Parliament should be confirmed by its successor which was summoned in due form by the King’s writ. These fantastic subtleties, subtleties worthy of the kindred device by which the first year of Charles’s reign was called the twelfth, would again have been wholly unintelligible to our man of the eleventh century. He might have remembered that the Assembly which restored Æthelred—which restored him on conditions, while Charles was restored without conditions—did not scruple to go on and pass a series of the most important decrees that were passed in any of our early Assemblies(20). Once more again, the Convention which deposed James and elected William, seemed, like that which deposed Richard and elected Henry, to doubt its own existence and to shrink from its own act. James was deposed; but the Assembly which deposed him ventured not to use the word, and, as an extorted abdication was deemed expedient in the case of Richard, so a constructive abdication was imagined in the case of James(21). And the Assembly which elected William, like the Assembly which elected Henry and that which elected Charles, prolonged its own existence by the same transparent fiction of voting itself to be a lawful Parliament. Wise men held at the time that, at least in times of revolution, a Parliament might be called into being by some other means than that of the writ of a King. Yet it was deemed that some additional security was given to the existence of the Assembly and to the validity of its acts by this second exercise of the mysterious power of self-creation(22). Once more in the same reign the question was brought forward whether a Parliament summoned by the joint writ of William and Mary did not expire when Mary died and William reigned alone. This subtlety was suggested only to be contemptuously cast aside; yet it may be fairly doubted whether it was not worth at least as much as any of the kindred subtleties which on the three earlier occasions were deemed of such vast importance(23). The untutored wisdom of Englishmen, in the days when we had laws but when those laws had not yet been made the sport of the subtleties of lawyers, would have seen as little force in the difficulties which it was deemed necessary to get over by solemn parliamentary enactments as in the difficulty which neither House of Parliament thought worthy of any serious discussion.