King James the Second was a man so
very disagreeable, that even the best of historians
has favoured his brother Charles, as becoming, by
comparison, quite a pleasant character. The one
object of his short reign was to re-establish the
Catholic religion in England; and this he doggedly
pursued with such a stupid obstinacy, that his career
very soon came to a close.
The first thing he did, was, to assure
his council that he would make it his endeavour to
preserve the Government, both in Church and State,
as it was by law established; and that he would always
take care to defend and support the Church.
Great public acclamations were raised over
this fair speech, and a great deal was said, from
the pulpits and elsewhere, about the word of a King
which was never broken, by credulous people who little
supposed that he had formed a secret council for Catholic
affairs, of which a mischievous Jesuit, called FATHER
PETRE, was one of the chief members. With tears
of joy in his eyes, he received, as the beginning of
his pension from the King of France, five hundred
thousand livres; yet, with a mixture of meanness and
arrogance that belonged to his contemptible character,
he was always jealous of making some show of being
independent of the King of France, while he pocketed
his money. As notwithstanding his
publishing two papers in favour of Popery (and not
likely to do it much service, I should think) written
by the King, his brother, and found in his strong-box;
and his open display of himself attending mass the
Parliament was very obsequious, and granted him a
large sum of money, he began his reign with a belief
that he could do what he pleased, and with a determination
to do it.
Before we proceed to its principal
events, let us dispose of Titus Oates. He was
tried for perjury, a fortnight after the coronation,
and besides being very heavily fined, was sentenced
to stand twice in the pillory, to be whipped from
Aldgate to Newgate one day, and from Newgate to Tyburn
two days afterwards, and to stand in the pillory five
times a year as long as he lived. This fearful
sentence was actually inflicted on the rascal.
Being unable to stand after his first flogging, he
was dragged on a sledge from Newgate to Tyburn, and
flogged as he was drawn along. He was so strong
a villain that he did not die under the torture, but
lived to be afterwards pardoned and rewarded, though
not to be ever believed in any more. Dangerfield,
the only other one of that crew left alive, was not
so fortunate. He was almost killed by a whipping
from Newgate to Tyburn, and, as if that were not punishment
enough, a ferocious barrister of Gray’s Inn
gave him a poke in the eye with his cane, which caused
his death; for which the ferocious barrister was deservedly
tried and executed.
As soon as James was on the throne,
Argyle and Monmouth went from Brussels to Rotterdam,
and attended a meeting of Scottish exiles held there,
to concert measures for a rising in England.
It was agreed that Argyle should effect a landing
in Scotland, and Monmouth in England; and that two
Englishmen should be sent with Argyle to be in his
confidence, and two Scotchmen with the Duke of Monmouth.
Argyle was the first to act upon this
contract. But, two of his men being taken prisoners
at the Orkney Islands, the Government became aware
of his intention, and was able to act against him with
such vigour as to prevent his raising more than two
or three thousand Highlanders, although he sent a
fiery cross, by trusty messengers, from clan to clan
and from glen to glen, as the custom then was when
those wild people were to be excited by their chiefs.
As he was moving towards Glasgow with his small force,
he was betrayed by some of his followers, taken, and
carried, with his hands tied behind his back, to his
old prison in Edinburgh Castle. James ordered
him to be executed, on his old shamefully unjust sentence,
within three days; and he appears to have been anxious
that his legs should have been pounded with his old
favourite the boot. However, the boot was not
applied; he was simply beheaded, and his head was set
upon the top of Edinburgh Jail. One of those
Englishmen who had been assigned to him was that old
soldier Rumbold, the master of the Rye House.
He was sorely wounded, and within a week after Argyle
had suffered with great courage, was brought up for
trial, lest he should die and disappoint the King.
He, too, was executed, after defending himself with
great spirit, and saying that he did not believe that
God had made the greater part of mankind to carry
saddles on their backs and bridles in their mouths,
and to be ridden by a few, booted and spurred for
the purpose in which I thoroughly agree
with Rumbold.
