Thursday, June 30, 2011

Orange Invitation

There may have been a Glorious Revolution without him, but William of Orange was the man who took the helm in 1688, replacing the Stuart king James II as King of England.  William was invited into England by a letter delivered on June 30, 1688, and landed at Torbay on November 15th.

Without the Glorious Revolution, Walter Scott's characters the Ravenswoods, in "The Bride of Lammermoor", would not have lost legal right to their estate:

'A day was accordingly fixed for holding a grand palaver at Wolf's Hope on the subject of Caleb's requisitions, and he was invited to attend at the hamlet for that purpose. 

He went with open hands and empty stomach, trusting to fill the one on his master's account and the other on his own score, at the expense of the feuars of Wolf's Hope. But, death to his hopes! as he entered the eastern end of the straggling village, the awful form of Davie Dingwall, a sly, dry, hard-fisted, shrewd country attorney, who had already acted against the family of Ravenswood, and was a principal agent of Sir William Ashton, trotted in at the western extremity, bestriding a leathern portmanteau stuffed with the feu-charters of the hamlet, and hoping he had not kept Mr. Balderstone waiting, "as he was instructed and fully empowered to pay or receive, compound or compensate, and, in fine, to age as accords respecting all mutual and unsettled claims whatsoever, belonging or competent to the Honourable Edgar Ravenswood, commonly called the Master of Ravenswood——"...'

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