But he will rise from the whole with very different impressions from what I have done, if he does not entitle this Revolution not only the glorious, but, in the first place, the fortunate Revolution of 1688. If he can but place himself in the midst of these occurrences, and suppose himself ignorant of what is to happen, it is with a sort of actual fear and trembling that he will read the history of these times; let him consider what his country has become by the successful termination of these transactions, and what it might have been rendered by a contrary issue; how much the interests of Europe were at this juncture identified with those of England; and what a variety of events, the most slight and the most natural, might have thrown the whole into a state of confusion and defeat.

The first question to be examined is the conduct of James, his unconstitutional measures, his arbitrary designs.

After the student has perused the history in Hume and Rapin, and compared it with the parliamentary debates of Cobbett, he will see that the indictment that was afterwards preferred against James by the two houses of legislature was strictly founded in fact, point by point.

As it is impossible for me to detail the history, not an incident of which is without its importance, I will just state what that indictment was. When the crown was afterwards offered to William and Mary, both houses prefaced their offer by declaring the reasons that compelled them to adopt a measure so extraordinary. They were these; and they form a sort of summary of the reign of James II., and therefore I shall read them to you; in every word they deserve attention; they are the case of the people of England on this great

occasion.

"Whereas the late king, James II., by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges, and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion, and the laws and liberties of this kingdom; By assuming and exercising a power of dispensing with, and suspending of laws, and the execution of laws, without consent of parliament; By committing and prosecuting divers worthy prelates, for humbly petitioning to be excused from concurring to the said assumed power; By issuing and

causing to be executed, a commission under the great seal, for erecting a court called the Court of Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes;' By levying money for and to the use of the crown, by pretence of prerogative, for other time and in other manner than the same was granted by parliament ; By raising and keeping a standing army within this kingdom, in time of peace, without consent of parliament, and quartering soldiers contrary to law; By causing divers good subjects, being Protestants, to be disarmed, at the same time when Papists were both armed and employed contrary to law; By violating the freedom of election of members to serve in parliament; By prosecutions in the Court of King's Bench for matters and causes cognizable only in parliament; and by divers other arbitrary and illegal courses: And whereas of late years partial, corrupt, and unqualified persons have been returned, and served on juries in trials, and particularly divers juries on trials for high treason, which were not freeholders; and excessive bail hath been required of persons committed in criminal cases, to elude the benefit of the laws made for the liberty of the subject; and excessive fines have been imposed, and illegal and cruel punishments inflicted; and several grants and promises made of fines and forfeitures, before any conviction or judgment against the persons upon whom the same were to be levied all which are utterly and directly contrary to the known laws, and statutes, and freedom of this realm."

Such were the articles of accusation preferred, and it will be found justly preferred, against James.

And thus much for the external facts of his administration. From these, the conclusion to the internal principles of his conduct is sufficiently clear; and the very particulars of these proceedings, such as they have been collected by historians, are all teeming with evidence of a bigotry and a rage for arbitrary power that advanced to a state of perfect infatuation.

With respect to such facts and intrigues as were concealed from the public, sufficient evidence may be seen in Dalrymple of the baseness of their nature, and of their entire hostility to the liberties, civil and religious, of the English nation. This evidence has been made still more abundant by the late pub

lication of Mr. Fox, which contains a new supply of authentic documents from France, and the most interesting letters between the French king and his ambassador Barillon. The instruction to be derived from these original letters is the same which we have already announced, when we considered the communications that passed between the French court and Charles II. We are here, for instance, taught the importance of the two houses of parliament, particularly the commons, the arts by which they were to be managed, the pretences by which they were to be deceived, the topics by which they were to be soothed, the principles by which they were to be betrayed, the expedients by which they were to be corrupted, the obstacle that their meetings and debates always opposed to the designs of the French and English courts, and on the whole, the impossibility that schemes of arbitrary power should succeed, while the parliaments retained the control of the purse, and still preserved their integrity.

Having now, in a general manner, considered the nature of the attack that was made by James on the constitution of the country, which is the first part of the subject, we may next turn to examine the nature of the resistance that was opposed to him; which is the second part.

