House then resolved itself into a committee; and Danby took the chair.

The discussion was soon interrupted by the reappearance of Hampden with another message. The House resumed, and was informed that the Commons had just voted it inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant nation to be governed by a Popish king. To this resolution, irreconcilable as it obviously was with the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right, the peers gave an immediate and unanimous assent. The principle which was thus affirmed has always, down to our own time, been held sacred by all Protestant statesmen, and has never been considered by any reasonable Roman Catholic as objectionable. If, indeed, our sovereigns were, like the presidents of the United States, mere civil functionaries, it would not be easy to vindicate such a restriction. But the headship of the English Church is annexed to the English crown; and there is no intolerance in saying that a Church ought not to be subjected to a head who regards her as schismatical and heretical.*

After this short interlude the Lords again went into committee. The Tories insisted that their plan should be discussed before the vote of the Commons which declared the throne vacant was considered. This was conceded to them; and the question was put whether a regency, exercising kingly power during the life of James, in his name, would be the best expedient for preserving the laws and liberties of the nation?

The contest was long and animated. The chief speakers in favor of a regency were Rochester and Nottingham. Halifax and Danby led the other side. The primate, strange to say, did not make his appearance, though earnestly importuned by the Tory peers to place himself at their head. His absence drew on him many contumelious censures; nor have even his eulogists been able to find any explanation of it which raises his character.t The plan of regency was his own. He had, a few days before, in a paper written with his own hand, pronounced that plan to be clearly the best that could be adopted. The deliberations of the Lords who supported that plan had been carried on under his roof. His situation made it his clear duty to declare publicly what he thought. Nobody can sus

* Lords' and Commons' Journals, Jan 29, 1688.

+ Clarendon's Diary, Jan. 21, 168§; Burnet, i. 810; Doyly's Life

of Sancroft.

pect him of personal cowardice or of vulgar cupidity. It was probably from a nervous fear of doing wrong that, at this great conjuncture, he did nothing; but he should have known that situated as he was, to do nothing was to do wrong. A man who is too scrupulous to take on himself a grave responsibility at an important crisis ought to be too scrupulous to accept the place of first minister of the Church and first peer of the realm. It is not strange, however, that Sancroft's mind should have been ill at ease; for he could hardly be blind to the obvious truth that the scheme which he had recommended to his friends was utterly inconsistent with all that he and his brethren had been teaching during many years. That the king had a divine and indefeasible right to the regal power, and that the regal power, even when most grossly abused, could not, without sin, be resisted, was the doctrine in which the Anglican Church had long gloried. Did this doctrine then really mean only that the king had a divine and indefeasible right to have his effigy and name cut on a seal which was daily employed in despite of him for the purpose of commissioning his enemies to levy war on him, and of sending his friends to the gallows for obeying him? Did the whole duty of a good subject consist in using the word king? If so, Fairfax at Naseby and Bradshaw in the high court of justice had performed all the duty of good subjects. For Charles had been designated by the generals who commanded against him, and even by the judges who condemned him, as king. Nothing in the conduct of the Long Parliament had been more severely blamed by the Church than the ingenious device of using the name of Charles against himself. Every one of her ministers had been required to sign a declaration condemning as traitorous the fiction by which the authority of the sovereign had been separated from his person.* Yet this traitorous fiction was now considered by the primate and by many of his suffragans as the only basis on which they could, in strict conformity with Christian principles, erect a government.

The distinction which Sancroft had borrowed from the Roundheads of the preceding generation subverted from the foundation that system of politics which the Church and the Universities pretended to have learned from Saint Paul. The Holy Spirit, it had been a thousand times repeated, had commanded the Romans to be subject to Nero. It now appeared

* See the Act of Uniformity.

that the Holy Spirit meant only that the Romans were to cal. Nero Augustus. They were perfectly at liberty to chase him beyond the Euphrates, to leave him a pensioner on the bounty of the Parthians, to withstand him by force if he attempted to return, to punish all who aided him, or corresponded with him, and to transfer the tribunitian power and the consular power, the presidency of the senate and the command of the legions, to Galba or Vespasian.

The analogy which the archbishop imagined that he had discovered between the case of a wrong-headed king and the case of a lunatic king will not bear a moment's examination. It was plain that James was not in that state of mind in which, if he had been a country gentleman or a merchant, any tribunal would have held him incapable of executing a contract or a will. He was of unsound mind only as all bad kings are of unsound mind; as Charles the First had been of unsound mind when he went to seize the five members; as Charles the Second had been of unsound mind when he concluded the treaty of Dover. If this sort of mental unsoundness did not justify subjects in withdrawing their obedience from princes, the plan of a regency was evidently indefensible. If this sort of mental unsoundness did justify subjects in withdrawing their obedience from princes, the doctrine of non-resistance was completely given up; and all that any moderate Whig had ever contended for was fully admitted.

As to the oath of allegiance about which Sancroft and his disciples were so anxious, one thing at least is clear, that whoever might be right, they were wrong. The Whigs held that, in the oath of allegiance, certain conditions were implied, that the king had violated these conditions, and that the oath had therefore lost its force. But, if the Whig doctrine were false, if the oath were still binding, could men of sense really believe that they escaped the guilt of perjury by voting for a regency? Could they affirm that they bore true allegiance to James while they were, in defiance of his protestations made before ali Europe, authorizing another person to receive the royal revenues, to summon and prorogue parliaments, to create dukes and earls, to name bishops and judges, to pardon offenders, to command the forces of the state, and to conclude treaties with foreign powers? Had Pascal been able to find, in all the folios of the Jesuitical casuists, a sophism more contemptible than that which now, as it seemed, sufficed to quiet the con sciences of the fathers of the Anglican Church?

Nothing could be more evident than that the plan of regency uld be defended only on Whig principles. Between the rational supporters of that plan and the majority of the House of Commons there could be no dispute as to the question of right. All that remained was a question of expediency. And would any statesman seriously contend that it was expedient to constitute a government with two heads, and to give to one of those heads regal power without regal dignity, and to the other regal dignity without regal power? It was notorious that such an arrangement, even when made necessary by the infancy or insanity of a prince, had serious disadvantages. That 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 42

VOL. II.

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 defence 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 defence 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. Germains.*

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, 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 ords divided. Forty-nine voted for a regency, fifty-one against it. In the minority were the natural children of Charles, the

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.