Passage of The First Mutiny Act
King William III replaced King James II in 1688 during the Glorious Revolution. A number of Scottish troops refused to obey orders from William III to fight in Holland, believing James II to be the true monarch. Instead, these troops marched home. Since these troops were located in England during peacetime the military laws that made these acts illegal could not be enforced against them. Common law did not make mutiny a crime. Therefore no legal action could be taken to stop them.
Parliament responded by passing the Mutiny Act of 1689. This act made desertion, mutiny, and sedition of officers and soldiers crimes which were triable by court-martial and punishable by death.
Read more about this topic: Mutiny Acts
Famous quotes containing the words passage of, passage and/or act:
“Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest
And passage through these looms
God ordered motion, but ordained no rest.”
—Henry Vaughan (1622–1695)
“We all have—to put it as nicely as I can—our lower centres and our higher centres. Our lower centres act: they act with terrible power that sometimes destroys us; but they don’t talk.... Since the war the lower centres have become vocal. And the effect is that of an earthquake. For they speak truths that have never been spoken before—truths that the makers of our domestic institutions have tried to ignore.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)