ney suffered a capital punishment (1683). The detection of this conspiracy strengthened the authority of the sovereign. The Duke of York was restored to his office of high admiral, and tacitly acknowledged as the successor to the crown. Charles

II. died 6th of February 1685, in the 55th year of his age, and 25th year of his reign. [His court was the most immoral that had ever been known in England: the example of the king was imitated by the young nobility: the palace became a school for vice, which was practised with ostentation, and spread its baleful influence around. Charles did not leave any legitimate children: his illegitimate children were the Dukes of Monmouth, Southampton, Grafton, Northumberland, St. Albans, and Richmond; the Countesses of Lichfield and Derwentwater. His average annual revenue, from all sources, has been estimated at £1,800,000.]

7. The Duke of York succeeded to the throne, by the title of James II. His reign was short and inglorious. He was the instrument of his own misfortunes, and ran headlong to destruction. The Catholics at this time were not the hundredth part of the nation, yet James was weak enough to make the desperate attempt of substituting the Popish faith in room of the Protestant. Discarding the nobility from his councils, he was directed solely by Romish priests; and in the very outset of his reign, expressed his contempt of the authority of parliament, and a firm purpose to exercise an unlimited despotism.

8. The Duke of Monmouth, having excited a new rebellion, was defeated, made prisoner, and beheaded; and the most inhuman rigour was shown in the punishment of all his partisans. [James then resolved to attempt three objects: first, the establishment of a standing army; secondly, the employment of Catholic officers; and thirdly, a modification of the Habeas Corpus Act. These measures were opposed by his council, and excited alarm in the public, which was increased by the expulsion of the Protestants from France by Louis XIV., about the same time.] The parliament was in general submissive to the king's will, which for a while met with no opposition or control. A declaration was published, establishing full liberty of conscience in matters of religion; and several bishops, who refused to publish it in their dioceses, were committed to prison. A Catholic president was appointed to one of the colleges of Oxford. An ambassador was sent to the pope, and a papal nuncio received in London. The Catholics openly boasted that theirs would soon be the religion of the state.

9. James had three children: Mary, the wife of the stadtholder, William, prince of Orange; Anne, married to Prince George of Denmark; and James, an infant, born in 1687. The stadtholder had looked on his right to the crown of England as certain before the birth of this infant, and, after that event, projected still to gain it by arms or intrigue; the infatuation of

the king, and the general discontent of the people, giving him the most flattering invitation. [The state of European politics at that time gave William an excuse for raising an army of 29,000 men, and in raising his fleet to sixty-seven vessels, under the pretext of defending himself against Louis XIV., who warned James of his danger, and proposed the junction of the French and English fleets as a measure of precaution; but James would give it no credit, till actually apprized of the sailing of William on the 19th October. He was driven back by a storm, and detained until the end of the month repairing the damage, when he again put to sea, and arrived at Torbay on the fifth of November, 1688, where he landed his troops].

10. The principal nobility and officers immediately joined the standard of the Prince of Orange; and James was at once abandoned by his people, his ministers, his favourites, and his own children. Leaving London in disguise, he was discovered and brought back by the populace; but the Prince of Orange wisely favouring his escape, he found means, a few days after, to convey himself to France (December 23).

11. [On the 26th December, the lords spiritual and temporal, to the number of about ninety, and an assembly of all who had sat in any of King Charles's parliaments, with the lord-mayor of London, and fifty of the Common Council, requested the Prince of Orange to take upon him the administration, and to issue writs for a convention-parliament, which met on the 22d January, 1689.] The throne being declared vacant, it was proposed, in the convention-parliament, that the crown should he settled on the Princess Mary and her issue, her husband governing as regent; whom failing, on the Princess Anne; and in default, on the heirs of the body of the Prince of Orange. The stadtholder declining the office of regent, it was finally resolved to confer the crown on the Prince and Princess of Orange, the former to have the sole administration of the government (February 13, 1689).

12. To this settlement was added a declaration of rights, fixing those of the subject and the royal prerogative. Of this, the most important articles are the following: "The king cannot suspend the laws, or their execution; he cannot levy money without consent of parliament: The subjects have right to petition the crown: A standing army cannot be kept up in time of peace but by consent of parliament: Elections and parliamentary debate must be free, and parliaments must be frequently assembled," &c. Such was the final settlement of the British government at the great era of the Revolution.

13. [The Great Revolution, as it has been called, borrowing nothing from the heroism or motives of those who brought it to pass, derives all its splendour from the great principle on which it rests, that the public good is the great end of government. It breathed a new life into the constitution, not so much by any alteration of its fundamental maxims, as by the spirit and feel

ings which henceforth prevailed among the people. Absolute power, passive obedience, and hereditary rights, were destroyed. And the struggle between the crown, the aristocracy, and the people-between despotism and liberty-which had continued from the Conquest downwards, almost always to the advantage of the monarch, who in return for their aid had gradually added to the privileges of the people, ended in his entire dependence on parliament. From that time, the real sovereignty of the nation has been in the parliament, the monarch having no power to exercise any administrative authority, but through a minister of state who is responsible to parliament, and who cannot be continued in office without its consent. The policy of government must now therefore be constantly in accordance with the opinions of the majority of the House of Commons, who have the power to withhold the supplies.]

SECTION XXV.

ON THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION.

