Law French and Law Latin; and, being by universal acknowledgment the most subtle and the most learned of English jurists, he could express what he felt without the risk of being accused of ignorance and presumption. He scornfully thrust aside as frivolous and out of place all that blackletter learning, which some men, far less versed in such matters than himself, had introduced into the discussion. "We are," he said, "at this moment out of the beaten path. If therefore we are determined to move only in that path, we cannot move at all. A man in a revolution resolving to do nothing which is not strictly according to established form resembles a man who has lost himself in the wilderness, and who stands crying 'Where is the king's highway? I will walk nowhere but on the king's highway.' In a wilderness a man should take the track which will carry him home. In a revolution we must have recourse to the highest law, the safety of the state." Another veteran Roundhead, Colonel Birch, took the same side, and argued with great force and keenness from the precedent of 1660. Seymour and his supporters were beaten in the Committee, and did not venture to divide the House on the Report. The Bill passed rapidly, and received the royal assent on the tenth day after the accession of William and Mary. [33] The law which turned the Convention into a Parliament contained a clause providing that no person should, after the first of March, sit or vote in either House without taking the oaths to the new King and Queen. This enactment produced great agitation throughout society. The adherents of the exiled dynasty hoped and confidently predicted that the recusants would be numerous. The minority in both Houses, it was said, would be true to the cause of hereditary monarchy. There might be here and there a traitor; but the great body of those who had voted for a Regency would be firm. Only two Bishops at most would recognise the usurpers. Seymour would retire from public life rather than abjure his principles. Grafton had determined to fly to France and to throw himself at the feet of his uncle. With such rumours as these all the coffeehouses of London were filled during the latter part of February. So intense was the public anxiety that, if any man of rank was missed, two days running, at his usual haunts, it was immediately whispered that he had stolen away to Saint Germains. [34]