ity from which he twice or thrice, at long
intervals, again emerged for a moment into infamy.

On the twenty-fourth of February 1692, about an hour after the Commons
had voted Fuller an impostor, they were summoned to the chamber of the
Lords. The King thanked the Houses for their loyalty and liberality,
informed them that he must soon set out for the Continent, and commanded
them to adjourn themselves. He gave his assent on that day to many
bills, public and private; but when the title of one bill, which had
passed the Lower House without a single division and the Upper House
without a single protest, had been read by the Clerk of the Crown, the
Clerk of the Parliaments declared, according to the ancient form, that
the King and the Queen would consider of the matter. Those words had
very rarely been pronounced before the accession of William. They have
been pronounced only once since his death. But by him the power of
putting a Veto on laws which had been passed by the Estates of the Realm
was used on several important occasions. His detractors truly asserted
that he rejected a greater number of important bills than all the Kings
of the House of Stuart put together, and most absurdly inferred that the
sense of the Estates of the Realm was much less respected by him than by
his uncles and his grandfather. A judicious student of history will
have no difficulty in discovering why William repeatedly exercised a
prerogative to which his predecessors very seldom had recourse, and
which his successors have suffered to fall into utter desuetude.

His predecessors passed laws easily because they broke laws easily.
Charles the First gave his assent to the Petition of Right, and
immediately violated every clause of that great statute. Charles the
Second gave his assent to an Act which provided that a Parliament should
be held at least once in three years; but when he died the country had
been near four years without a Parliament. The laws which abolished
the Court of High Commission, the laws which instituted the Sacramental
Test, were passed without the smallest difficulty; but they did
not prevent James the Second from reestablishing the Court of High
Commission, and from filling the Privy Council, the public offices, the
courts of justice, and the municipal corporations with persons who had
never taken the Test. Nothing could be more natural than that a King
should not think it worth while to withhold his assent from a statute