The Duke of Monmouth, partly through
being detained and partly through idling his time
away, was five or six weeks behind his friend when
he landed at Lyme, in Dorset: having at his right
hand an unlucky nobleman called LORD GREY OF WERK,
who of himself would have ruined a far more promising
expedition. He immediately set up his standard
in the market-place, and proclaimed the King a tyrant,
and a Popish usurper, and I know not what else; charging
him, not only with what he had done, which was bad
enough, but with what neither he nor anybody else had
done, such as setting fire to London, and poisoning
the late King. Raising some four thousand men
by these means, he marched on to Taunton, where there
were many Protestant dissenters who were strongly
opposed to the Catholics. Here, both the rich
and poor turned out to receive him, ladies waved a
welcome to him from all the windows as he passed along
the streets, flowers were strewn in his way, and every
compliment and honour that could be devised was showered
upon him. Among the rest, twenty young ladies
came forward, in their best clothes, and in their brightest
beauty, and gave him a Bible ornamented with their
own fair hands, together with other presents.
Encouraged by this homage, he proclaimed
himself King, and went on to Bridgewater. But,
here the Government troops, under the EARL OF FEVERSHAM,
were close at hand; and he was so dispirited at finding
that he made but few powerful friends after all, that
it was a question whether he should disband his army
and endeavour to escape. It was resolved, at
the instance of that unlucky Lord Grey, to make a night
attack on the King’s army, as it lay encamped
on the edge of a morass called Sedgemoor. The
horsemen were commanded by the same unlucky lord,
who was not a brave man. He gave up the battle
almost at the first obstacle which was
a deep drain; and although the poor countrymen, who
had turned out for Monmouth, fought bravely with scythes,
poles, pitchforks, and such poor weapons as they had,
they were soon dispersed by the trained soldiers,
and fled in all directions. When the Duke of
Monmouth himself fled, was not known in the confusion;
but the unlucky Lord Grey was taken early next day,
and then another of the party was taken, who confessed
that he had parted from the Duke only four hours before.
Strict search being made, he was found disguised as
a peasant, hidden in a ditch under fern and nettles,
with a few peas in his pocket which he had gathered
in the fields to eat. The only other articles
he had upon him were a few papers and little books:
one of the latter being a strange jumble, in his own
writing, of charms, songs, recipes, and prayers.
He was completely broken. He wrote a miserable
letter to the King, beseeching and entreating to be
allowed to see him. When he was taken to London,
and conveyed bound into the King’s presence,
he crawled to him on his knees, and made a most degrading
exhibition. As James never forgave or relented
towards anybody, he was not likely to soften towards
the issuer of the Lyme proclamation, so he told the
suppliant to prepare for death.
On the fifteenth of July, one thousand
six hundred and eighty-five, this unfortunate favourite
of the people was brought out to die on Tower Hill.
The crowd was immense, and the tops of all the houses
were covered with gazers. He had seen his wife,
the daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch, in the Tower,
and had talked much of a lady whom he loved far better the
LADY HARRIET WENTWORTH who was one of the
last persons he remembered in this life. Before
laying down his head upon the block he felt the edge
of the axe, and told the executioner that he feared
it was not sharp enough, and that the axe was not
heavy enough. On the executioner replying that
it was of the proper kind, the Duke said, ’I
pray you have a care, and do not use me so awkwardly
as you used my Lord Russell.’ The executioner,
made nervous by this, and trembling, struck once and
merely gashed him in the neck. Upon this, the
Duke of Monmouth raised his head and looked the man
reproachfully in the face. Then he struck twice,
and then thrice, and then threw down the axe, and
cried out in a voice of horror that he could not finish
that work. The sheriffs, however, threatening
him with what should be done to himself if he did not,
he took it up again and struck a fourth time and a
fifth time. Then the wretched head at last fell
off, and James, Duke of Monmouth, was dead, in the
thirty-sixth year of his age. He was a showy,
graceful man, with many popular qualities, and had
found much favour in the open hearts of the English.
The atrocities, committed by the Government,
which followed this Monmouth rebellion, form the blackest
and most lamentable page in English history.
The poor peasants, having been dispersed with great
loss, and their leaders having been taken, one would
think that the implacable King might have been satisfied.
But no; he let loose upon them, among other intolerable
monsters, a COLONEL KIRK, who had served against the
Moors, and whose soldiers called by the
people Kirk’s lambs, because they bore a lamb
upon their flag, as the emblem of Christianity were
worthy of their leader. The atrocities committed
by these demons in human shape are far too horrible
to be related here. It is enough to say, that
besides most ruthlessly murdering and robbing them,
and ruining them by making them buy their pardons
at the price of all they possessed, it was one of
Kirk’s favourite amusements, as he and his officers
sat drinking after dinner, and toasting the King,
to have batches of prisoners hanged outside the windows
for the company’s diversion; and that when their
feet quivered in the convulsions of death, he used
to swear that they should have music to their dancing,
and would order the drums to beat and the trumpets
to play. The detestable King informed him, as
an acknowledgment of these services, that he was ’very
well satisfied with his proceedings.’
