Bill of Rights

The Bill of Rights is presented as the political consequence of a struggle in which the Commons and a divided peerage helped limit the crown. The novel treats this settlement as an important check on royal power, but not as a straightforward victory for equality: the aristocracy could oppose the king while retaining its own privileges over the people.

Constitutional Setting

The narrator places the Bill of Rights within a long account of the English peerage and its changing relation to the monarchy. The crown had reason to welcome the decline of aristocratic power: under Queen Anne, the narrator says, 565 peerages dating from the twelfth century had become extinct. Earlier rulers had also reshaped the nobility, restoring dukedoms and using appointments to cultivate court loyalty. These changes set the scene for the central constitutional tension: a peerage dependent on the crown could also resist the crown's efforts to control it.

The book's account of social hierarchy makes clear that this constitutional conflict was not a contest among equals. Its earlier examples of privilege include the rule that a commoner who struck a lord could lose a hand, and the elevated forms of address used for both lords and God. Such details frame the world in which constitutional restraints on monarchy emerged: legal rank could limit royal authority without abolishing the unequal privileges enjoyed by the aristocracy.

The Peerage Against the Crown

The narrator describes the House of Peers as increasingly irritated by attempts to bind it through court influence. Conflict with the crown is traced across successive reigns: the Lords' proceedings against Bacon under James I and against Strafford under Charles I are presented as signs of a widening rupture. The account gives this conflict a political consequence beyond the careers of individual men, connecting aristocratic resistance to the broader struggle between king and Parliament.

At the decisive point in this narrative, the king summoned Parliament to Oxford, while the revolution summoned it to London. Forty-four peers sided with the king, and twenty-two with the Republic. The division matters because the narrator attributes the emergence of the Bill of Rights to the combination of the people with the Lords, rather than to either force acting alone. The settlement thus arises from political alignment and conflict, not from a simple gift of rights by the monarchy.

Meaning and Limits of the Settlement

The narrator characterizes the Bill of Rights as a sketch of the French declaration of rights and as a faint anticipation of the French Revolution. This comparison gives the English settlement a place in a longer history of political change, while emphasizing that the later revolutionary ideal is only dimly present in it. The book does not set out the Bill's individual provisions; its emphasis falls instead on the political forces that made such a settlement possible.

The narrator's judgment of the peerage remains deliberately ambivalent. It is described as parasitic, and its services to the people as involuntary and costly. Yet its opposition to the crown also checked the possibility of a monarchy that leveled society by subjecting everyone to royal power. Aristocratic arrogance toward the people was, in this account, counterbalanced by aristocratic insolence toward the king. The Bill of Rights therefore signifies a restraint on sovereignty achieved through an institution that was itself a source of inequality.

Rights and the Reach of State Power

The novel's surrounding discussion of law cautions against treating constitutional settlement as proof that coercive practices had disappeared. It describes arrests conducted without explanation as common despite the Habeas Corpus Act, especially in cases considered matters of state. Such arrests signaled that authorities might reserve questions from public scrutiny in the name of raison d'état. The Bill of Rights is not presented as the direct cause of their end, nor does the narrative claim that it resolved the conflict between liberty and government power.

The same contrast appears in the treatment of royal authority over individual status. The account of Gwynplaine's lineage describes a royal order under King James II that enabled the child to be sold and removed from his inheritance; later, the legal confrontation over the sealed confession forces the authorities to recognize his identity. Set beside the novel's account of the Bill of Rights, this episode underscores the distance between constitutional principles and the exercise of power in particular cases. The settlement marks a limit on monarchy in the political order, but the narrative continues to expose how law, privilege, and royal command can leave individuals vulnerable.