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Scenes of such a nature did not occur every day even in 1688, and the storm of indignation and excitement among the members of the congregation did not subside so quickly as it had risen.
The tacit assuagement of the severities against the Reformers, between 1688 and 1700, was the fruit of the representations of Bossuet, Fenelon, and Cardinal Noailles. Madame de Maintenon wrote at that date to one of her relatives, "You are converted; do not meddle in the conversion of others.
One king, it is true, had been evicted from the throne, and Roman Catholics were to be always excluded; and these measures disposed of divine hereditary right. But that had been a Stuart invention, and kings had been deposed before James II. Why should self-government follow on the events of 1688 any more than on those of 1399, 1461, or 1485?
This, at all events, was the view of the late Duke of Devonshire, who more than any other statesman of our time could claim to be a representative in his own person of the Whig tradition handed down from 1688. Passive obedience has, indeed, been preached as a political dogma in the course of English history, but never by apostles of Liberalism.
It was on such a literary chaos as this that the one great poet of the time poured scorn in his "Dunciad." Pope was a child of the Revolution; for he was born in 1688, and he died at the moment when the spirit of his age was passing into larger and grander forms in 1744. But from all active contact with the world of his day he stood utterly apart.
By 1688 the period of active growth was past for the colonial empires of Holland, Portugal, and Spain; but England and France, beginning to realize the possibilities for power in North America, in India, and on the high seas, were just on the verge of a world conflict, which, after raging intermittently for more than a hundred years, was to leave Great Britain the "mistress of the seas."
Then seven well-known men, both Whigs and Tories, wrote a letter asking the husband of James's oldest daughter Mary, William III the Stadtholder or head of the Dutch Republic, to come to England and deliver the country from its lawful but entirely undesirable sovereign. On the fifth of November of the year 1688, William landed at Torbay.
To understand what sort of an expedition was this of two hundred years ago, how Dampier was equipped and what manner of ship and company he commanded, it will not be out of place to give some account of the navy at that time. When James II. abdicated in 1688, according to Pepys, the royal navy was made up of 173 ships of 101,892 tons, an armament of 6930 guns, and 42,003 men.
It was not until 1688 that the reformers finally attained their aim in the abolition of absolute power spiritual and temporal; and the accession of William of Orange in that year brought England into the great struggle that was raging on the Continent between the principle of despotism and the principle of freedom.
We shall presently see that the English Revolution of 1688, which drove James II into exile, was a decisive step in the establishment of constitutional government in England.
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