On the 20th of March the new Parliament met, and the King addressed it in a speech in which he announced his intention of proceeding to Ireland as soon as might be, and recommended to the prompt attention of the two Houses the question of the settlement of the royal revenue and of the enactment of an amnesty. In the former of these matters their action was more conformable to sound constitutional principle than agreeable to the King. In addition to the hereditary revenues which had passed with the crown to William and Mary, the Commons would only agree to settle absolutely upon the King and Queen about one third of the fiscal revenues which had been assured to the last two sovereigns for the term of their lives. That portion of the excise, estimated at £300,000, which had been settled upon James II. for life, was now settled upon William and Mary for their joint and separate lives. But, on the other hand, the customs duties, amounting to £600,000, which had been settled for life on Charles and James successively, were granted to the Crown for a term of only four years. This restriction, in which Whigs and Tories concurred, was not unnaturally displeasing to a sovereign who justly valued himself on the ability, integrity, and thrift which made him, as he conceived, at once the most efficient and the most trustworthy steward of the national resources; but that he should have resented the action of Parliament in this matter not merely as a limitation upon the free play of his policy, but as a personal slight to himself, instructively illustrates the very limited extent to which the principles of the British Constitution, as we now know it, had established themselves in the joint recognition of the sovereign and the legislature. If there was one principle more inevitably implied in the Revolution that William had headed than another, it was that no personal claims of any individual sovereign could be allowed either to suspend or in any degree to qualify the general rule of parliamentary control. Had William contended, whether reasonably or unreasonably, that the restraint placed on him by Parliament was more severe than needed to be imposed upon _any_ sovereign, his position would have been a defensible one; but his complaint, as Burnet testifies, was that the Commons were showing an undue and ungenerous jealousy of their particular sovereign for the time being. His claim to enjoy the same amount of freedom as his predecessor had abused was founded simply on the fact that James was James and that he was William; and that was obviously one of these circumstances of which the administrators of a general rule, intended to apply to any number of future Jameses and Williams, could not possibly take into account. Had this general rule been recognised with anything approaching to its acceptance in these days, it is impossible to suppose that so clear and fair an intelligence as William's could have missed its application to himself.