But the King’s great delight was in the proceedings
of Jeffreys, now a peer, who went down into the west,
with four other judges, to try persons accused of
having had any share in the rebellion. The King
pleasantly called this ‘Jeffreys’s campaign.’
The people down in that part of the country remember
it to this day as The Bloody Assize.
It began at Winchester, where a poor
deaf old lady, MRS. ALICIA LISLE, the widow of one
of the judges of Charles the First (who had been murdered
abroad by some Royalist assassins), was charged with
having given shelter in her house to two fugitives
from Sedgemoor. Three times the jury refused
to find her guilty, until Jeffreys bullied and frightened
them into that false verdict. When he had extorted
it from them, he said, ’Gentlemen, if I had
been one of you, and she had been my own mother, I
would have found her guilty;’ as I
dare say he would. He sentenced her to be burned
alive, that very afternoon. The clergy of the
cathedral and some others interfered in her favour,
and she was beheaded within a week. As a high
mark of his approbation, the King made Jeffreys Lord
Chancellor; and he then went on to Dorchester, to Exeter,
to Taunton, and to Wells. It is astonishing,
when we read of the enormous injustice and barbarity
of this beast, to know that no one struck him dead
on the judgment-seat. It was enough for any man
or woman to be accused by an enemy, before Jeffreys,
to be found guilty of high treason. One man who
pleaded not guilty, he ordered to be taken out of court
upon the instant, and hanged; and this so terrified
the prisoners in general that they mostly pleaded
guilty at once. At Dorchester alone, in the
course of a few days, Jeffreys hanged eighty people;
besides whipping, transporting, imprisoning, and selling
as slaves, great numbers. He executed, in all,
two hundred and fifty, or three hundred.
These executions took place, among
the neighbours and friends of the sentenced, in thirty-six
towns and villages. Their bodies were mangled,
steeped in caldrons of boiling pitch and tar, and hung
up by the roadsides, in the streets, over the very
churches. The sight and smell of heads and limbs,
the hissing and bubbling of the infernal caldrons,
and the tears and terrors of the people, were dreadful
beyond all description. One rustic, who was
forced to steep the remains in the black pot, was
ever afterwards called ‘Tom Boilman.’
The hangman has ever since been called Jack Ketch,
because a man of that name went hanging and hanging,
all day long, in the train of Jeffreys. You will
hear much of the horrors of the great French Revolution.
Many and terrible they were, there is no doubt; but
I know of nothing worse, done by the maddened people
of France in that awful time, than was done by the
highest judge in England, with the express approval
of the King of England, in The Bloody Assize.
Nor was even this all. Jeffreys
was as fond of money for himself as of misery for
others, and he sold pardons wholesale to fill his pockets.
The King ordered, at one time, a thousand prisoners
to be given to certain of his favourites, in order
that they might bargain with them for their pardons.
The young ladies of Taunton who had presented the
Bible, were bestowed upon the maids of honour at court;
and those precious ladies made very hard bargains
with them indeed. When The Bloody Assize was
at its most dismal height, the King was diverting
himself with horse-races in the very place where Mrs.
Lisle had been executed. When Jeffreys had done
his worst, and came home again, he was particularly
complimented in the Royal Gazette; and when the King
heard that through drunkenness and raging he was very
ill, his odious Majesty remarked that such another
man could not easily be found in England. Besides
all this, a former sheriff of London, named CORNISH,
was hanged within sight of his own house, after an
abominably conducted trial, for having had a share
in the Rye House Plot, on evidence given by Rumsey,
which that villain was obliged to confess was directly
opposed to the evidence he had given on the trial of
Lord Russell. And on the very same day, a worthy
widow, named ELIZABETH GAUNT, was burned alive at
Tyburn, for having sheltered a wretch who himself
gave evidence against her. She settled the fuel
about herself with her own hands, so that the flames
should reach her quickly: and nobly said, with
her last breath, that she had obeyed the sacred command
of God, to give refuge to the outcast, and not to betray
the wanderer.
