times of regency were times of weakness, of trouble, and of disaster, was a truth proved by the whole history of England, of France, and of Scotland, and had almost become a proverb. Yet, in a case of infancy or of insanity, the king was at least passive. He could not actively counterwork the regent. What was now proposed was that England should have two first magistrates, of ripe age and sound mind, waging with each other an irreconcilable war. It was absurd to talk of leaving James merely the kingly name, and depriving him of all the kingly power, for the name was a part of the power. The word king was a word of conjuration. It was associated in the minds of many Englishmen with the idea of a mysterious character derived from above, and in the minds of almost all Englishmen with the idea of legitimate and venerable authority. Surely, if the title.carried with it such power, those who maintained that James ought to be deprived of all power could not deny that he ought to be deprived of the title.

And how long was the anomalous government planned by the genius of Sancroft to last? Every argument which could be urged for setting it up at all might be urged with equal force for retaining it to the end of time. If the boy who had been carried into France was really born of the queen, he would hereafter inherit the divine and indefeasible right to be called king. The same right would very probably be transmitted from papist to papist through the whole of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both the houses had unanimously resolved that England should not be governed by a papist. It might well be, therefore, that, from generation to generation, regents would continue to administer the government in the name of vagrant and mendicant kings. There was no doubt that the regents must be appointed by Parliament. The effect, therefore, of this contrivance, a contrivance intended to preserve unimpaired the sacred principle of hereditary monarchy, would be, that the monarchy would become really elective.

Another unanswerable reason was urged against Sancroft's plan. There was on the statute-book a law which had been passed soon after the close of the long and bloody contest between the houses of York and Lancaster, and which had been framed for the purpose of averting calamities such as the alternate victories of those houses had brought on the nobility and gentry of the realm. By this law it was provided that no person should, by adhering to a king in possession, incur the penalties of treason. When the regicides were brought to trial after the Restoration, some of them insisted that their case lay within the equity of this act. They had obeyed, they said, the government which was in possession, and were therefore not traitors. The judges admitted that this would have been a good defense if the prisoners had acted under the authority of a usurper who, like Henry the Fourth and Richard the Third, bore the regal title, but declared that such a defense could not avail men who had indicted, sentenced, and executed one who, in the indictment, in the sentence, and in the death-warrant, was designated as king. It followed, therefore, that whoever should support a regent in opposition to James would run great risk of being hanged, drawn, and quartered, if ever James should recover supreme power; but that no person could, without such a violation of law as Jeffreys himself would hardly venture to commit, be punished for siding with a king who was reigning, though wrongfully, at Whitehall, against a rightful king who was in exile at St. Germain's.*

It should seem that these arguments admit of no reply; and they were doubtless urged with force by Danby, who had a wonderful power of making every subject which he treated clear to the dullest mind, and by Halifax, who, in fertility of thought and brilliancy of diction, had no rival among the orators of that age. Yet so numerous and powerful were the Tories in the Upper House, that,

* Stat. 2 Hen. 7, c. 1; Lord Coke's Institutes, part iii., chap. i.; Trial of Cook for high treason, in the Collection of State Trials; Burnet, i., 813, and

Swift's note.

notwithstanding the weakness of their case, the defection
of their leader, and the ability of their opponents, they
very nearly carried the day. A hundred lords divided.
Forty-nine voted for a regency, fifty-one against it. In
the minority were the natural children of Charles, the
brothers-in-law of James, the Dukes of Somerset and Or-
mond, the Archbishop of York and eleven bishops. No
prelate voted in the majority except Compton and Tre-
lawney.*

It was near nine in the evening before the House rose.
The following day was the thirtieth of January, the anni-
versary of the death of Charles the First. The great body
of the Anglican clergy had, during many years, thought
it a sacred duty to inculcate on that day the doctrines of
non-resistance and passive obedience. Their old sermons
were now of little use; and many divines were even in
doubt whether they could venture to read the whole Lit-
urgy.
The Lower House had declared that the throne
was vacant. The Upper had not yet expressed any opin-
ion. It was therefore not easy to decide whether the
prayers for the sovereign ought to be used. Every offi-
ciating minister took his own course. In most of the
churches of the capital the petitions for James were omit-
ted; but at Saint Margaret's, Sharp, dean of Norwich,
who had been requested to preach before the Commons,
not only read to their faces the whole service as it stood
in the book, but, before his sermon, implored, in his own
words, a blessing on the king, and, toward the close of his
discourse, declaimed against the Jesuitical doctrine that
princes might lawfully be deposed by their subjects. The
speaker, that very afternoon, complained to the house of
this affront. "You pass a vote one day," he said, "and

*Lords' Journals, Jan. 29, 1683; Clarendon's Diary; Evelyn's Diary; Citters; Eachard's History of the Revolution; Burnet, i., 813; History of the Re-establishment of the Government, 1689. The numbers of Contents and Not Contents are not given in the journals, and are differently reported by different writers. I have followed Clarendon, who took the trouble to make out lists of the majority and minority.

Up to this moment the small body of peers which was under the guidance of Danby had acted in firm union with Halifax and the Whigs. The effect of this union had been that the plan of regency had been rejected, and the doctrine of the original contract affirmed. The proposition that James had ceased to be king had been the rallying point of the two parties which had made up the majority; but from that point their path diverged. The next question to be decided was whether the throne was vacant; and this was a question not merely verbal, but of grave practical importance. If the throne was vacant, the estates of the realm might place William in it; if it was not vacant, he could succeed to it only after his wife, after Anne, and after Anne's posterity.

The man might ab

It was, according to the followers of Danby, an established maxim that our country could not be, even for a moment, without a rightful prince. The man might die, but the magistrate was immortal. dicate, but the magistrate was irremovable. If, these politicians said, we once admit that the throne is vacant, we admit that it is elective. The sovereign whom we may place on it will be a sovereign, not after the English, but after the Polish fashion. Even if we choose the very person who would reign by right of birth, still that person will reign, not by right of birth, but in virtue of our choice, and will take as a gift what ought to be regarded as an inheritance. That salutary reverence with which the blood royal and the order of primogeniture have hitherto been regarded will be greatly diminished. Still more serious will the evil be if we not only fill the throne by election, but fill it with a prince who has doubtless the qualities of a great and good ruler, and who has wrought a wonderful deliverance for us, but who is not first nor even second in the order of succession. If we once say that merit, however eminent, shall be a title to the crown, we disturb the very foundations of our polity, and furnish a precedent of which every ambitious warrior or statesman who may have rendered any great service to the public