While Prince William was making it his principal endeavour to combine the two elements of the army with each other, and to give them a common organisation, in which task Churchill assisted him on the part of the English, the elections to the Convention were completed. The first had been held in the capital, for this reason if for no other, that the smaller places might be encouraged by its example. Wherever they took place the troops were withdrawn, as has remained the custom subsequently; nor was any other influence exercised. The old forms, which had lately been called in question, were adhered to all the more rigorously on that account. As the majority of the nation had taken part in the resistance to James II, it could not be but that the result of the elections should harmonise with this feeling.

On the morning of the appointed day—the 22nd of January by the Old Style, the 1st of February by the New—the members who had been elected assembled in the House of Commons at Westminster. Henry Powle was now chosen no longer chairman, as in the preliminary assembly, but Speaker.

This Convention was not what has been called in later times a National Assembly. It had itself been elected in accordance with the old exclusive privileges, in the established parliamentary forms; by its side there appeared the lords spiritual and temporal, who also chose their Speaker—Lord Halifax—on the same day, and claimed the exercise of their old customary privileges in full: the assembly formed a Parliament, only without a king; but from this very omission it derived an enormous increase of power.