and landed at Torbay on November 4.  Resistance was impossible.  The troops of James’s army quietly deserted wholesale, many joining the Dutch camp at Honiton.  First the West of England, and then the North, revolted against James.  Evil news poured in upon him.  When he heard that Churchill and Grafton had forsaken him, he exclaimed, “Est-il possible?” On December 8 the king fled from London secretly.  His home in exile was at Saint Germains.

William and Mary were proclaimed King and Queen of the United Kingdom, and thus was consummated the English Revolution.  It was of all revolutions the least violent and yet the most beneficent.

After the Great Revolution

The Revolution had been accomplished.  The rejoicings throughout the land were enthusiastic.  Still more cordial was the rejoicing among the Dutch when they learned that the first minister of their Commonwealth had been raised to a throne.  James had, during the last year of his reign, been even more hated in England by the Tories than by the Whigs; and not without cause; for to the Whigs he was only an enemy; and to the Tories he had been a faithless and thankless friend.

One misfortune of the new king, which some reactionaries imputed to him as a crime, was his bad English.  He spoke our language, but not well.  Our literature he was incapable of enjoying or understanding.  He never once appeared in the theatre.  The poets who wrote Pindaric verse in his praise complained that their flights of sublimity were beyond his comprehension.  But his wife did her best to supply what was wanting.  She was excellently qualified to be the head of the Court.  She was English by birth and also in her tastes and feelings.  The stainless purity of her private life and the attention she paid to her religious duties discourages scandal as well as vice.

The year 1689 is not less important in the ecclesiastical than in the civil history of England, for in that year was granted the first legal indulgence to Dissenters.  And then also the two chief sections within the Anglican communion began to be called the High Church and Low Church parties.  The Low Churchmen stood between the nonconformists and the rigid conformists.  The famous Toleration Bill passed both Houses with little debate.  It approaches very near the ideal of a great English law, the sound principle of which undoubtedly is that mere theological error ought not to be punished by the civil magistrate.

The War in Ireland

The discontent of the Roman Catholic Irishry with the Revolution was intense.  It grew so manifestly, that James, assured that his cause was prospering in Ireland, landed on March 12, 1689, at Kinsale.  On March 24 he entered Dublin.  This event created sorrow and alarm in England.  An Irish army, raised by the Catholics, entered Ulster and laid siege to Londonderry, into which city two English regiments had been thrown by sea.  The heroic defence of