1. THE rudiments of the constitution of England may be traced as far back as the Norman conquest. William distributed a great proportion of the lands among his Norman followers, subjecting these, as well as the Anglo-Saxons who retained their property, to the feudal tenures (see Note, page 316), and thus extinguishing at once the ancient liberties of the people.-England was divided into 60,215 military fiefs, all held of the crown, under the obligation of the vassal's taking arms (with a fixed number of cavalry) for his sovereign, whenever required (on pain of having his lands escheated). In the continental kingdoms of Europe, as in France, the feudal system arose by slow degrees; nor was there of consequence the same union of the fabric as in England. The feudal lords were independent of each other, ever at variance from their mutual pretensions, and often owing but a very slender allegiance to the crown. Their subvassals (those who held lands of them on the same conditions as they held of the crown) suffered from oppression, and often struggled for their freedom; but these efforts, being partial, produced no consequence favourable to its attainment. In England, all (the feudatories) were oppressed by the enormous weight of the crown; it was a common grievance, and produced at times violent efforts [to limit the prerogatives of the monarch. was during these contests between the crown and the feudal barons, that concessions were obtained by the people from both parties, which favoured their escape from the villanage to which they had been reduced.]

It

2. The forest-laws imposed by the Conqueror (see M. A., Sect.

XVII., § 2, 11) were a grievance felt by the whole nation, as rendering every man's property precarious, and subject to the arbitrary encroachments of the crown. It was no wonder that the barons and their vassals should cordially unite to rid themselves of so intolerable a hardship. Henry I. found it necessary to conciliate his subjects, by mitigating the most rigorous of the feudal laws. A greater advance was made under Henry II., by the institution of the trial by jury. But John, imprudently resisting this natural progress towards a rational freedom, was soon compelled into those important concessions, the Charta de Foresta and Magna Charta. From that time, whatever we may judge of the actual government, which was often most arbitrary and despotical, the constitution of England was that of a limited monarchy.

3. The next memorable era in the growth of the English constitution was the reign of Henry III., when, under that weak prince, the parliament received a new form, by the admission of [two knights for each county, two citizens for each city, and two burgesses for every burgh, who were summoned by writ (1265). Until this time the king had not the power of omitting to call a tenant-in-chief or baron to the Great Council, nor of summoning any person who was not one; but after the battle of Evesham (August 4, 1265), when the barons were subdued, Henry III. selected for the next parliament only such of his peers as he thought proper, on the ground that those who had been in arms against him were not fit to be summoned to his councils. The same practice was followed by Edward I.; and thus arose the law that the king's writ of summons constituted a baron, and not the circumstance of holding lands of him in chief. Barons were not created by patent until 1387, in the tenth year of Richard II.] Edward I. acknowledged the authority of parliament in obtaining all his subsidies, and ratified a new law, which declared that no tax should be levied without the consent of Lords and Commons.-The Magna Charta was confirmed no less than eleven times in the course of this reign.

4. Thus the constitution continued advancing, till its progress was suspended by the civil wars of York and Lancaster. The rights of both prince and people seemed then to be entirely forgotten; and the race of Tudor found no resistance from parliament to their vigorous but despotic sway. The talents of Elizabeth, and the high character which her government sustained with foreign powers, extinguished all domestic disquiets, while the predominant feeling was the maintenance of the power and dignity of the crown.

5. But under the succeeding prince, when that power and dignity were abused by his own weakness, the nation began to awake from its lethargy; and that spirit of opposition, which in this reign confined itself to complaints, was in the next to break forth with alarming violence. Charles I., endowed with superior

energy of character, and acting, as he conceived, on a principle of duty, which called on him to maintain the prerogative of his predecessors, and transmit it unimpaired to his posterity, was imprudent in exerting with rigour an authority which he wanted ultimate resources to support. He was compelled to sign the Petition of Rights, a grant more favourable to liberty than Magna Charta. The true patriots were satisfied with this concession, which conferred the most ample constitutional freedom. But with the popular leaders, patriotism was the cloak of insatiable ambition; and, advancing in their demands with every new compliance, the last appeal was made to the sword; and the contest ended by the destruction of the monarchy.

6. The despotism which succeeded, and the fluctuation of power from the Long Parliament to the Protector, and finally to the leaders of a standing army, afforded convincing demonstration how vain was the chimera of a republic, under which the demagogues had masked their designs. Weary of anarchy, the nation returned with high satisfaction to the best of all constitu. tions, a limited monarchy.

7. New encroachments under Charles II. produced new limitations, and the act of Habeas Corpus (which gives to the subject the right to be brought before the Court of King's Bench or Common Pleas to have it determined whether the cause of his commitment be just) gave the utmost possible security to personal liberty. The violent and frantic invasion of the constitution by James II. banished himself and his posterity from the throne, and produced a new and solemn contract between the king and people. Regarding, therefore, the Revolution as the final settlement of the English constitution, we shall endeavour briefly to dilineate the chief features of that great political structure.

8. The constitution of Great Britain may be viewed under two distinct heads, the legislative and the executive power; the last comprehending the prerogative of the crown.

The power of legislation belongs to parliament, whose constituent parts are, the King, Lords, and Commons. The House of Lords consists of the temporal peers of England, and the spiritual, viz. the two archbishops (of Canterbury and York), and twentyfour bishops. To these, since the union with Scotland and Ireland, are added sixteen delegates from the peerage of the former kingdom (elected by the whole body for every new parliament); and twenty-eight peers (elected for life), one archbishop, and three bishops (who sit in annual rotation), from the latter. [The House of Commons consists of 658 deputies or members,-500 from England, 53 from Scotland, and 105 from Ireland. The members for counties, or divisions of counties, are elected by the freeholders, copyholders, leaseholders, and occupying tenants of a certain yearly value; and the members for cities and burghs, by the occupiers of houses rated at £10 and upwards. The Lord Chancellor of England (in virtue of his office) is speaker (or