When the dynasty was overthrown, the parliament had presented to William and Mary A Bill of Rights, in which the people’s grievances were set forth, and their rights enumerated and insisted upon; and this was accepted by the monarchs as a condition of their tenure.

Mary died in 1695, and when William followed her, in 1702, Anne, the second daughter of James, ascended the throne.  Had she refused the succession, there would have been a furious war between the Jacobites and the Hanoverians.  In 1714, Anne died childless, but her reign had bridged the chasm between the experiment of William and Mary and the house of Hanover.  In default of direct heirs to Queen Anne, the succession was in this Hanoverian house; represented in the person of the Electress Sophia, the granddaughter of James I., through his daughter, Elizabeth of Bohemia.  But this lineage of blood had lost all English affinities and sympathies.

Meanwhile, the child born to James II., in 1688, had grown to be a man, and stood ready, on the death of Queen Anne, to re-affirm his claim to the throne.  It was said that, although, on account of the plottings of the Jacobites, a price had been put upon his head, the queen herself wished him to succeed, and had expressed scruples about her own right to reign.  She greatly disliked the family of Hanover, and while she was on her death-bed, the pretender had been brought to England, in the hope that she would declare him her successor.  The elements of discord asserted themselves still more strongly.  Whigs and Tories in politics, Romanists and Protestants in creed, Jacobite and Hanoverian in loyalty, opposed each other, harassing the feeble queen, and keeping the realm in continual ferment.

WHIGS AND TORIES.—­The Whigs were those who declared that kingly power was solely for the good of the subject; that the reformed creed was the religion of the realm; that James had forfeited the throne, and that his son was a pretender; and that the power justly passed to the house of Hanover.  The Tories asserted that monarchs ruled by divine right; and that if, when religion was at stake, the king might be deposed, this could not affect the succession.

Anne escaped her troubles by dying, in 1714.  Sophia, the Electress of Hanover, who had only wished to live, she said, long enough to have engraved upon her tombstone:  “Here lies Sophia, Queen of England,” died, in spite of this desire, only a few weeks before the queen; and the new heir to the throne was her son, George Louis of Brunswick-Luneburg, electoral prince of Hanover.

He came cautiously and selfishly to the throne of England; he felt his way, and left a line of retreat open; he brought not a spice of honest English sentiment, but he introduced the filth of the electoral court.  As gross in his conduct as Charles II., he had indeed a prosperous reign, because it was based upon a just and tolerant Constitution; because the English were in reality not governed by a king, but by well-enacted laws.