Because the right to the Throne is hereditary, is it therefore indefeasible?"

What is implied in the words " The King's Majesty, his Heirs and Successors ? "

How may the right to the Throne be defeated?

What is the signification of the phrase "the King never dies ?" State the four points in which consists the constitutional doctrine of this hereditary right to the Throne?

Have these principles been invariably regarded in the course of English History?

HISTORY OF THE SUCCESSION OF THE BRITISH MONARCHS.

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. How his ancestors acquired their title, whether by force, by fraud, by contract, or by election, it matters not much to inquire; and is indeed a point of such high antiquity, as must render all inquiries at best but plausible guesses. His right must be supposed indisputably good, because we know no better. The other kingdoms of the heptarchy he acquired, some by conquest, but most by a voluntary submission. And it is an established maxim in civil polity, and the law of nations, that when one country is united to another in such a manner, as that one keeps its government and states and the other loses them, the latter entirely assimilates with or is melted down in the former, and must adopt its laws and customs. And, in pursuance of this maxim, there hath ever been, since the union of the heptarchy in king Egbert, a general acquiescence under the hereditary monarch of the West Saxons, through all the united kingdoms.

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 Ethelwolf succeeded to each other in the kingdom, without regard to the children of the elder branches, according to the rule of succession prescribed by their father, and confirmed by the wittenagemote, 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 a new family introduced upon the throne: in whom however this new acquired throne continued hereditary, for three reigns; when, upon the death of Hardiknute, the ancient Saxon line was restored in the person of Edward the Confessor.

He was not indeed the true heir to the crown, being the younger brother of king Edmund Ironside, who had a son Edward, surnamed (from his exile) the Outlaw, still living. But this son was then in Hungary: and, the English having just then shaken off the Danish yoke, it was necessary that somebody on the spot should mount the throne; and the Confessor was the next of the royal line then in England. On his decease without issue, Harold II. usurped the throne; and almost at the same instant came on the Norman invasion: the right to the crown being all the time in Edgar, surnamed Atheling, which signifies in the Saxon language illustrious or of royal blood, who was the son of Edward the Outlaw, and grandson of Edmund Ironside; or, as Matthew Paris well expresses the sense of our old constitution, "Edmundus autem latusferreum, rex naturalis de stirpe regum, genuit Edwardum: et Edwardus genuit Edgurum, cui de jure debebatur regnum Anglorum."

William the Norman claimed the crown by virtue of a pretended grant from king Edward the Confessor: a grant which, if real, was in itself utterly invalid; because it was made, as Harold well observed in his reply to William's demand, "absque generali senatus et populi conventu et edicto;" which also very plainly implies, that it then was generally understood, that the king, with consent of the general council, might dispose of the crown, and change the line of succession. William's title, however, was altogether as good as Harold's, he being a mere private subject, and an utter stranger to the royal blood. Edgar Atheling's undoubted right was overwhelmed by the violence of the times; though frequently asserted by the English nobility after the conquest, till such time as he died without issue: but all their attempts proved unsuccessful. and only

served the more firmly to establish the crown in the family which had newly acquired it.

The conquest then by William of Normandy was, like that of Canute before, a forcible transfer of the crown of England into a new family; but, the crown being so transferred, all the inherent properties of the crown were with it transferred also. For, the victory obtained at Hastings, not being a victory over the nation collectively, but only Over the person of Harold, the only right that the Conqueror could pretend to acquire thereby, was the right to possess the crown of England, not to alter the nature of the government. And therefore, as the English laws still remained in force, he must necessarily take the crown subject to those laws, and with all its inherent properties, the first and principal of which was its descendibility. Here then we must drop our race of Saxon kings, at least for a while, and derive our descents from William the Conqueror, as from a new stock, who acquired by right of war (such as it is, yet still the dernier ressort of kings) a strong and undisputed title to the inheritable crown of England.

Accordingly it descended from him to his sons William II. and Henry I. Robert, it must be owned, his eldest son, was kept out of possession by the arts and violence of his brethren; who perhaps might proceed upon a notion, which prevailed for some time in the law of descents, though never adopted as the rule of public succession, that when the eldest son was already provided for, as Robert was constituted duke of Normandy by his father's will, in such a case the next brother was entitled to enjoy the rest of their father's inheritance. But, as he died without issue, Henry at last had a good title to the throne, whatever he might have had at first.

Stephen of Blois, who succeeded him, was indeed the grandson of the conqueror by Adelicia his daughter, and claimed the throne by a feeble kind of hereditary right; not as being the nearest of the male line, but as the nearest male of the blood royal, excepting his elder brother Theobald, who was earl of Blois, and therefore seems to have waved, as he certainly never insisted on, so troublesome and precarious a claim. The real right was in the empress Matilda or Maud the daughter of Henry I.; the rule of succession being, where women are admitted at all, that the daughter of a son shall be preferred to the son of a

daughter. So that Stephen was little better than a mere usurper; and therefore he rather chose to rely on a title by election, while the empress Maud did not fail to assert her hereditary right by the sword; which dispute was attended with various success, and ended at last in the compromise made at Wallingford, that Stephen should keep the crown, but that Henry the son of Maud should succeed him; as he afterwards accordingly did.

Henry, the second of that name, was, next after his mother Matilda, the undoubted heir of William the conqueror; but he had also another connection in blood, which endeared him still farther to the English. He was lineally descended from Edmund Ironside, the last of the Saxon race of hereditary kings. For Edward the outlaw, the son of Edmund Ironside, had, besides Edgar Atheling, who died without issue, a daughter Margaret, who was married to Malcolm king of Scotland; and in her the Saxon hereditary right resided. By Malcolm she had several children, and among the rest Matilda the wife of Henry I. who by him had the empress Maud the mother of Henry II. Upon which account, the Saxon line is in our histories frequently said to have been restored in his person: though in reality that right subsisted in the sons of Malcolm by queen Margaret; king Henry's best title being as heir to the conqueror.

From Henry II. the crown descended to his eldest son Richard I., who dying childless, the right vested in his nephew Arthur the son of Geoffrey his next brother; but John, the youngest son of king Henry, seized the throne; claiming, as appears from his charters, the crown by hereditary right: that is to say, that he was next of kin to the deceased king, being his surviving brother: whereas Arthur was removed one degree farther, being his brother's son, though by right of representation he stood in the place of his father Geoffrey. And however flimsy this title, and those of William Rufus and Stephen of Blois, may appear at this distance to us, after the law of descents hath been now settled for so many centuries, they were sufficient to puzzle the understandings of our brave, but unlettered ancestors. Nor indeed can we wonder at the number of partizans who espoused the pretensions of king John in particular; since, even in the reign of his father king Henry II. it was a point undetermined, whether, even in