up around the
new Government made it impossible to spare a man of those who remained
at home. The great ends of the Revolution were indeed secured, even
amidst the confusion and intrigue which we shall have to describe, by
the common consent of all. On the great questions of civil liberty Whig
and Tory were now at one. The Declaration of Rights was turned into the
Bill of Rights by the Convention which had now become a Parliament, and
the passing of this measure in 1689 restored to the monarchy the
character which it had lost under the Tudors and the Stuarts. The right
of the people through its representatives to depose the king, to change
the order of succession, and to set on the throne whom they would, was
now established. All claim of Divine Right or hereditary right
independent of the law was formally put an end to by the election of
William and Mary. Since their day no English sovereign has been able to
advance any claim to the crown save a claim which rested on a particular
clause in a particular Act of Parliament. William, Mary, and Anne, were
sovereigns simply by virtue of the Bill of Rights. George the First and
his successors have been sovereigns solely by virtue of the Act of
Settlement. An English monarch is now as much the creature of an Act of
Parliament as the pettiest tax-gatherer in his realm.

[Sidenote: Taxation and the Army.]

Nor was the older character of the kingship alone restored. The older
constitution returned with it. Bitter experience had taught England the
need of restoring to the Parliament its absolute power over taxation.
The grant of revenue for life to the last two kings had been the secret
of their anti-national policy, and the first act of the new legislature
was to restrict the grant of the royal revenue to a term of four years.
William was bitterly galled by the provision. "The gentlemen of England
trusted King James," he said, "who was an enemy of their religion and
their laws, and they will not trust me, by whom their religion and their
laws have been preserved." But the only change brought about in the
Parliament by this burst of royal anger was a resolve henceforth to make
the vote of supplies an annual one, a resolve which, in spite of the
slight changes introduced by the next Tory Parliament, soon became an
invariable rule. A change of almost as great importance established the
control of Parliament over the army. The hatred to a standing army which
had begun under Cromwel