Civil and Religious Liberty
James II. was tumbled from the throne for his vain attempt to establish toleration for Catholics and Nonconformists without consent of Parliament. Yet the Whig aristocracy which followed, while it did nothing for Catholics, laid broad principles of civil and religious liberty for democracy to build upon.66
The Declaration of Right, presented by Parliament to William and Mary on their arrival in London, was turned into the Bill of Rights, and passed into law in 1689. It stands as the last of the great charters of political liberty, and states clearly both what is not permitted to the Crown, and what privileges are allowed to the people.
Under the Bill of Rights the King was denied the power of suspending or dispensing, of levying money, or maintaining a standing army without consent of Parliament. The people were assured of the right of the subject to petition the Crown, and of the free election of representatives in Parliament, and of full and free debate in Parliament. Any profession of the Catholic religion, or marriage with a Catholic, disqualified from inheritance to or possession of the throne.
So there was an end to the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, and four hundred non-juring clergymen—including half-a-dozen bishops—of the Church of England were deprived of their ecclesiastical appointments for refusing to accept the accomplished fact, and acknowledge William III. as the lawful King of England. By making William King, to the exclusion of the children of James II., Parliament destroyed for all future time in England the belief in the sacred character of kingship. The King was henceforth a part of the constitution, and came to the throne by authority of Parliament, on conditions laid down by Parliament.
William resented the decision of Parliament not to allow the Crown a revenue for life, but to vote an annual supply; but the decision was adhered to, and has remained in force ever since. The Mutiny Act, passed the same year, placed the army under the control of Parliament, and the annual vote for military expenses has, in like manner, remained.
The Toleration Act (1689) gave Nonconformists a legal right to worship in their own chapels, but expressly excluded Unitarians and Roman Catholics from this liberty. Life was made still harder for Roman Catholics in England by the Act of 1700, which forbade a Catholic priest, under penalty of imprisonment for life, to say mass, hear confessions, or exercise any clerical function, and denied the right of the Catholic laity to hold, buy or inherit property, or to have their children educated abroad. The objection to Roman Catholics was that their loyalty to the Pope was an allegiance to a “foreign” ruler which prevented their being good citizens at home. Against this prejudice it was useless to point to what had been done by Englishmen for their country, when all the land was Catholic, and all accepted the supremacy of the Pope. It was not till 1778 that the first Catholic Relief Bill was carried, a Bill that “shook the general prejudice against Catholics to the centre, and restored to them a thousand indescribable charities in the ordinary intercourse of social life which they had seldom experienced.”
The last Roman Catholic to die for conscience’ sake was Oliver Plunket, Archbishop of Armagh, who was executed at Tyburn, when Charles II. was King, in 1681. After the Revolution, Nonconformists and Catholics were no longer hanged or tortured for declining the ministrations of the Established Church, but still were penalised in many lesser ways. But the spirit of the eighteenth century made for toleration, and the Whigs were as unostentatious in their own piety as they were indifferent to the piety of others.
The killing of “witches,” however, went on in Scotland and in England long after toleration had been secured for Nonconformists. As late as 1712 a woman was executed for witchcraft in England.67