THE SOVEREIGN AND THE NATURE OF THE

SOVEREIGN'S TITLE.

The supreme Executive power of the kingdom is vested by our laws in a single person, the King or Queen; for it matters not to which sex the crown descends, and the person entitled to it is immediately invested with all the ensigns, rights, and prerogatives of Sovereign power. Let us, therefore, in this chapter investigate the Sovereign's right of succession, and inquire into the Royal right from the days of Egbert, the first sole monarch of the kingdom, to our present gracious Sovereign, Queen Victoria.

Explain the Sovereign's Right of Succession.

The grand fundamental maxim upon which the jus coronæ, or right of succession to the Throne of these kingdoms depends, is this:-That the Crown is, by common law and constitutional custom hereditary, and this in a manner peculiar to itself; but that the right of inheritance may, from time to time, be changed or limited by Act of Parliament, under which limitations the Crown still continues hereditary.

The hereditary right which the laws of England acknowledge owes its origin to the founders of our Constitution, and to them only; for it has no relation to, nor does it depend upon, the civil laws of the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, nor upon any other nation. The founders of our English Monarchy might, perhaps, if they had thought proper, have made it an elective monarchy; but they rather chose to establish originally a succession by inheritance, which has been acquiesced in by general consent,

and ripened by degrees into common law, being the very same title that every private man has to his own estate. Lands are not naturally descendible, any more than thrones; but the law has thought proper, for the benefit and peace of the public, to establish hereditary succession in the one as well as the other. An hereditary succession to the Crown is therefore now established in this and most other countries, in order to prevent the periodical bloodshed and misery-which the history of ancient Imperial Rome and the more modern experience of Poland and elsewhere show-are the consequences of elective kingdoms.

It is true, this succession, through fraud or force, or sometimes through necessity, when in hostile times the Crown descended on a minor or the like, has been very frequently suspended, but it has generally at last returned into the old hereditary channel, though sometimes a very considerable period has intervened. And, even in those instances where the succession has been violated, the Crown has ever been looked upon as hereditary in the wearer of it; of which fact the usurpers themselves were so sensible that they, for the most part, endeavoured to establish some feeble show of a title by descent in order to amuse the people, while they gained the possession of the kingdom; and, when possession was once gained, they considered it as the purchase or acquisition of a new estate of inheritance, and transmitted, or endeavoured to transmit it, to their own posterity, by a kind of hereditary right of usurpation.

Give a brief History of the Succession of the Crown from King Egbert to Queen Victoria.

King Egbert, about the year 800, found himself in possession of the throne of the West Saxons, by a long and undisturbed descent from his ancestors of above three hundred years; and from Egbert to the death of Edmund Ironside, a period of above two hundred years, the Crown descended regularly through a succession of fifteen princes without any deviation or interruption, save only that the sons of King Ethelwulf succeeded to each other without regard to the children of the elder branches, according to the rule of succession prescribed by their father, and confirmed by the Witena-gemote, in the heat of the Danish

invasions; and also that King Edred, the uncle of Edwy, mounted the throne for about nine years in the right of his nephew, a minor, the times being very troublesome and dangerous. But this was with a view to preserve, and not to destroy the succession, and accordingly Edwy succeeded him.

King Edmund Ironside was obliged by the hostile irruption of the Danes, at first to divide his kingdom with Canute, King of Denmark; and Canute, after his death, seized the whole of it, Edmund's sons being driven into foreign countries. Here the succession was suspended by actual force, and after three reigns, upon the death of Hardikanute, the ancient line was restored in the person of Edward the Confessor.

On his decease without issue, Harold II. usurped the throne, and almost at the same time came the Norman invasion, when William the Conqueror succeeded by force, which transferred the Crown of England into a new family, and all the inherent properties of the Crown were transferred with it. The Crown descended from him to his sons William II., and afterwards to Henry I. Stephen of Blois, grandson of William I., succeeded him; and Henry, the second of that name, the heir of William the Conqueror, and lineally descended from Edmund Ironside, the last of the Saxon race, succeeded. Then followed Richard I., who, dying childless, the right vested in his nephew, Arthur; but John, the youngest son of King Henry, seized the throne, claiming the Crown by hereditary right. Henry III., the son of John, succeeded, and from him to Richard II., a succession of six generations, the Crown descended in the true hereditary line. Upon Richard II.'s resignation of the Crown, he having no children, the right resulted to the issue of his grandfather, Edward III. Henry IV. succeeded by usurpation; then the Crown descended to his son and grandson, Henry V., and Henry VI., in the latter of whose reign the House of York asserted their dormant title, and after imbruing the kingdom in blood and confusion for seven years, the Crown at last was established in the person of Edward IV.

