THE ACT OF SETTLEMENT.

1700.

I.

That whosoever shall hereafter come to the possession of this Crown shall join in communion with the Church of England as by law established.

2. That in case the Crown and Imperial dignity of this realm shall hereafter come to any person not being a native of this kingdom of England, this nation be not obliged to engage in any war for the defence of any dominions or territories which do not belong to the Crown of England, without the consent of Parliament.

3. That no person who shall hereafter come to the possession of this Crown shall go out of the dominions of England, Scotland, or Ireland, without consent of Parliament.'

4. That from and after the time that the further limitation by this Act shall take effect, all matters and things relating to the well governing of this kingdom, which are properly cognisable in the Privy Council by the laws and customs of this realm, shall be transacted there, and all resolutions taken thereupon shall be signed by such of the Privy Council as shall advise and consent to the same.2

5. That, after the said limitation shall take effect as aforesaid, no person born out of the kingdoms of England, Scotland, or Ireland, or the dominions thereunto belonging (although to be naturalised or made a denizen - except such as are born of English parents), shall be capable to be of the Privy Council, or a member of either House of Parliament, or to enjoy any office or place of trust, either civil or military, or to have any grant of lands, tenements, or hereditaments, from the Crown, to himself, or to any other or others in trust for him.

6. That no person who has an office or place of profit under the King, or receives a pension from the Crown, shall be capable of serving as a member of the House of Commons.3

7.

That, after the said limitation shall take effect as aforesaid, judges' commissions be made quamdiu se bene gesserint, and their salaries ascertained and established; but upon the address of both Houses of Parliament, it may be lawful to remove them. 8. That no pardon under the Great Seal of England be pleadable to an impeachment by the Commons in Parliament.

The Bill of Rights was an act of Parliament, passed in 1689, declaring the rights and liberties of the people and defining the power of the King and its conditions. It confirmed and embodied in itself the various clauses of the Declaration of Rights, which accompanied the offer of the crown to William and Mary, February 13, 1689. It reasserted and established the doctrine, asserted repeatedly by the English people in earlier times, but denied and defied by the Stuarts, that the crown was held by no "divine right," but by the will of the people and the people's Parliament. It was a new Magna Charta. The Revolution was the triumph of the Puritan principle, which had been eclipsed at the Restoration. It secured all that Hampden and Cromwell demanded against Charles I, it made absolute or arbitrary rule, such as the Stuarts attempted, thenceforth impossible, established the supremacy of Parliament, and made England practically almost a republic. "The Revolution," says Gardiner, "was more than a change of sovereigns. It was the rejection of the ideas of the minority of 1641, which had been adopted as sufficient at the Restoration, in favor of the idea of the supremacy of Parliament. Pym's political ideas were at last to be realized. The name and title of the King were to remain as they had been before. But it was to be clearly understood that if a serious difficulty ensued, the King was to give way to Parliament, and more especially to the House of Commons, by which the nation was more directly represented. Up to the Revolution, England was under a monarchy surrounded by certain constitutional checks, intended to prevent the will of the monarch from degenerating into arbitrary wilfulness. After the Revolution, England became practically a republic, in which the crown possessed various constitutional powers, intended prevent the will of the representatives of the people from degenerating into arbitrary wilfulness.”

"In his progress to the capital [upon the Restoration, in 1660] Charles passed in review the soldiers assembled on Blackheath. Betrayed by their

general, abandoned by their leaders, surrounded as they were by a nation in arms, the gloomy silence of their ranks awed even the careless King with a sense of danger. But none of the victories of the New Model were so glorious as the victory which it won over itself. Quietly and without a struggle, as men who bowed to the inscrutable will of God, the farmers and traders who had dashed Rupert's chivalry to pieces on Naseby field, who had scattered at Worcester the army of the aliens,' and driven into helpless flight the sovereign that now came to enjoy his own again,' who had renewed beyond sea the glories of Cressy and Agincourt, had mastered the Parliament, had brought a king to justice and the block, had given laws to England, and held even Cromwell in awe, became farmers and traders again, and were known among their fellow-men by no other sign than their greater soberness and industry. And with them Puritanism laid down the sword. It ceased from the long attempt to build up a kingdom of God by force and violence, and fell back on its truer work of building up a kingdom of righteousness in the hearts and consciences of men. It was from the moment of its seeming fall that its real victory began. As soon as the wild orgy of the Restoration was over, men began to see that nothing that was really worthy in the work of Puritanism had been undone. The revels of Whitehall, the skepticism and debauchery of courtiers, the corruption of statesmen, left the mass of Englishmen what Puritanism had made them — serious, earnest, sober in life and conduct, firm in their love of Protestantism and of freedom. In the Revolution of 1688 Puritanism did the work of civil liberty which it had failed to do in that of 1642. It wrought out through Wesley and the revival of the eighteenth century the work of religious reform which its earlier efforts had only thrown back for a hundred years. Slowly but steadily it introduced its own seriousness and purity into English society, English literature, English politics. The whole history of English progress since the Restoration, on its moral and spiritual sides, has been the history of Puritanism."- Green.

