Under sovereigns who would consider it as little short of high treason to preach nonresistance and the patriarchal theory of government, under sovereigns whose authority, springing from resolutions of the two Houses, could never rise higher than its source, there would be little risk of oppression such as had compelled two generations of Englishmen to rise in arms against two generations of Stuarts.

On these grounds the Whigs were prepared to declare the throne vacant, to fill it by election, and to impose on the prince of their choice such conditions as might secure the country against misgovernment.
The time for the decision of these great questions had now arrived.

At break of day, on the twenty-second of January, the House of Commons was crowded with knights and burgesses.

On the benches appeared many faces which had been well known in that place during the reign of Charles the Second, but had not been seen there under his successor.

Most of those Tory squires, and of those needy retainers of the court, who had been returned in multitudes to the Parliament of 1685, had given place to the men of the old country party, the men who had driven the Cabal from power, who had carried the Habeas Corpus Act, and who had sent up the Exclusion Bill to the Lords.