subjection of a foreign Power; lastly, neglect or abandonment of the government by the supreme executive power. In all these cases government is dissolved, the contract broken, and resistance justifiable. It will not escape notice that all these cases included actions of which James might plausibly be accused. Locke argued for a particular purpose, with practical qualifications; and he fairly pays the penalty of one who binds up a political pamphlet in the cover of a philosophic treatise. He can claim as a recompense that he became the oracle of the Whigs, that he inspired the political ideas of his country for nearly a hundred years, and was for at least fifty the most influential political philosopher in Europe. The English Revolution, unlike the French, never carried its originating principles to the extreme of logical severity. It showed little idealism and much common-sense, often allowing practical considerations 1688-9] General features of the Revolution 255 to outweigh consistency or principle. Moreover, its international and diplomatic character rendered personal factors of great importance, and the form which it finally assumed was profoundly affected by the personalities of both William and James. In his exile James was accustomed to ascribe every disaster to his advisers. But it is certain that Mary of Modena, Father Petre, and the extreme Catholics opposed some of his most impolitic measures, and that Penn and Sunderland opposed others. And, even supposing his ordinary counsellors to have been unwise, James had frequently disbelieved the information and disregarded the advice of Louis. His actions and opinions during and after 1688 exhibit a complete misunderstanding of the limits of the possible, and show that he lived in a world of illusion. If to these considerations is added that of his well-known haughtiness and love of power, it is reasonable to conclude that his worst counsellor was himself, and his neglect of other advice the main cause of his fall. On the other hand, the respect and deference shown by William to his English advisers was one of the main reasons of his success. The firm stand of the seven Bishops, the pen of Burnet, the voice of Clarendon, and the policy of Compton, brought the Established Church for the moment on to the side of William. The calm diplomacy of Shrewsbury and the resolute purpose of Danby brought over the moderate Whigs and Tories; the well-timed desertion of Churchill secured the army. The eloquence of Somers inspired the Commons to settle the Succession, and the arguments of Halifax induced the Lords to agree in it. The influence of Halifax, or of his "trimming" policy, is apparent everywhere—in the moderation, the cautious temporising, the concessions to expediency, and the compromises of principle, in which the Revolution abounded. The last cause of the moderation and tranquillity of the Revolution is to be found in the personality of William, and in the elements and forces which he controlled. His European outlook enabled him to entertain views of a purely practical kind and to judge the struggle with a calmness which no Englishman could equal. He decided to interfere only when assured of powerful support, and when his own interests would have been endangered by delay. The impolicy of James and the caution of William combined to produce a result very rare in history—namely, a foreign intervention which successfully accomplished a great internal revolution with the minimum of bloodshed and change. Other explanations are to be found in more impersonal forces, especially in the course of events which bewildered contemporaries by their sudden and kaleidoscopic changes. The vigorous minority, which supported William, alone had a clear-cut plan and purpose. Hence it came about that even ardent royalists were surprised into revolt against their King. This is admirably illustrated by two well-known incidents recorded in Clarendon's Diary. On November 15, 1688, Clarendon hears of the flight of his son, Lord Cornbury, to William, and writes: “O God, that 66 |