420

HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

chap.

x.

ICS8.

name was a part of the power. The word King was a wordof conjuration. It was associated in the minds of many Eng-lishmen with the idea of a mysterious character derived fromabove, and in the minds of almost all Englishmen with theidea of legitimate and venerable authority. Surely, if thetitle carried with it such power, those who maintained thatJames ought to bo deprived of all power could not deny thathe ought to be deprived of the title.

And how long was the anomalous government plannedby the genius of Sancroft to last? Every argument whichcould bo urged for setting it up at all might be urged withequal force for retaining it to the end of time. If the boy whohad been carried into France was really born of the Queen,he would hereafter inherit the divine and indefeasible rightto be called King. The same right would very probably betransmitted from Papist to Papist through the whole of theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both the Houses hadunanimously resolved that England should not be governedby a Papist. It might well bo, therefore, that, from ge-neration to generation, Regents would continue to administerthe government in the name of vagrant and mendicant Kings.There was no doubt that the Regents must be appointed byParliament. The effect, therefore, of this contrivance, acontrivance intended to preserve unimpaired the sacred prin-ciple of hereditary monarchy, would be that the monarchywould become really elective.

Another unanswerable reason was urged against Sancroft’splan. There was in the statute book a law which had beenpassed soon after the close of the long and bloody contestbetween the Houses of York and Lancaster, and which hadbeen framed for the purpose of averting calamities such asthe alternate victories of those Houses had brought on thenobility and gentry of the realm. By this law it was providedthat no person should, by adhering to a King in possession,incur the penalties of treason. When the regicides werebrought to trial after the Restoration, some of them insistedthat their case lay within the equity of this act. They hadobeyed, they said, the government which was in possession, and