408

HISTORY OP ENGLAND.

CHAP.

X.

1686 .

Meetingof theConven-tion.Leadingmembersof theHouseof Com-mons.

be to interrupt the course of descent. Under sovereigns who• would consider it as little short of high treason to preach non-resistance and the patriarchal theory of government, undersovereigns whose authority, springing from resolutions of thetwo Houses, could never rise higher than its source, therewould be little risk of oppression such as had compelled twogenerations of Englishmen to rise in arms against two genera-tions of Stuarts. On these grounds the Whigs were preparedto declare the throne vacant, to fill it by election, and toimpose on the prince of their choice such conditions as mightsecure the country against misgovernment.

The time for the decision of these great questions had nowarrived. At break of day, on the twenty-second of January,the House of Commons was crowded with knights and bur-gesses. On the benches appeared many faces which hadbeen well known in that place during the reign of Charles theSecond, but had not been seen there under his successor.Most of those Tory squires, and of those needy retainersof the court, who had been returned in multitudes to the Par-liament of 1685, had given place to the men of the old countryparty, the men who had driven the Cabal from power, whohad carried the Habeas Corpus Act, and who had sent up theExclusion Bill to the Lords. Among them was Powle, deeplyread in the history and law of Parliament, and distinguishedby the species of eloquence which is required when gravequestions are to be solemnly brought under the notice ofsenates; and Sir Thomas Littleton, versed in European po-litics, and gifted with a vehement and piercing logic whichhad often, when, after a long sitting, the candles had beenlighted, roused the languishing House, and decided theevent of the debate. There, too, was William Sacheverell,an orator whose great parliamentary abilities were, manyyears later, a favourite theme of old men who lived to see theconflicts of Walpole and Pulteney.* With these eminentpersons was joined Sir Robert Clayton, the wealthiestmerchant of London, whose palace in the Old Jewry sur-passed in splendour the aristocratical mansions of Lincoln’s* Burnet, i. 389., and the notes of Speaker Onslow.