liament by an
abandonment of his recent acts. But the haste and completeness with
which James reversed his whole course forbade any belief in his
sincerity. He personally appealed for support to the Bishops. He
dissolved the Ecclesiastical Commission. He replaced the magistrates he
had driven from office. He restored their franchises to the towns. The
Chancellor carried back the Charter of London in state into the City.
The Bishop of Winchester was sent to replace the expelled Fellows of
Magdalen. Catholic chapels and Jesuit schools were ordered to be closed.

[Sidenote: William's Landing.]

Sunderland pressed for the instant calling of a Parliament. But it was
still plain that any Parliament would as yet be eager for war with
France and would probably call on the king to put the Prince of Orange
at the head of his army in such a war. To James therefore Sunderland's
counsel seemed treachery, the issue of a secret design with William to
place him helpless in the Prince's hands and above all to imperil the
succession of his boy, whose birth William had now been brought by
advice from the English lords to regard as an imposture. He again
therefore fell back on France which made new advances to him in the hope
of meeting this fresh danger of an attack from England; and in the end
of October he dismissed Sunderland from office. But Sunderland had
hardly left Whitehall when the Declaration of the Prince of Orange
reached England. It demanded the removal of grievances and the calling
of a free Parliament which should establish English freedom and religion
on a secure basis. It promised toleration to Protestant Nonconformists
and freedom of conscience to Catholics. It left the question of the
legitimacy of the Prince of Wales and the settlement of the succession
to Parliament. James was wounded above all by the doubts thrown on the
birth of a Prince; and he produced proofs of the birth before the peers
who were in London. But the proofs came too late. Detained by ill winds,
beaten back on its first venture by a violent storm, William's fleet of
six hundred transports, escorted by fifty men-of-war, anchored on the
5th of November in Torbay; and his army, thirteen thousand strong,
entered Exeter amid the shouts of its citizens. Great pains had been
taken to strip from William's army the appearance of a foreign force,
which might have stirred English feeling to resistance. The core of it
consisted of the English and Scottish regi