After all this hanging, beheading,
burning, boiling, mutilating, exposing, robbing, transporting,
and selling into slavery, of his unhappy subjects,
the King not unnaturally thought that he could do whatever
he would. So, he went to work to change the
religion of the country with all possible speed; and
what he did was this.
He first of all tried to get rid of
what was called the Test Act which prevented
the Catholics from holding public employments by
his own power of dispensing with the penalties.
He tried it in one case, and, eleven of the twelve
judges deciding in his favour, he exercised it in three
others, being those of three dignitaries of University
College, Oxford, who had become Papists, and whom
he kept in their places and sanctioned. He revived
the hated Ecclesiastical Commission, to get rid of
COMPTON, Bishop of London, who manfully opposed him.
He solicited the Pope to favour England with an ambassador,
which the Pope (who was a sensible man then) rather
unwillingly did. He flourished Father Petre before
the eyes of the people on all possible occasions.
He favoured the establishment of convents in several
parts of London. He was delighted to have the
streets, and even the court itself, filled with Monks
and Friars in the habits of their orders. He
constantly endeavoured to make Catholics of the Protestants
about him. He held private interviews, which
he called ‘closetings,’ with those Members
of Parliament who held offices, to persuade them to
consent to the design he had in view. When they
did not consent, they were removed, or resigned of
themselves, and their places were given to Catholics.
He displaced Protestant officers from the army, by
every means in his power, and got Catholics into their
places too. He tried the same thing with the
corporations, and also (though not so successfully)
with the Lord Lieutenants of counties. To terrify
the people into the endurance of all these measures,
he kept an army of fifteen thousand men encamped on
Hounslow Heath, where mass was openly performed in
the General’s tent, and where priests went among
the soldiers endeavouring to persuade them to become
Catholics. For circulating a paper among those
men advising them to be true to their religion, a
Protestant clergyman, named JOHNSON, the chaplain of
the late Lord Russell, was actually sentenced to stand
three times in the pillory, and was actually whipped
from Newgate to Tyburn. He dismissed his own
brother-in-law from his Council because he was a Protestant,
and made a Privy Councillor of the before-mentioned
Father Petre. He handed Ireland over to RICHARD
TALBOT, EARL OF TYRCONNELL, a worthless, dissolute
knave, who played the same game there for his master,
and who played the deeper game for himself of one
day putting it under the protection of the French
King. In going to these extremities, every man
of sense and judgment among the Catholics, from the
Pope to a porter, knew that the King was a mere bigoted
fool, who would undo himself and the cause he sought
to advance; but he was deaf to all reason, and, happily
for England ever afterwards, went tumbling off his
throne in his own blind way.
A spirit began to arise in the country,
which the besotted blunderer little expected.
He first found it out in the University of Cambridge.
Having made a Catholic a dean at Oxford without any
opposition, he tried to make a monk a master of arts
at Cambridge: which attempt the University resisted,
and defeated him. He then went back to his favourite
Oxford. On the death of the President of Magdalen
College, he commanded that there should be elected
to succeed him, one MR. ANTHONY FARMER, whose only
recommendation was, that he was of the King’s
religion. The University plucked up courage at
last, and refused. The King substituted another
man, and it still refused, resolving to stand by its
own election of a MR. HOUGH. The dull tyrant,
upon this, punished Mr. Hough, and five-and-twenty
more, by causing them to be expelled and declared
incapable of holding any church preferment; then he
proceeded to what he supposed to be his highest step,
but to what was, in fact, his last plunge head-foremost
in his tumble off his throne.
He had issued a declaration that there
should be no religious tests or penal laws, in order
to let in the Catholics more easily; but the Protestant
dissenters, unmindful of themselves, had gallantly
joined the regular church in opposing it tooth and
nail. The King and Father Petre now resolved
to have this read, on a certain Sunday, in all the
churches, and to order it to be circulated for that
purpose by the bishops. The latter took counsel
with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was in disgrace;
and they resolved that the declaration should not be
read, and that they would petition the King against
it. The Archbishop himself wrote out the petition,
and six bishops went into the King’s bedchamber
the same night to present it, to his infinite astonishment.
