in person or by representation. For, as the crown has the sole right of convening the parliament, so also it is a branch of the royal prerogative, that he may prorogue the parliament for a time, or put a final period to its existence. If nothing had a right to prorogue or dissolve a parliament but itself, it might happen to become perpetual. It is, therefore, extremely necessary that the crown should be empowered to regulate the duration of these assemblies, under the limitations which the English constitution has prescribed: so that, on the one hand, they may frequently and regularly come together for the despatch of business, and redress of grievances; and may not, on the other, even with the consent of the crown, be continued to an inconvenient or unconstitutional length.

2. A parliament may be dissolved by the demise of the crown. This dissolution formerly happened immediately upon the death of the reigning sovereign; for he being considered in law as the head of the parliament, that failing, the whole body was held to be extinct. But calling a new parliament immediately on the inauguration of the successor being found inconvenient, and dangers being apprehended from having no parliament in being in case of a disputed succession, it is provided by several statutes that the parliament in being shall continue for six months after the death of any king or queen, unless sooner prorogued or dissolved by the

successor.

3. Lastly, a parliament may be dissolved or expire by length of time. For if either the legislative body were perpetual; or might last for the life of the prince who convened them, as formerly; and were so to be supplied, by occasionally filling the vacancies with new representatives; in these cases, if it were once corrupted, the evil would be past all remedy: but when different bodies succeed each other, if the people see cause to disapprove of the present, they may rectify its faults in the next. As our constitution now stands the parliament must expire, or die a natural death, at the end of every seventh year, if not sooner dissolved by the royal prerogative.

CHAPTER III.

OF THE SOVEREIGN AND HIS TITLE.

The crown hereditary-Title defeasible by act of parliament-Historical view of the succession-Revolution of 1688-The Act of Settlement.

THE supreme executive power of these kingdoms is vested by our laws in a single person, the king or queen; for it matters not to which sex the crown descends: but the person entitled to it, whether male or female, is immediately invested with all the ensigns, rights, and prerogatives of sovereign power. This power being thus vested in a single person, it became necessary to the freedom and peace of the state, that a rule should be laid down, to mark out with precision who is that single person, to whom are committed the care and protection of the community; and to whom, in return, the allegiance of every individual is due; and our constitution accordingly has not left us in the dark upon this material occasion.

The grand fundamental maxim upon which the jus corona, or right of succession to the throne of these kingdoms, depends, I take to be this: "that the crown is, by common law and constitutional custom, hereditary; and this in a manner peculiar to itself; but "that the right of inheritance may from time to time be changed or "limited by act of parliament; under which limitations the crown "still continues hereditary."

1. First, it is in general hereditary, or descendible to the next heir, on the death or demise of the last proprietor. Yet while I assert an hereditary, I by no means intend a jure divino title to the throne. Such a title may have subsisted under the theocratic establishments of the children of Israel in Palestine, but it never yet subsisted in any other country. So that the hereditary right which the laws of England acknowledge, owes its origin to the founders of our constitution, and to them only. They might, if they had thought proper, have made it an elective monarchy; but they rather chose to establish originally a succession by inheritance. This has been acquiesced in by general consent; and ripened by degrees into common law the very same title that every private man has to his own estate. Lands are not naturally descendible any more than thrones; but the law has thought proper, for the benefit and peace of the public, to establish hereditary succession in the one as well as the other.

2. But, secondly, as to the particular mode of inheritance, it in

general corresponds with the feudal path of descents, chalked out by the law in succession to landed estates. Like estates, the crown will descend lineally to the issue of the reigning monarch, as it did from King John to Richard II., through a regular pedigree of six lineal generations. As in common descents, the preference of males to females, and the right of primogeniture among the males, are strictly adhered to. Thus Edward V. succeeded to the crown in preference to Richard his younger brother, and Elizabeth his elder sister. Like lands or tenements, the crown, on failure of the male line, descends, to the issue female. Thus Mary I. succeeded to Edward VI., and the line of Margaret Queen of Scots, the daughter of Henry VII., succeeded on failure of the line of Henry VIII., his son. But among the females, the crown descends by right of primogeniture to the eldest daughter only and her issue; and not, as in common inheritances, to all the daughters at once; the evident necessity of a sole succession to the throne having occasioned the royal law of descents to depart from the common law in this respect; and therefore Queen Mary, on the death of her brother, succeeded to the crown alone, and not in partnership with her sister Elizabeth. Again, the doctrine of representation prevails in the descent of the crown, as it does in other inheritances; whereby the lineal descendants of any person deceased stand in the same place as their ancestor, if living, would have done. Thus Richard II. succeeded his grandfather Edward III., in right of his father the Black Prince, to the exclusion of all his uncles, his grandfather's younger children. Lastly, on failure of lineal descendants, the crown goes to the next collateral relations of the late king; provided they are lineally descended from the bloodroyal, that is from the royal stock which originally acquired the crown. Thus Henry I. succeeded to William II., John to Richard I., and James I. to Elizabeth, being all derived from the Conqueror, who was then the only regal stock,

3. The doctrine of hereditary right does by no means imply an indefeasible right to the throne. It is unquestionably in the breast of the supreme legislative authority of this kingdom to defeat this hereditary right; and, by particular limitations and provisions, to exclude the immediate heir, and vest the inheritance in any one else.

4. But, fourthly, however the crown may be limited or transferred, it still retains its descendible quality, and becomes hereditary in the wearer of it. And hence the king is said never to die, in his political capacity; though, in common with other men, he is subject to mortality in his natural: because immediately upon the natural death of Henry, William, or Edward, the sovereign survives in his successor. For the right of the crown vests, eo instanti, upon his heir; either the hæres natus, if the course of descent remains unim

peached, or the hæres factus, if the inheritance be under any particular settlement. So that there can be no interregnum; but the right of sovereignty is fully invested in the successor by the very descent of the crown. And therefore, however acquired, it becomes in him absolutely hereditary, unless by the rules of the limitation it is otherwise ordered and determined.

In these four points consists, as I take it, the constitutional notion of hereditary right to the throne; which will be still further elucidated, and made clear beyond all dispute, from a short historical view of the succession to the crown, the doctrines of our ancient lawyers, and the several acts of parliament that have from time to time been made, to create, to declare, to confirm, to limit, or to bar the hereditary title to the throne.

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; his right must be supposed indisputably good, because we know no better.

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 witena-gemote, 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 son 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 Hardicanute, 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 Edmund Ironside, who had a son Edward, surnamed (from his exile) the Outlaw, still living. But this son was then in Hun

gary: and, the English having just 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 I. usurped the throne; and almost at the same iustant came on the northern invasion: the right to the crown being all the time in Edgar Atheling, the son of Edward the Outlaw, and grandson of Edmund Ironside.

William the Norman claimed the crown by virtue of a pretended grant from 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.

His conquest 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.

Accordingly, it descended from him to his sons William II. and Henry I. Robert, his eldest son, was no doubt kept out of possession by the arts and violence of his brethren: who perhaps might proceed upon a notion that he was already provided for as Duke of Normandy by his father's will. But, as he died without issue, Henry at last had a good title to the throne, whatever he might have 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 waived, as he certainly never insisted on, so troublesome and precarious a claim. The real right was in the Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I.; the rule of succession being that the daughter of a son shall be preferred to the son of a daughter. So that Stephen was little better than a usurper; and therefore, he rather chose to rely on a title by election, while the empress did not fail to assert