, the right of the nation to a pure and merciful
administration of justice according to the spirit of its own mild laws,
were solemnly affirmed. All these things the Convention claimed, in the
name of the whole nation, as the undoubted inheritance of Englishmen.
Having thus vindicated the principles of the constitution, the Lords and
Commons, in the entire confidence that the deliverer would hold sacred
the laws and liberties which he had saved, resolved that William and
Mary, Prince and Princess of Orange, should be declared King and Queen
of England for their joint and separate lives, and that, during their
joint lives, the administration of the government should be in the
Prince alone. After them the crown was settled on the posterity of Mary,
then on Anne and her posterity, and then on the posterity of William.

By this time the wind had ceased to blow from the west. The ship
in which the Princess of Orange had embarked lay off Margate on the
eleventh of February, and, on the following morning, anchored at
Greenwich. [672] She was received with many signs of joy and affection:
but her demeanour shocked the Tories, and was not thought faultless even
by the Whigs. A young woman, placed, by a destiny as mournful and awful
as that which brooded over the fabled houses of Labdacus and Pelops, in
such a situation that she could not, without violating her duty to her
God, her husband, and her country, refuse to take her seat on the throne
from which her father had just been hurled, should have been sad, or at
least serious. Mary was not merely in high, but in extravagant, spirits.
She entered Whitehall, it was asserted, with a girlish delight at
being mistress of so fine a house, ran about the rooms, peeped into the
closets, and examined the quilt of the state bed, without seeming to
remember by whom those magnificent apartments had last been occupied.
Burnet, who had, till then, thought her an angel in human form, could
not, on this occasion, refrain from blaming her. He was the more
astonished because, when he took leave of her at the Hague, she had,
though fully convinced that she was in the path of duty, been deeply
dejected. To him, as to her spiritual guide, she afterwards explained
her conduct. William had written to inform her that some of those
who had tried to separate her interest from his still continued their
machinations: they gave it out that she thought herself wronged; and,
if she wore a gloomy countenance,