to go to the Princess Anne and her children. So we see that William’s right to the crown was given by Parliament, and henceforth no sovereign ruled by any other title than a parliamentary one.
William III. was in every respect a remarkable man. He was an unfortunate general, yet one who succeeded by his calmness and courage in the hour of defeat in wresting gain out of his losses. He had been brought up in a land which had suffered greatly from religious persecution, and so had learned to be liberal and tolerant to people of all creeds. When quite young he had been surrounded by enemies who watched his words and actions, and he had formed the habit of keeping his own counsel and trusting but few. This, added to a disposition naturally distrustful, caused him to appear to the English people sullen and morose. When it is remembered that William suffered almost continually from ill-health, and that when in England he was living among men who constantly sought to betray him, we have an explanation of his being so unsociable and suspicious, and why he was so unpopular with his English subjects. Yet, while the English did not like his foreign ways and his foreign favorites, they knew that he alone stood between them and the loss of their religion and their political rights, and this caused them to give him their support in the days when he was most disliked.
2. Early Difficulties.—But William was not accepted as king by all his subjects. In England, some of the clergy who believed in the Divine Right of kings refused to take the oath of allegiance to him, and, in consequence, were turned out of their offices. They then formed themselves into a party called the “Non-Jurors,” and for a century elected their own bishops. The “Non-Jurors” caused a good deal of trouble, for they joined with the friends of James, or Jacobites (from Jacobus, Latin for James), in plots to have the Stuarts restored.
In Scotland, Parliament agreed to accept William as king on the condition that Presbyterianism should be restored. The English Church clergy in Scotland would now have been severely treated by the Covenanters, had not William interfered to stop the “rabbling” that began with the downfall of James. In the Highlands, the people were mostly Roman Catholics, and there an old follower of