Next day was the Sunday fixed for the reading, and
it was only read by two hundred clergymen out of ten
thousand. The King resolved against all advice
to prosecute the bishops in the Court of King’s
Bench, and within three weeks they were summoned before
the Privy Council, and committed to the Tower.
As the six bishops were taken to that dismal place,
by water, the people who were assembled in immense
numbers fell upon their knees, and wept for them,
and prayed for them. When they got to the Tower,
the officers and soldiers on guard besought them for
their blessing. While they were confined there,
the soldiers every day drank to their release with
loud shouts. When they were brought up to the
Court of King’s Bench for their trial, which
the Attorney-General said was for the high offence
of censuring the Government, and giving their opinion
about affairs of state, they were attended by similar
multitudes, and surrounded by a throng of noblemen
and gentlemen. When the jury went out at seven
o’clock at night to consider of their verdict,
everybody (except the King) knew that they would rather
starve than yield to the King’s brewer, who
was one of them, and wanted a verdict for his customer.
When they came into court next morning, after resisting
the brewer all night, and gave a verdict of not guilty,
such a shout rose up in Westminster Hall as it had
never heard before; and it was passed on among the
people away to Temple Bar, and away again to the Tower.
It did not pass only to the east, but passed to the
west too, until it reached the camp at Hounslow, where
the fifteen thousand soldiers took it up and echoed
it. And still, when the dull King, who was then
with Lord Feversham, heard the mighty roar, asked
in alarm what it was, and was told that it was ’nothing
but the acquittal of the bishops,’ he said,
in his dogged way, ’Call you that nothing?
It is so much the worse for them.’
Between the petition and the trial,
the Queen had given birth to a son, which Father Petre
rather thought was owing to Saint Winifred. But
I doubt if Saint Winifred had much to do with it as
the King’s friend, inasmuch as the entirely
new prospect of a Catholic successor (for both the
King’s daughters were Protestants) determined
the EARLS OF SHREWSBURY, DANBY, and DEVONSHIRE, LORD
LUMLEY, the BISHOP OF LONDON, ADMIRAL RUSSELL, and
COLONEL SIDNEY, to invite the Prince of Orange over
to England. The Royal Mole, seeing his danger
at last, made, in his fright, many great concessions,
besides raising an army of forty thousand men; but
the Prince of Orange was not a man for James the Second
to cope with. His preparations were extraordinarily
vigorous, and his mind was resolved.
For a fortnight after the Prince was
ready to sail for England, a great wind from the west
prevented the departure of his fleet. Even when
the wind lulled, and it did sail, it was dispersed
by a storm, and was obliged to put back to refit.
At last, on the first of November, one thousand six
hundred and eighty-eight, the Protestant east wind,
as it was long called, began to blow; and on the third,
the people of Dover and the people of Calais saw a
fleet twenty miles long sailing gallantly by, between
the two places. On Monday, the fifth, it anchored
at Torbay in Devonshire, and the Prince, with a splendid
retinue of officers and men, marched into Exeter.
But the people in that western part of the country
had suffered so much in The Bloody Assize, that they
had lost heart. Few people joined him; and he
began to think of returning, and publishing the invitation
he had received from those lords, as his justification
for having come at all. At this crisis, some
of the gentry joined him; the Royal army began to
falter; an engagement was signed, by which all who
set their hand to it declared that they would support
one another in defence of the laws and liberties of
the three Kingdoms, of the Protestant religion, and
of the Prince of Orange. From that time, the
cause received no check; the greatest towns in England
began, one after another, to declare for the Prince;
and he knew that it was all safe with him when the
University of Oxford offered to melt down its plate,
if he wanted any money.
By this time the King was running
about in a pitiable way, touching people for the King’s
evil in one place, reviewing his troops in another,
and bleeding from the nose in a third. The young
Prince was sent to Portsmouth, Father Petre went off
like a shot to France, and there was a general and
swift dispersal of all the priests and friars.
One after another, the King’s most important
officers and friends deserted him and went over to
the Prince. In the night, his daughter Anne fled
from Whitehall Palace; and the Bishop of London, who
had once been a soldier, rode before her with a drawn
sword in his hand, and pistols at his saddle.
‘God help me,’ cried the miserable King:
’my very children have forsaken me!’
In his wildness, after debating with such lords as
were in London, whether he should or should not call
a Parliament, and after naming three of them to negotiate
with the Prince, he resolved to fly to France.
