h rose the city cross
surmounted by the unicorn of Scotland, [304] Hamilton read the vote of
the Convention; and a King at Arms proclaimed the new Sovereigns with
sound of trumpet. On the same day the Estates issued an order that the
parochial clergy should, on pain of deprivation, publish from their
pulpits the proclamation which had just been read at the city cross, and
should pray for King William and Queen Mary.

Still the interregnum was not at an end. Though the new Sovereigns had
been proclaimed, they had not yet been put into possession of the royal
authority by a formal tender and a formal acceptance. At Edinburgh,
as at Westminster, it was thought necessary that the instrument which
settled the government should clearly define and solemnly assert those
privileges of the people which the Stuarts had illegally infringed. A
Claim of Right was therefore drawn up by the Twenty Four, and adopted by
the Convention. To this Claim, which purported to be merely declaratory
of the law as it stood, was added a supplementary paper containing a
list of grievances which could be remedied only by new laws. One most
important article which we should naturally expect to find at the head
of such a list, the Convention, with great practical prudence, but in
defiance of notorious facts and of unanswerable arguments, placed in the
Claim of Right. Nobody could deny that prelacy was established by Act
of Parliament. The power exercised by the Bishops might be pernicious,
unscriptural, antichristian but illegal it certainly was not; and to
pronounce it illegal was to outrage common sense. The Whig leaders
however were much more desirous to get rid of episcopacy than to
prove themselves consummate publicists and logicians. If they made the
abolition of episcopacy an article of the contract by which William was
to hold the crown, they attained their end, though doubtless in a manner
open to much criticism. If, on the other hand, they contented themselves
with resolving that episcopacy was a noxious institution which at some
future time the legislature would do well to abolish, they might find
that their resolution, though unobjectionable in form, was barren of
consequences. They knew that William by no means sympathized with their
dislike of Bishops, and that, even had he been much more zealous for
the Calvinistic model than he was, the relation in which he stood to the
Anglican Church would make it difficult and dangerous for him to dec