And when this part is considered, the conclusion seems to be, and it is a melancholy conclusion, that if James had not violated the religious persuasions of his subjects, he would have met with no proper resistance whatever, and that the English nation, after all the sufferings and exertions of their ancestors, would at this period have submitted to such violations of their civil liberties, and would have allowed such precedents to be established, that in the event these liberties might very probably have been lost, like those of the other European monarchies.

The natural guardian of the community was, in the first place, the parliament. But so successful had been the practices of the king, and of his predecessor, Charles, that when he looked over the list of the returns, he declared "that there were not more than forty names which he could have wished not there."

The parliament was only suffered to sit a year. Some proper feeling was indeed shown, when the king intimated to

them (clearly enough) that he meant to maintain a standing army. But their expostulations with the crown in this last address were merely directed against his suspensions and violations of the law in favour of the Papists.

Expostulations of the most dutiful kind; to which his majesty replied, by saying he did not expect such an address; and when Coke, of Derby, animated for the moment with the remembrance of the better days of the constitution, stood up and said, "he hoped that they were all Englishmen, and not to be frightened out of their duty by a few high words," he was immediately sent to the Tower "for his indecent and undutiful reflection on the king and on the house."

The king immediately prorogued the parliament, and never suffered it again to assemble; and here, for any thing that can be discovered to the contrary, in the honest, unpremeditated effusion of a single representative of the people, might have ended all the efforts that could be made in the cause of the civil liberties of the country.

For from what quarter comes the next resistance to the illegal proceedings of the crown? From the ecclesiastical bodies-the Charter House, the University of Cambridge, the colleges of Oxford, and the seven bishops, the representatives of the English clergy; that is, from men who had been so lately, at the close of the reign of Charles II., the addressers of the crown in the language of servility, and the preachers and the propagators of the doctrine of passive obedience.

Happily for the nation, the clergy at this period, venerable in their characters and situation, however mistaken in their political theories, however the teachers of passive obedience, could after all resist, when their own acknowledged rights, when their own established opinions in religion, were endangered; and the community, on their part, could be roused into some sense of their danger when they saw the most dignified ministers of their religion, even the prelates of the land, hurried away by officers of justice and consigned to imprisonment in the Tower.

The king's own standing army, and the very sentinels who had to guard these peaceful sufferers, participated with the multitude in their sense of religious horror at the king's in

tolerable violation of all law, privilege, and security; of every thing that was dear and respectable in the eyes of his subjects.

The fact was, that the age still continued to be an age of religious dispute. In the former part of the century, we saw the sectaries, animated by the religious principle, enter into a contest with the Church of England and the crown; we now see, by the unexpected direction of the same religious principle, the Church of England itself slowly and heavily moved onward into an opposition to the monarch.

Not that the church had begun to entertain more enlightened notions on the subject of civil obedience, but that the crown had most fortunately allied itself to Popery; and the church, though it abjured the doctrines of resistance, however modified, abominated with still greater earnestness the tenets and superstitions of the Roman Catholic communion.

It is not too much to assert that the resistance of the people of England to James was universally of a religious nature; of a very large portion of the country, the high Tory and ecclesiastical part, exclusively so.

But besides these, there was another great division of the nation, of which the resistance was not exclusively of a religious nature. The resistance here was compounded; it was not only of a religious, but also, and very properly, of a civil nature. This party was the Whig party, the exclusionists, who, like Coke of Derby, were not to be put down by high words; these, however fallen and trampled upon since the victory of Charles II. and the accession of James, still existed, though discountenanced and in silence; and they must no doubt have observed, with pleasure, their cause strengthening as the king proceeded, and new prospects arising of civil happiness to their country from the religious fury of their arbitrary monarch, the very prince whom they had endeavoured, from an anticipation of his character and designs, to exclude from the throne.

So much for the resistance which the king experienced at home. The next great division of the subject is the resistance which James experienced from abroad.

Charles II., in a most fortunate moment of improvidence, had suffered his minister Danby to connect the Prince of