The English Revolution was in the main a protest against the attempt of
James II to establish a despotism in alliance with France and Rome. It
was almost entirely a movement of the aristocracy, and, for the most
part, it was aristocratic opposition that it encountered. What it did
was to make for ever impossible the thought of reunion with Rome and the
theory that the throne could be established on any other basis than the
consent of Parliament. For no one could pretend that William of Orange
ruled by Divine Right. The scrupulous shrank from proclaiming the
deposition of James; and the fiction that he had abdicated was not
calculated to deceive even the warmest of William's adherents. An
unconstitutional Parliament thereupon declared the throne vacant; and
after much negotiation William and Mary were invited to occupy it. To
William the invitation was irresistible. It gave him the assistance of
the first maritime power in Europe against the imperialism of Louis XIV.
It ensured the survival of Protestantism against the encroachments of an
enemy who never slumbered. Nor did England find the new régime
unwelcome. Every widespread conviction of her people had been wantonly
outraged by the blundering stupidity of James. If a large fraction of
the English Church held aloof from the new order on technical grounds,
the commercial classes gave it their warm support; and many who doubted
in theory submitted in practice. All at least were conscious that a new
era had dawned.

For William had come over with a definite purpose in view. James had
wrought havoc with what the Civil Wars had made the essence of the
English constitution; and it had become important to define in set terms
the conditions upon which the life of kings must in the future be
regulated. The reign of William is nothing so much as the period of that
definition; and the fortunate discovery was made of the mechanisms
whereby its translation into practice might be secured. The Bill of