lves with school disputes about
words, which, while they discovered the fine lines of party in England,
had embarrassed the English convention, struck their blow without
ceremony, and came to a resolution, that King James had, by his evil
deeds, _forfaulted_ his right to the crown; a term which, in the
language of the law of Scotland, involved in it the exclusion of all his
posterity as well as his own. But, as this resolution would have
comprehended the other children of James, as well as the young Prince,
they agreed upon the following explanation of the word _forfaulted_.
"Agreed, that the word _forfault_, in the resolution, should imply no
other alteration in the succession to the crown than the seclusion of
King James, the pretended Prince of Wales, and the children that shall
be procreated of either of their bodies." Only five opposed these
resolutions....

The convention next made offer of the crown to William and Mary: a vote
in which the Duke of Queensberry and the Marquis of Athole concurred,
although they had refused to be present at the other. They reconciled
their conduct by saying, "That, since the throne was declared vacant by
the nation, they knew none so worthy to fill it as the Prince and
Princess of Orange"--a mixture of sentiment, intended to please both
Kings, but which, like most compliments of the kind, pleased neither.
From an excess of zeal which betrayed the cause of it, the Duke of
Hamilton demeaned himself to act the part of a clerk; reading, at the
ordinary place of proclamation, the act of convention aloud to the mean
multitude, who found even their own vanity hurt in the sacrifice which
was made to it by the first man in the nation. With more dignity the
parliament accompanied the offer of the crown with such a declaration of
rights as laid open all the invasions upon the constitution, not of the
late King alone, but of his brother, and ascertained every disputed
pretension between the crown and the subject; for, accustomed either to
trample upon their sovereigns, or to be trampled upon by them, the
Scottish nation chose to leave nothing to be adjusted afterwards by the
vibration between the executive and legislative powers, which had kept
the English constitution almost continually in a just medium between the
imperiousness of the crown and the licentiousness of the subject. The
Earl of Argyle for the peers, Sir James Montgomery for the knights, and
Sir John Dalrymple for the boroughs, we