r violence towards those who
petitioned and addressed against parliament) to have been, in general,
highly laudable and meritorious; and yet I am afraid it may be justly
suspected that it was precisely to that part of their conduct which
related to the plot, and which is most reprehensible, that they were
indebted for their power to make the noble, and, in some instances,
successful struggles for liberty, which do so much honour to their
memory. The danger to be apprehended from military force being always,
in the view of wise men, the most urgent, they first voted the disbanding
of the army, and the two houses passed a bill for that purpose, to which
the king found himself obliged to consent. But to the bill which
followed, for establishing the regular assembling of the militia, and for
providing for their being in arms six weeks in the year, he opposed his
royal negative; thus making his stand upon the same point on which his
father had done; a circumstance which, if events had taken a turn against
him, would not have failed of being much noticed by historians. Civil
securities for freedom came to be afterwards considered; and it is to be
remarked, that to these times of heat and passion, and to one of those
parliaments which so disgraced themselves and the nation by the
countenance given to Oates and Bedloe, and by the persecution of so many
innocent victims, we are indebted for the Habeas Corpus act, the most
important barrier against tyranny, and best framed protection for the
liberty of individuals, that has ever existed in any ancient or modern
commonwealth.

But the inefficacy of mere laws in favour of the subjects, in the case of
the administration of them falling into the hands of persons hostile to
the spirit in which they had been provided, had been so fatally evinced
by the general history of England, ever since the grant of the Great
Charter, and more especially by the transactions of the preceding reign,
that the parliament justly deemed their work incomplete unless the Duke
of York were excluded from the succession to the crown. A bill,
therefore, for the purpose of excluding that prince was prepared, and
passed the House of Commons; but being vigorously resisted by the court,
by the church, and by the Tories, was lost in the House of Lords. The
restrictions offered by the king to be put upon a popish successor are
supposed to have been among the most powerful of those means to which he
was indebted