The accession of the Hanoverian line was one of those peaceful revolutions—it closed the era of Jacobitism. The reign of Anne had vibrated between the principles of the constitution and the principles of Charles II. Never was a balance more evenly poised, than the fate of freedom against the return to arbitrary power. Anne herself was a Jacobite—she had all the superstition of “Divine right.” By her nature she had the infirmities of the convent. She was evidently fitter to be an abbess than a queen: a character of frigidness and formality designated her for the cloister; and if the Hanoverian succession had not been palpably prepared before the national eye, to ascend the throne at the moment when the royal coffin sank into the vault, England might have seen the profligate son of James dealing out vengeance through a corrupted or terrified legislature; the Reformation extinguished by the Inquisitor; the jesuit at the royal ear, mass in Westminster Abbey, and the scaffold the instrument of conversion to the supremacy of Rome. The expulsion of the Stuarts had left the throne to the disposal of the nation. By the Bill of Rights, it was determined that the succession should go to the heirs of William and Mary; and, in their default, to Anne, daughter of James. But the deaths of Mary, and of the Duke of Gloucester, awoke the hopes of Popery and the cabals of Jacobitism once more. The danger was imminent. William became deeply anxious for the Protestant succession, and a bill was brought into the House of Commons, declaring that the crown should devolve on the Electress Sophia, Duchess-dowager of Hanover, and her heirs,—the Electress of Hanover (or more correctly, of Brunswick and Luneburg) being the tenth child of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, daughter of James I., the only Protestant princess among the foreign relations of the line. The next in succession to Anne in the Roman Catholic line would have been the houses of Savoy, France, and Spain, through Henrietta, daughter of Charles I. This order of succession was made law by the 12th of William III., and confirmed in the next session by the Abjuration Act, (13th William,) so named from the oath _abjuring_ the Pretender. It is striking to observe how many high matters of legislation have seemed the work of casualty. The Habeas Corpus Act, confessedly the noblest achievement of British liberty since Magna Charta, was said to have been carried by a mistake in counting the votes of the House; the limitation to the Electress was proposed by a half-lunatic; the oath of abjuration was carried but by a majority of one; and the Reform Bill, which, though a measure as doubtful in its principles as disappointing in its promises, has yet exercised an extraordinary power over the constitution, was carried in its second reading by a majority of only one.