only to be
averted by the combined efforts of King, Lords, and Commons, menaced
the State? A Jacobite indeed might consistently refuse to recognise the
Convention as a Parliament. For he held that it had from the beginning
been an unlawful assembly, that all its resolutions were nullities,
and that the Sovereigns whom it had set up were usurpers. But with what
consistency could any man, who maintained that a new Parliament ought to
be immediately called by writs under the great seal of William and Mary,
question the authority which had placed William and Mary on the throne?
Those who held that William was rightful King must necessarily hold that
the body from which he derived his right was itself a rightful Great
Council of the Realm. Those who, though not holding him to be rightful
King, conceived that they might lawfully swear allegiance to him as King
in fact, might surely, on the same principle, acknowledge the Convention
as a Parliament in fact. It was plain that the Convention was the
fountainhead from which the authority of all future Parliaments must be
derived, and that on the validity of the votes of the Convention must
depend the validity of every future statute. And how could the
stream rise higher than the source? Was it not absurd to say that the
Convention was supreme in the state, and yet a nullity; a legislature
for the highest of all purposes, and yet no legislature for the
humblest purposes; competent to declare the throne vacant, to change
the succession, to fix the landmarks of the constitution, and yet not
competent to pass the most trivial Act for the repairing of a pier or
the building of a parish church?

These arguments would have had considerable weight, even if every
precedent had been on the other side. But in truth our history afforded
only one precedent which was at all in point; and that precedent
was decisive in favour of the doctrine that royal writs are not
indispensably necessary to the existence of a Parliament. No royal writ
had summoned the Convention which recalled Charles the Second. Yet
that Convention had, after his Restoration, continued to sit and to
legislate, had settled the revenue, had passed an Act of amnesty, had
abolished the feudal tenures. These proceedings had been sanctioned by
authority of which no party in the state could speak without reverence.
Hale had borne a considerable share in them, and had always maintained
that they were strictly legal. Clarendon, littl