21. =A Convention Parliament Summoned. 1688.=--Amongst the crowd which welcomed William was Sergeant Maynard, an old man of ninety. "You must," said William to him, "have survived all the lawyers of your standing." "Yes, sir," replied Maynard, "and, but for your Highness, I should have survived the laws too." He expressed the general sense of almost every Englishman. How to return to a legal system with the least possible disturbance was the problem to be faced. William consulted the House of Lords and an assembly composed of all persons who had sat in any of Charles's Parliaments, together with special representatives of the City. Members of James's one Parliament were not summoned, on the plea that the return to it of members chosen by the remodelled corporations made it no true Parliament. The body thus consulted advised William to call a Convention, which would be a Parliament in everything except that there was no king to summon it. 22. =The Throne declared Vacant. 1689.=--On January 22, =1689=, the Convention met. The House of Commons contained a majority of Whigs, whilst the Tories were in a majority in the Lords. On the 28th the Commons resolved that "king James II., having endeavoured to subvert the constitution of the kingdom by breaking the original contract between king and people, and by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons having violated the fundamental laws and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, had abdicated the government, and that the throne had thereby become vacant." This lumbering resolution was unanimously adopted. The Whigs were pleased with the clause which made the vacancy of the throne depend on James's misgovernment, and the Tories were pleased with the clause which made it depend on his so-called voluntary abdication. The Tories in the Lords proposed that James should remain nominally king, but that the country should be governed by a regent. Danby, however, and a small knot of Tories supported the Whigs, and the proposal was rejected. Danby had, indeed, a plan of his own. James, he held, had really abdicated, and the crown had therefore passed to the next heir. That heir was not, according to him, the supposititious infant, but the eldest daughter of James, Mary Princess of Orange, who was now in her own right queen of England. It was an ingenious theory, but two circumstances were against its being carried into practice. In the first place, Mary scolded Danby for daring to set her above her husband. In the second place William made it known that he would neither be regent nor administer the government under his wife. Danby therefore withdrew his motion, and on February 6 the Lords voted, as the Commons had voted before, that James had abdicated and the throne was vacant.