Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

the parts which were not impaired. They kept these old parts exactly as they were, that the part recovered might be suited to them. They acted by the ancient organized states in the shape of their old organization, and not by the organic molecule of a disbanded people. At no time, perhaps, did the sovereign legislature manifest a more tender regard to that fundamental principle of British conftitutional policy, than at the time of the Revolution, when it deviated from the direct line of hereditary succession. The crown was carried fomewhat out of the line in which it had before moved; but the new line was derived from the same stock. It was still a line of hereditary descent; still an hereditary descent in the fame blood, though an hereditary descent qualified with proteftantism. When the legislature altered the direction, but kept the principle, they shewed that they held it inviolable.

On this principle, the law of inheritance had admitted some amendment in the old time, and long before the æra of the Revolution. Some time after the conquest great questions arofe upon the legal principles of hereditary descent. It became a matter of doubt, whether the heir per capita or the heir per ftirpes was to fucceed; but whether the heir per capita gave way when the heirdom per ftirpes took place, or the Catholic heir when the Protestant was preferred, the inheritable principle survived with a fort of immortality through all transmigrations-mul

tofque tosque per annos ftat fortuna domus et avi numerantur avorum. This is the spirit of our constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its revolutions. Whoever came in, or however he came in, whether he obtained the crown by law, or by force, the hereditary succession was either continued or adopted.

The gentlemen of the Society for Revolutions see nothing in that of 1688 but the deviation from the constitution; and they take the deviation from the principle for the principle. They have little regard to the obvious consequences of their doctrine, though they must see, that it leaves positive authority in very few of the positive institutions of this country. When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded their æra of fictitious election can be valid. Do these theorists mean to imitate some of their predecessors, who dragged the bodies of our antient sovereigns out of the quiet of their tombs? Do they mean to attaint and disable backwards all the kings that have reigned before the Revolution, and consequently to stain the throne of England with the blot of a continual ufurpation? Do they mean to invalidate; annul, or to call into question, together with the titles of the whole line of our kings, that great body of our statute law which passed under those whom they treat as ufurpers? to annul laws of inestimable value to our liberties of as great value value at least as any which have passed at of fince the period of the Revolution? If kings, who did not owe their crown to the choice of their people, had no title to make laws, what will become of the statute de tallagio non concedendo ?-of the petition of right? of the act of habeas corpus? Do these new doctors of the rights of men presume to affert, that King James the Second, who came to the crown as next of blood, according to the rules of a then unqualified fuccession, was not to all intents and purposes a lawful king of England, before he had done any of those acts which were justly construed into an abdication of his crown? If he was not, much trouble in parliament might have been saved at the period these gentlemen commemorate. But King James was a bad king with a good title, and not an ufurper. The princes who fucceeded according to the act of parliament which fettled the crown on the electress Sophia and on her descendants, being Proteftants, came in as much by a title of inheritance as King James did. He came in according to the law, as it stood at his accession to the crown; and the princes of the House of Brunswick came to the inheritance of the crown, not by election, but by the law, as it stood at their several acceffions of Proteftant descent and inheritance, as I hope I have shewn sufficiently.

The law by which this royal family is fpecifically destined to the succession, is the act of

the

the 12th and 13th of King William. The terms of this act bind " us and our heirs, and our "pofterity, to them, their heirs, and their poste"rity," being Protestants, to the end of time, in the fame words as the declaration of right had bound us to the heirs of King William and Queen Mary. It therefore secures both an hereditary crown and an hereditary allegiance. On what ground, except the constitutional policy of forming an establishment to secure that kind of fucceffion which is to preclude a choice of the people for ever, could the legiflature have faftidiously rejected the fair and abundant choice which our own country presented to them, and searched in strange lands for a foreign princess, from whose womb the line of our future rulers were to derive their title to govern millions of men through a feries of ages ?

The Princess Sophia was named in the act of fettlement of the 12th and 13th of King William, for a stock and root of inheritance to our kings, and not for her merits as a temporary administratrix of a power, which she might not, and in fact did not, herself ever exercife. She was adopted for one reason, and for one only, because, says the act, "the most excellent "Princess Sophia, Electress and Dutchess Dow

[ocr errors]

ager of Hanover, is daughter of the most " excellent Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of "Bohemia, daughter of our late fovereign lord King James the First, of happy memory, and " is hereby declared to be the next in fucceffion

[ocr errors]

D

" in

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

" in the Proteftant line," &c. &c.; " and the crown shall continue to the heirs of her body, being Proteftants." This limitation was made by parliament, that through the Princess Sophia an inheritable line, not only was to be continued in future but (what they thought very material) that through her it was to be connected with the old stock of inheritance in King James the First; in order that the monarchy might preserve an unbroken unity through all ages, and might be preserved (with safety to our religion) in the old approved mode by descent, in which, if our liberties had been once endangered, they had often, through all storms and struggles of prerogative and privilege, been preferved. They did well. No experience has taught us, that in any other course or method than that of an hereditary crown, our liberties can be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred as our hereditary right. An irregular, convulfive movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular, convulsive disease. But the course of fucceffion is the healthy habit of the British constitution. Was it that the legiflature wanted, at the act for the limitation of the crown in the Hanoverian line, drawn through the female defcendants of James the First, a due sense of the inconveniencies of having two or three, or possibly more, foreigners in fuccefsion to the British throne? No! - they had a due sense of the evils which might happen from fuch foreign rule, and more than a due sense of them.

« ElőzőTovább »