THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION I The English Revolution was in the main a protest against the attempt of James II to establish a despotism in alliance with France and Rome.

It was almost entirely a movement of the aristocracy, and, for the most part, it was aristocratic opposition that it encountered.

What it did was to make for ever impossible the thought of reunion with Rome and the theory that the throne could be established on any other basis than the consent of Parliament.

For no one could pretend that William of Orange ruled by Divine Right.

The scrupulous shrank from proclaiming the deposition of James; and the fiction that he had abdicated was not calculated to deceive even the warmest of William's adherents.