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HISTORY OF ENGLAND,

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ii.

land. What was apparent was not sufficient to warrant an- appeal to the sword. If the Exclusion Bill had been thrownout, it Lad been thrown out by the Lords in the exercise of aright coeval with the constitution. If the King had dissolvedthe Oxford Parliament, he had done so by virtue of a pre-rogative which had never been questioned. If the court had,since the dissolution, done some harsh things, still thosethings were in strict conformity with the letter of the law, andwith the recent practice of the malecontents themselves. Ifthe King had prosecuted his opponents, he had prosecutedthem according to the proper forms, and before the propertribunals. The evidence now produced for the crown was atleast as worthy of credit as the evidence on which the noblestblood of England had lately been shed by the opposition.The treatment which an accused Whig had now to expectfrom judges, advocates, sheriffs, juries, and spectators, wasno worse than the treatment which had lately been thought bythe Whigs good enough for an accused Papist. If the privi-leges of the City of London were attacked, they were attacked,not by military violence or by any disputable exercise of pre-rogative, but according to the regular practice of WestminsterHall. No tax was imposed by royal authority. No law wassuspended. The Habeas Corpus Act was respected. Eventhe Test Act was enforced. The opposition therefore couldnot bring home to the King that species of misgovernmentwhich alone could justify insurrection. And, even had hismisgovernment been more flagrant than it was, insurrectionwould still have been criminal, because it was almost certainto be unsuccessful. The situation of the Whigs in 1682 dif-fered widely from that of the Roundheads forty years beforeThose who took up arms against Charles the First acted underthe authority of a Parliament which had been legally assem-bled, and which could not, without its own consent, belegally dissolved. The opponents of Charles the Second were