have a suspicious analogy to her father's reiterated assurances that he would make it his "endeavour to preserve this Government, both in Church and State, as it is now by law established;" and again, when, on a solemn repetition of these words, he had uttered an assurance that the repetition was intended "the better to evidence to you that I spoke then not by chance, and consequently, that you may firmly rely upon a promise so solemnly made." 1

Parliament occupied the few remaining days of its existence in denunciations of certain pamphlets, and sermons preached on the 30th of January, the commemoration day of the execution of King Charles I. Of the mischievous influences that might be aroused by recriminating against a commemoration sermon, we shall in a few years find a brilliant example. Nothing more could be made of the pamphlets than that they were found to hint at dangers to the parliamentary settlement of the crown on the queen; but neither from the substance of the pamphlets themselves, nor in a cross-questioning of those who avowed themselves authors or publishers of the culpable pages, could a distinct announcement of where the danger might be found, be extracted.2 There

1 Parl. Hist., iv. 1351-1353.

2 As, for instance, when "the House went into consideration of the paragraphs in the 89 and 90 pages of the said book, which were read as followeth-viz.:

"Whiglove.-I find we have miscarried in our great design: the train would not take. We were very hot upon it just before the Parliament met; all the Whig coffee-houses rung, how necessary it was to break into the Acts of Settlement, and to exclude—'

"Double.-Mum, Whiglove; talk no more on that subject, I beseech you fresh orders are issued out, and since we are not strong enough to make it go, we are now directed to say that never any such thing was intended by our party.'"-Cited from 'Tom Double returned out of

seemed more peril in an articulate story that among the late King's papers there would be found evidence of a plan to throw Queen Anne out of the succession in consequence of dangerous communications that passed between her and her father. By appointment of the House of Lords, an august group of their number examined the King's private repositories for the satisfaction of Parliament, and found nothing to justify the story. The Lords, on this, could only vent their wrath on the distributors of the false story, while they requested her Majesty to order Mr AttorneyGeneral to prosecute, with the utmost severity of the law, the authors or publishers "of the above-mentioned or suchlike scandalous reports."1

The Parliament that had begun in August 1699, sat to finish the business before it as the fourteenth of William III. and the first of Anne. If there was any peril in the strange conditions of the conferring the royal assent on the Abjuration Act, this item of critical legislation received a strengthening in the necessity for a new Act applying it to a new reign. The logic of the Abjuration Act was, that Parliament having settled the succession to the crown, and demanded that all good citizens should loyally accept the Protestant line of succession, they were required to abjure the Jacobite line in this Act, bearing the

the Country; or, the True Picture of a Modern Whig,' &c. Another of the House's critical attacks was 'The History of the last Parliament, begun at Westminster in the Reign of King William, anno 1700,' of which Dr James Drake admitted himself to be the author. Two pamphlets-one recommending that the Electress of Hanover and her son should be invited into the country, and another professing to denounce the Pretender-were among the productions deemed offensive in their double meaning.-Parl. Hist., vi. 18-23.

1 Parl. Hist., vi. 7.

expressive title, "An Act for the further security of his Majesty's person, and for extinguishing the hopes of the pretended Prince of Wales, and all other pretenders, and their abettors.” 1 The immediate apology for the Abjuration Act was Louis XIV.'s acknowledgment of "the Pretender." It had been adjusted that, in failure of any representative of either of the Protestant daughters of King James, the succession should open to "the excellent Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess-Dowager of Hanover, daughter of the most excellent Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of Bohemia, daughter of our late sovereign lord King James the First;""and whereas the French king, in hopes of disturbing the peace and repose of your Majesty and your kingdoms, and creating divisions therein, hath, since the making of the said Act, caused the pretended Prince of Wales to be proclaimed in your Majesty's said kingdom of France by the name, style, and title of James the Third," &c. ; and here it may be inferred that the promoters of the Act must have been conscious of adding sarcasm to defiance, since, if we follow the clause to its logical conclusion, it charges Louis XIV. with seizing the opportunity of his being unlawfully in possession of that part of the heritage of the English crown called France, for doing as he did.

This Parliament came to an end in a speech from the throne on the 25th of May. Parliament, indeed, had by a recent statute of its own, adjusted, subject to the sovereign's right of prorogation, the exact duration of its own life. It had become the constitutional rule that the Parliament died with the sove

113 & 14 Will. III. c. 6.

reign. But the Revolution and the political conditions of the time had shaken the efficiency of the fiction that the sovereign never dies; and with a preamble referring to "great dangers by the invasion of foreigners or by the traitorous conspiracies of wicked and ill-disposed persons," it is provided that the Parliament in existence at the king's death is immediately to assemble, and to exist "for and during the time of six months and no longer." 1

The definition of persons required to take the Abjuration Oath is an attempt, and a successful attempt, to exhaust the gentry and the educated community. It includes all holders of public offices, civil or military, members of the universities, teachers of youth, clergy of all denominations, legal practitioners of all grades: the only considerable body apparently omitted is medical practitioners not having degrees; but as a general remedy of omissions, the oath might be tendered "to any person or persons whatsoever." 2

It was adjusted that the coronation should be performed on the 15th of April; and looking forward to that event, the opportunity may be taken for a brief retrospect of some conditions that give a strong political influence to what, in the ordinary fixed conditions of succession to the crown, is merely an august ceremonial. To count, indeed, that a coronation went for anything more, was an outrage to the absolute doctrine of divine right so influential during the dynasty of the Stewarts. Though Anne acted as queen whenever William by death ceased to be king, yet it is an established fact that the eight successive

17 & 8 Will. III. c. 15.

214 Will. III. & 1 Anne, cc. 6 and 22.

monarchs after the Conquest did no regal act until, in each instance, the coronation sanctioned his admission. as monarch.1 The doctrine that the throne is never vacant, that "the sovereign never dies," was a subtle invention of the canonists for the purpose of conferring on the "divine right" doctrines the conditions and power of an exact science. Genealogy-or the exhaustion of male descendants in the ratio of seniority, then taking female descendants in the same ratio, before working out collaterals in the ratio of their vicinity-was an exact science; and if it was to rule the succession to the throne, then divine right was also an exact science. In the later calm period of uninterrupted hereditary succession the doctrine has met with approval, or at least acquiescence. It is a convenient adjunct to the working of that which really is an exact science-the application of the rule of lineal descent which exhausts the sons or other nearest male descendants according to their seniority, and then does the same by the female.

Queen Anne's accession, however, followed no such abstract rule. Supposing her to have had no brother, King William's short period of sole government as thoroughly broke in upon the hereditary descent of the crown, as if he had not been the nephew of King James and the husband of his daughter. In fact, Queen Anne's reign was part of a revolutionary pro

1 This was not generally known in our own country until, in 1830, John Allen published his learned little book, called 'Inquiry into the Rise and Growth of the Royal Prerogative in England;' but it had been announced half a century earlier by the French archæologists— see 'L'Art de vérifier les dates des faits historiques, des chartes,' &c., iii. 798 et seq. The conclusions on this matter are briefly told in the chapter on "Regnal Years of the Kings of England," in the 'Chronology of History,' by Sir Harris Nicolas.