William came; James fled to France.  A Convention Parliament[4] drew up a Declaration of Right which declared that the King had vacated the throne, and the crown was therefore offered to William and Mary (S494).  They accepted.  Thus by the bloodless Revolution of 1688 the English nation transferred the sovereignty to those who had no direct legal claim to it so long as James and his son were living (S490).  Hence by this act the people deliberately set aside hereditary succession, as a binding rule, and revived the primitive English custom of choosing a sovereign as they deemed best.  In this sense the uprising of 1688 was most emphatically a revolution (S491, 492).  It made, as Green has said, an English monarch as much the creature of an act of Parliament as the pettiest taxgatherer in his realm (S497).  But it was a still greater revolution in another way, since it gave a deathblow to the direct “personal monarchy,” which began with the Tudors two hundred years before.  It is true that in George III’s reign we shall see that power temporarily revived, but we shall never hear anything more of that Divine Right of Kings, for which one Stuary “lost his head, and another his crown.”  Henceforth the House of Commons will govern England, although, as we shall see, it will be nearly a hundred and fifty years before that House will be able to free itself entirely from the control of either a few powerful families on the one hand, or that of the Crown on the other.

[4] Convention Parliament:  it was so called because it was not regularly summoned by the King,—­he having fled the country.

25.  Bill of Rights; the Commons by the Revenue and the Mutiny Act
    obtain Complete Control over the Purse and the Sword.

In order to make the constitutional rights of the people unmistakably clear, the Bill of Rights, 1689,—­an expansion of the Declaration of Right—­was drawn up (S497).  The Bill of Rights[1] declare:  (1) That there should be no suspension or change in the laws, and no taxation except by act of Parliament. (2) That there should be freedom of election to Parliament and freedom of speech in Parliament (both rights that the Stuarts had attempted to contrl). (3) That the sovereign should not keep a standing army, in time of peace, except by consent of Parliament. (4) That in future no Roman Catholic should sit on the English throne.  This last clause was reaffirmed by the Act of Settlement, 1701 (S497).[2]

[1] Bill of Rights:  see Constitutional Documents, p. xxxi. [2] See, too, Constitutional Documents, p. xxxii.

This most important bill, having received the signature of William and Mary, became law.  It constitutes the third great written charter or safeguard of English liberty.  Taken in connection with Magna Carta and the Petition of Right, it forms, according to Lord Chatham, the Bible of English liberty (S497).