He had the little Prince of Wales brought back from
Portsmouth; and the child and the Queen crossed the
river to Lambeth in an open boat, on a miserable wet
night, and got safely away. This was on the night
of the ninth of December.
At one o’clock on the morning
of the eleventh, the King, who had, in the meantime,
received a letter from the Prince of Orange, stating
his objects, got out of bed, told LORD NORTHUMBERLAND
who lay in his room not to open the door until the
usual hour in the morning, and went down the back
stairs (the same, I suppose, by which the priest in
the wig and gown had come up to his brother) and crossed
the river in a small boat: sinking the great
seal of England by the way. Horses having been
provided, he rode, accompanied by SIR EDWARD HALES,
to Feversham, where he embarked in a Custom House
Hoy. The master of this Hoy, wanting more ballast,
ran into the Isle of Sheppy to get it, where the fishermen
and smugglers crowded about the boat, and informed
the King of their suspicions that he was a ‘hatchet-faced
Jesuit.’ As they took his money and would
not let him go, he told them who he was, and that the
Prince of Orange wanted to take his life; and he began
to scream for a boat and then to cry, because
he had lost a piece of wood on his ride which he called
a fragment of Our Saviour’s cross. He put
himself into the hands of the Lord Lieutenant of the
county, and his detention was made known to the Prince
of Orange at Windsor who, only wanting to
get rid of him, and not caring where he went, so that
he went away, was very much disconcerted that they
did not let him go. However, there was nothing
for it but to have him brought back, with some state
in the way of Life Guards, to Whitehall. And
as soon as he got there, in his infatuation, he heard
mass, and set a Jesuit to say grace at his public dinner.
The people had been thrown into the
strangest state of confusion by his flight, and had
taken it into their heads that the Irish part of the
army were going to murder the Protestants. Therefore,
they set the bells a ringing, and lighted watch-fires,
and burned Catholic Chapels, and looked about in all
directions for Father Petre and the Jesuits, while
the Pope’s ambassador was running away in the
dress of a footman. They found no Jesuits; but
a man, who had once been a frightened witness before
Jeffreys in court, saw a swollen, drunken face looking
through a window down at Wapping, which he well remembered.
The face was in a sailor’s dress, but he knew
it to be the face of that accursed judge, and he seized
him. The people, to their lasting honour, did
not tear him to pieces. After knocking him about
a little, they took him, in the basest agonies of
terror, to the Lord Mayor, who sent him, at his own
shrieking petition, to the Tower for safety.
There, he died.
Their bewilderment continuing, the
people now lighted bonfires and made rejoicings, as
if they had any reason to be glad to have the King
back again. But, his stay was very short, for
the English guards were removed from Whitehall, Dutch
guards were marched up to it, and he was told by one
of his late ministers that the Prince would enter London,
next day, and he had better go to Ham. He said,
Ham was a cold, damp place, and he would rather go
to Rochester. He thought himself very cunning
in this, as he meant to escape from Rochester to France.
The Prince of Orange and his friends knew that, perfectly
well, and desired nothing more. So, he went
to Gravesend, in his royal barge, attended by certain
lords, and watched by Dutch troops, and pitied by
the generous people, who were far more forgiving than
he had ever been, when they saw him in his humiliation.
On the night of the twenty-third of December, not
even then understanding that everybody wanted to get
rid of him, he went out, absurdly, through his Rochester
garden, down to the Medway, and got away to France,
where he rejoined the Queen.
There had been a council in his absence,
of the lords, and the authorities of London.
When the Prince came, on the day after the King’s
departure, he summoned the Lords to meet him, and soon
afterwards, all those who had served in any of the
Parliaments of King Charles the Second. It was
finally resolved by these authorities that the throne
was vacant by the conduct of King James the Second;
that it was inconsistent with the safety and welfare
of this Protestant kingdom, to be governed by a Popish
prince; that the Prince and Princess of Orange should
be King and Queen during their lives and the life
of the survivor of them; and that their children should
succeed them, if they had any. That if they
had none, the Princess Anne and her children should
succeed; that if she had none, the heirs of the Prince
of Orange should succeed.
On the thirteenth of January, one
thousand six hundred and eighty-nine, the Prince and
Princess, sitting on a throne in Whitehall, bound
themselves to these conditions. The Protestant
religion was established in England, and England’s
great and glorious Revolution was complete.