“For, if the resistance at the Revolution was illegal, the Revolution settled in usurpation, and this act can have no greater force and authority than an act passed under a usurper.

“And the Commons take leave to observe, that the authority of this Parliamentary settlement is a matter of the greatest consequence to maintain, in a case where the hereditary right to the crown is contested.”

“It appears by the several instances mentioned in the act declaring the rights and liberties of the subject and settling the succession of the crown, that at the time of the Revolution there was a total subversion of the constitution of government both in Church and State, which is a case that the laws of England could never suppose, provide for, or have in view.”

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Sir Joseph Jekyl, so often quoted, considered the preservation of the monarchy, and of the rights and prerogatives of the crown, as essential objects with all sound Whigs, and that they were bound not only to maintain them, when injured or invaded, but to exert themselves as much for their reestablishment, if they should happen to be overthrown by popular fury, as any of their own more immediate and popular rights and privileges, if the latter should be at any time subverted by the crown.  For this reason he puts the cases of the Revolution, and the Restoration exactly upon the same footing.  He plainly marks, that it was the object of all honest men not to sacrifice one part of the Constitution to another, and much more, not to sacrifice any of them to visionary theories of the rights of man, but to preserve our whole inheritance in the Constitution, in all its members and all its relations, entire and unimpaired, from generation to generation.  In this Mr. Burke exactly agrees with him.

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Sir Joseph Jekyl.

[Sidenote:  What are the rights of the people.]

[Sidenote:  Restoration and Revolution.]

[Sidenote:  People have an equal interest in the legal rights of the crown and of their own.]

“Nothing is plainer than that the people have a right to the laws and the Constitution.  This right the nation hath asserted, and recovered out of the hands of those who had dispossessed them of it at several times.  There are of this two famous instances in the knowledge of the present age:  I mean that of the Restoration, and that of the Revolution:  in both these great events were the regal power and the rights of the people recovered.  And it is hard to say in which the people have the greatest interest; for the Commons are sensible that there it not one legal power belonging to the crown, but they have an interest in it; and I doubt not but they will always be as careful to support the rights of the crown as their own privileges.”

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