The reign of James II, who came to the throne in 1685 at the death of Charles, was retrogressive. He assumed the crown with the full intention of exercising arbitrary authority, and if he had not tried to substitute Catholicism for the Established Church, there is little to show that he would not at least for a time have succeeded. Before the summons of his Parliament, which he called reluctantly notwithstanding a lapse of five years under Charles without one, he continued to himself the payment of the customs duties by proclamation. This illegal act met with no serious objection from Parliament when it met. Nor was this all; Parliament raised the permanent revenue of the king to the annual amount of £2,000,000, and on the suppression of Monmouth’s rebellion, gave him £700,000 more wherewith to support a standing army. Thus did Parliament make James financially independent, provided he was content to live within reason, and gave him an army in addition. This was a combination of powers which on the Continent had sufficed to create despotisms. [William and Mary] That it did not create a despotism in England is not greatly to be wondered at. James set himself to fighting the battle of the Roman Catholic church in England. The result was almost immediate disaster. On the 5th November, 1688, William, Prince of Orange, and Stadtholder of the United Provinces, landed at Torbay in Devonshire. He was requested by seventy of the lords spiritual and temporal (all who were then in London), by the members of the House of Commons which met in the last Parliament of Charles II, and the corporation of the City of London, to assume the provisional government of the kingdom pending a session of Parliament. This was called for the 22nd January, 1688-89. On the 13th February following, a tender of the crown was made to William, on the conditions denominated in the recently framed Declaration of Right. In it the illegal acts of King James were recited and the announcement was made that the throne had been abdicated; it was asserted also that certain specified acts of King James were illegal, and a resolution was appended settling the crown on William and Mary. William, speaking for himself and for the Princess Mary, “thankfully accepted what had been offered them.” [The Bill of Rights, 1689] The Declaration of Right, with some slight but essential changes, was incorporated at the second session of this Parliament, the 25th October, 1689, in statutory form known subsequently as the Bill of Rights.[379] In the matter of taxation, it sums up in a few clauses the whole principle which had been in course of evolution since the German chieftains received gifts of cattle and fruits from their people.