These arguments would have had considerable weight, even if every precedent had been on the other side. But in truth our history afforded only one precedent which was at all in point; and that precedent was decisive in favour of the doctrine that royal writs are not indispensably necessary to the existence of a Parliament. No royal writ had summoned the Convention which recalled Charles the Second. Yet that Convention had, after his Restoration, continued to sit and to legislate, had settled the revenue, had passed an Act of amnesty, had abolished the feudal tenures. These proceedings had been sanctioned by authority of which no party in the state could speak without reverence. Hale had borne a considerable share in them, and had always maintained that they were strictly legal. Clarendon, little as he was inclined to favour any doctrine derogatory to the rights of the Crown, or to the dignity of that seal of which he was keeper, had declared that, since God had, at a most critical conjuncture, given the nation a good Parliament, it would be the height of folly to look for technical flaws in the instrument by which that Parliament was called together. Would it be pretended by any Tory that the Convention of 1660 had a more respectable origin than the Convention of 1689? Was not a letter written by the first Prince of the Blood, at the request of the whole peerage, and of hundreds of gentlemen who had represented counties and towns, at least as good a warrant as a vote of the Rump?