Courts of justice will undergo reform.  They will cease to be “little better than caverns of murderers,"[1] where judges like Scroggs and Jeffreys (SS478, 487) browbeat the prisoners, took their guilt for granted, insulted and silenced witnesses for their defense, and even cast juries into prison under penalties of heavy fines, for venturing to bring in verdicts contrary to their wishes.[2]

[1] Hallam’s “Constitutional History of England,” p. 138.  Hallam also says that the behavior of the Stuart judges covered them “with infamy,” p. 597. [2] See Hallam, and also the introduction to Professor Adams’s “Manual of Historical Literature.”  For a graphic picture of the times, see, in Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” Christian’s trial before Lord Hategood.

The day, too, had gone by when an English sovereign could cast his subjects into fetid dungeons in the Tower and leave them to die there of lingering disease, in darkness, solitude, and despair.  No future king like the marble-hearted James II would sit in the court room at Edinburgh, and watch with curious delight the agony inflicted by the Scotch instruments of torture, the “boot” and the thumbscrew, or like his grandfather, James I, burn Unitarian heretics at the stake in Smithfield market place in London (S518).

For the future, thought and discussion in England were to be in great measure free, as in time they would be wholly so.  Perhaps the coward King’s heaviest retribution in his secure retreat in the royal French palace of Versailles was the knowledge that all his efforts, and all the efforts of his friend Louis XIV, to prevent the coming of this liberty had absolutely failed.

493.  Summary.

The reign of James must be regarded as mainly taken up with the attempt of the King to rule independently of Parliament and of law, and, apparently, he sought to restore the Roman Catholic faith as the Established Church of England.

Monmouth’s rebellion, though without real justification, since he could not legitimately claim the crown, was a forerunner of that memorable Revolution which invited William of Orange to come to the support of Parliament, and which placed a Protestant King and Queen on the throne.

WILLIAM AND MARY (House of Orange-Stuart)—­1689-1702

494.  The “Convention Parliament”; the Declaration of Right. 1689.

After the flight of James II, a “Convention Parliament” met, and declared that, James having broken “the orginal contract between king and people,” the throne was therefore vacant.  The Convention next issued a formal statement of principles under the name of the “Declaration of Right,” 1689.[1]

[1] It was called a “Convention Parliament” because it had not been summoned by the King (S491).  Declaration of Right:  see Summary of Constitutional History in the Appendix, p. xxii, S24.  On the coronation oath see S380, note 1.

That document recited the illegal and arbitrary acts of the late King James II, proclaimed him no longer sovereign, and resolved that the crown should be tendered to William and Mary.[2] The Declaration having been read to them and having received their assent, they were formally invited to accept the joint sovereignty of the realm, with the understanding that the actual administration should be vested in William alone.