Edward IV. left two sons and a daughter, the eldest of which sons, King Edward V., enjoyed the regal dignity for a very short time. He was deposed by Richard III., his unnatural uncle. The tyrannical reign of Richard III. gave occasion to Henry, Earl of Richmond, to assert a title to the Crown, and after the

battle of Bosworth Field he assumed the regal dignity as Henry VII. Soon after he married the undoubted heiress of the Con

queror, Elizabeth of York. Henry VIII., the issue of this marriage, succeeded to the Crown by clear indisputable hereditary right, and transmitted it to his three children in successive order; but in his reign we at several times find the Parliament busy in regulating the succession to the kingdom. Ultimately, by stat. 35 Henry VIII., c. 1, the Crown was limited to Prince Edward by name (Edward VI.), after that to the Lady Mary, and then to the Lady Elizabeth, and the heirs of their respective bodies.

On the death of Queen Elizabeth, who survived them, and died without issue, the line of Henry VIII. became extinct. It therefore became necessary to recur to the other issue of Henry VII. by Elizabeth of York, his queen, whose eldest daughter Margaret, having married James IV. of Scotland, King James VI. of Scotland and I. of England was indisputably the lineal heir of the Conqueror; and, what is still more remarkable, in his person also centred the right of the Saxon monarchs, which had been suspended from the Conquest till his accession. His unfortunate son Charles I. succeeded; and after dire calamities, that lasted for twenty years, a solemn Parliamentary Convention of the Estates restored the right heir of the Crown in the person of Charles II., son of Charles I.

At the end of the reign of Charles II. the famous Bill of Exclusion was introduced. The purport of this bill was to set aside the King's brother and presumptive heir, the Duke of York, from the succession, on the ground of his being a Papist. The bill passed the House of Commons, but the Lords rejected it; and the King also declared that it would never have his consent. The bill therefore took no effect, and King James II. succeeded to the throne of his ancestors, and might have enjoyed it during the remainder of his life, but for his own misconduct, which, with other concurring circumstances, brought on the Revolution in 1688, and his consequent abdication. The abdication of James II. ended the old line of succession, which, from the Conquest, had lasted above six hundred years, and from the Union of the Heptarchy in King Egbert, almost nine hundred years.

The Lords and Commons in a convention thereupon determined

that there was a vacancy of the Throne, and proceeded to fill up that vacancy in such manner as they judged most proper; and this was done by their Declaration of February 12, 1688, in the following manner:-"That William and Mary, Prince and Princess of Orange, be, and be declared, King and Queen of England, to hold the Crown and the Royal dignity during their lives, and the life of the survivor of them; and that the sole and full exercise of the regal power be only in, and executed by, the said Prince of Orange, in the names of the said Prince and Princess, during their joint lives; and after their deceases the said Crown and Royal dignity to be to the heirs of the body of the said Princess, and for default of such issue to the Princess Anne of Denmark and the heirs of her body, and for default of such issue to the heirs of the body of the said Prince of Orange."

King William, Queen Mary, and Queen Anne did not take the Crown by hereditary right or descent, but by way of donation or by purchase, as the lawyers call it, by which word "purchase" they mean any method of acquiring an estate otherwise than by descent.

The new settlement did not merely consist in excluding King James and the person pretending to be Prince of Wales, and then suffering the Crown to descend in the old hereditary channel(for the usual course of descent was in some instances broken through)—yet the Convention kept it before them, and paid a great, though not exclusive, regard to it.

Towards the end of King William's reign, when all hopes of any surviving issue from any of these princes died with the Duke of Gloucester, the King and Parliament thought it necessary again to exert their power of limiting and appointing the succession, in order to prevent another vacancy to the Throne, which must have ensued upon their deaths, as no farther provision was made at the Revolution than for the issue of Queen Mary, Queen Anne, and King William. The Parliament had previously, by 1 Wm. & Mary, stat. 2, c. 2, enacted that every person who should be reconciled to, or hold communion with, the See of Rome, or profess the Popish religion, or marry a Papist, should be excluded and for ever incapable to inherit, possess, or enjoy the Crown; and