It may be at first matter of surprise that Scotland should so completely have succumbed. All that the popular party could do was to suffer. Only on rare occasions could they take the field. Suffering or fighting, they never yielded. But the dearth of constitutional life is not inexplicable. Had the Restoration occurred ten years earlier, it would have been otherwise. The Commonwealth had blotted out the recollection of the years which preceded it, and prepared the way for the years that followed it. Bishop Burnet's remark, that the root of the trouble lay in the king's "entering in without condition," was true, at all events, for the historian's own country. Moreover, we must not forget the condition of the country. The long-continued struggle had brought desolation where before the union of the crowns we can trace prosperity. In Glasgow, in 1692, "near fyve hundredth houses [were] standing waste." The harbour of Ayr was ruinous. The High Street of Dumfries contained scarcely a habitable house.[132] Trade and commerce had declined. The short interval of freedom of trade had but served to intensify the pressure of the Navigation Act. Scotsmen boasted of their "conquest" of England in 1603. England had but given their kings the power to oppress them. A free Parliament met again in 1689. The absence of any strict constitutional feeling led, as so often before, to the assumption of a much more advanced position than that of the English Parliament. Nothing is more characteristic of the slowly broadening growth of English parliamentary claims than the delicate adjustment of conflicting theories by the Convention. In Scotland no such nice adjustment was possible. The proceedings are marked rather by a rude logic. The Estates enumerated the misdeeds of the unfortunate monarch in language distinguished from that of the Claim of Rights only by its strength.[133] The details are not important for our purpose. There is no appeal to precedent, nor any nicety of phrasing. James, having been guilty of this catalogue of crimes, had "forfaulted the right to the Crown, and the throne is become vacant." The underlying theory is sufficiently clear, but it was based on the logic of events. It was probably an effect of the English connections that the Estates went further than usual, and laid down two general principles. All the acts that they had enumerated were illegal. No papist might be king or queen of Scotland. With these conditions, and one other limitation, they proceeded to offer the crown to William and Mary and to entail it, in default of their heirs, upon the Princess Anne. That other clause expressed a claim which, for the people of Scotland, included civil liberties, and had been throughout the troubles synonymous with freedom. The Estates declared that "Prelacy is a great and insupportable grievance to the nation." A "Covenanted King" it was impossible to hope for, nor is there evidence that they desired to repeat the experiment.