"The passing of the Bill of Rights in 1689 restored to the monarchy the character which it had lost under the Tudors and the Stuarts. The right of the people through its representatives to depose the King, to change the order of succession, and to set on the throne whom they would, was now established. All claim of divine right, or hereditary right independent of the law, was formally put an end to by the election of William and Mary. Since their day no English sovereign has been able to advance any claim to the crown save a claim which rested on a particular clause in a particular Act of Parliament. William, Mary and Anne were sovereigns simply by virtue of

the Bill of Rights. George the First and his successors have been sovereigns solely by virtue of the Act of Settlement. An English monarch is now as much the creature of an Act of Parliament as the pettiest tax-gatherer in his realm."- Green.

Macaulay's History of England is the great work upon the Revolution of 1688. That work is indeed simply a history of the causes, course and results of that Revolution. Its opening words will be remembered: “I purpose to write the history of England from the accession of King James the Second down to a time which is within the memory of men still living. I shall recount the errors which, in a few months, alienated a loyal gentry and priesthood from the House of Stuart. I shall trace the course of that revolution which terminated the long struggle between our sovereigns and their parliaments, and bound up together the rights of the people and the title of the reigning dynasty." From Macaulay's summary of the results of the Revolution of 1688, the following passage is taken: "This revolution, of all revolutions the least violent, has been of all revolutions the most beneficent. It finally decided the great question whether the popular element which had, ever since the age of Fitzwalter and De Montfort, been found in the English polity, should be destroyed by the monarchical element, or should be suffered to develop itself freely, and to become dominant. The strife between the two principles had been long, fierce, and doubtful. It had lasted through four reigns. It had produced seditions, impeachments, rebellions, battles, sieges, proscriptions, judicial massacres. Sometimes liberty, sometimes royalty, had seemed to be on the point of perishing. During many years one half of the energy of England had been employed in counteracting the other half. The executive power and the legislative power had so effectually impeded each other that the state had been of no account in Europe. The king-at-arms, who proclaimed William and Mary before Whitehall Gate, did in truth announce that this great struggle was over; that there was entire union between the throne and the Parliament; that England, long dependent and degraded, was again a power of the first rank; that the ancient laws by which the prerogative was bounded would thenceforth be held as sacred as the prerogative itself, and would be followed out to all their consequences; that the executive administration would be conducted in conformity with the sense of the representatives of the nation; and that no reform which the two houses should, after mature deliberation, propose, would be obstinately withstood by the sovereign. The Declaration of Rights, though it made nothing law which had not been law before, contained the germ of the law which gave religious freedom to

the Dissenter, of the law which secured the independence of the judges, of the law which limited the duration of Parliaments, of the law which placed the liberty of the press under the protection of juries, of the law which prohibited the slave-trade, of the law which abolished the sacramental test, of the law which relieved the Roman Catholics from civil disabilities, of the law which reformed the representative system, of every good law which has been passed during a hundred and sixty years, of every good law which may hereafter, in the course of ages, be found necessary to promote the public weal, and to satisfy the demands of public opinion."

Bishop Burnet's History of his Own Times is the most important original authority for the period of the Revolution. Macaulay considered Burnet a "rash and partial" writer, but he was a most learned, industrious and earnest writer, and his works are of very great value. He was the personal friend of William of Orange, and accompanied him in his invasion of England, in the capacity of chaplain. In his interesting account of the landing at Torbay, he says: "As soon as I landed, I made what haste I could to the place where the prince was; who took me heartily by the hand, and asked me, if I would not now believe predestination. I told him, I would never forget that providence of God which had appeared so signally on this occasion. He was cheerfuller than ordinary. Yet he returned soon to his usual gravity."

Evelyn's Memoirs, of which Sir Walter Scott said that he "had never seen so rich a mine," also cover the period of the English Revolution. Evelyn was born in 1620, five years before Charles I became king, and lived four years after the death of William. The life of Sir William Temple, to whom Macaulay has devoted one of his longest and most important essays, falls within this time.

Hallam's Constitutional History of England, chaps. xiv and xv, discusses the Revolution with great thoroughness and impartiality. This discussion and that by Ranke, in his History of England in the Seventeenth Century, vol. iv, will be read by the careful student. There are two brief histories of the Revolution which are commended to the young people - The Fall of the Stuarts, by Rev. E. Hale, in the "Epochs of History" series, and the History of the English Revolution of 1688, by Charles Duke Yonge. Macaulay's brilliant narrative of that great event," says the latter writer in his preface, "is too long for ordinary students; the account given in even the best school history is unavoidably far too short; while the work of Hallam touches only the constitutional points, the purely historical events not coming within his plan. It seemed, therefore, that a narrative which should at once be full enough to give an adequate knowledge of the Revolu

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