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design of re-establishing the Roman Catholic religion. Of these, the dispensing with laws was the most dan gerous, as the exercise of such a power would, of course, at once render the monarch absolutely despotic. Odious as such a power, however employed, must be to a free people, it was rendered still more so in this case, (as De Lolme has observed,) by being made the instrument of the subver sion of the Protestant religion. Of the famous "Declaration" of the Prince of Orange, when he embarked on his glorious enterprise, it is surely unnecessary now to say more, than that it contains these words, "we have nothing before our eyes, in this our undertaking, but the preservation of the Protestant religion." "That the Protestant religion, and the peace, honour, and happiness of these nations may be established upon lasting foundations." This Declaration was, as Dr Phillpotts forcibly expresses it, "the hinge on which the subsequent great transactions were made to turn; "the principles and ends proclaimed in it were referred to as the guiding rule, the chart, and compass, by which the vessel of the state was steered in safety, through its perilous and obstructed course. And immediately on the appearance, and in express approbation of the principles contained in it, more than one public declaration was made, as we have seen, as well by the most distinguished individuals, as by numerous bodies of Englishmen. Passing over the proceedings in the first Parliament, we come to the ceremony of the Coronation Oath-the House of Commons attending on the next day to congratulate their Majesties on the occasion, when the Speaker in his address said, "that what completes our happiness, is the experience we have of your Majesty's continual care to maintain the Protestant religion; so that we can no longer apprehend any danger of being deprived of that ines timable blessing either by secret practices or by open violence." "Here then," says Dr Phillpotts, "we have an express acknowledgment, that the maintenance of the Protestant religion was the first object of the Statesmen of that day; and connecting this acknowledgment with the occasion on which it was made, and the plain allusion to the oath their Majesties had both taken, we cannot doubt that the

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intention of the Legislature which imposed that oath was thereby to bind the energies of the realm, by the strongest ties of religion and conscience, to the perpetual maintenance of the Protestant Church of England."

Mr Lane enters into a concise, but learned statement of the reasons on which he rightly holds, that in the transactions of the Revolution are found ample grounds upon which the legislature of that day may be vindicated from the imputation of having been guided, with respect to the exclusion of the Roman Catholics from power, by a narrow and vindictive policy: an imputation which (to serve a present purpose) has been openly, and also by implication, cast upon it by those who, on this occasion, as Burke said of other worthies, "desire to be thought to understand the principles of the Revolution of 1688 better than those by whom it was brought about," though, on other occasions, they are in the habit of appealing, in support of their own notions, to the provisions of that legislature, as manifesting the highest degree of wisdom, moderation, and foresight. The principle of excluding Roman Catholics from the executive and legislative departments of the state, did not originate in the exigencies of that period, nor were the restrictions upon the influence of their religion designed to have merely a temporary operation. The exclusion of Roman Catholics from the throne, could then, as now, only be justified consistently on one principle, namely, that it is inconsistent with the safety of this Protestant kingdom (to use the language of the Bill of Rights) to be governed by a Popish Prince, or by any King or Queen marrying a Papist. What was the language of the address of the House of Commons, 20th December 1680, to Charles the Second, which Mr Lane justly calls prophetic?" As the issue of our most deliberate thoughts and consultations, that for the Papists to have their hopes continued, that a prince of that religion should succeed to the throne of these kingdoms, was utterly inconsistent with the preservation of the Protestant religion, and the prosperity, peace, and welfare of the Protestant subjects." And here Mr Lane quotes a well-known sentence-and a most emphatic one it isemployed by Lord Shaftesbury in the

debate on the state of the nation-two years before-March 25, 1678, prognosticating the mischief which would ensue from the accession of a Papist to the crown, and which did ensue on the occurrence of that event which he

laboured to prevent. "Popery and slavery, like two sisters, go hand in hand, and sometimes one goes first, sometimes the other; but wheresoever the one enters, the other always following close at hand!" Hume (a philosopher, who, as Mr Lane justly remarks, like Shaftesbury, regarded religion only as a politician,) assigns, as the result of his observation, "the disadvantages of recalling the abdicated family, consist chiefly in their religion, which affords no toleration, or peace, or security, to any other communion."

Though, however, it were admitted, that the Legislature of 1688 only confirmed a principle of government long before introduced, and that, in doing so, they regarded not merely the immediate dangers to be apprehended from the adherents of the expelled family, but the political tendency, in a Protestant state, of the principles of the Roman Catholic religion, still, could nothing farther be adduced, it might perhaps be urged, that there is not anything to shew that the exclusion of Roman Catholics from political power was designed to be esta blished as a permanent principle of the Constitution. But the maintenance of this principle, namely, the exclusion of Roman Catholics from power, was an article of the express contract of 1688, and one of the conditions upon which the Crown was settled in the Protestant, to the exclusion of the Roman Catholic, line of succession. For the terms of this contract we can refer to those legislative enactments alone, by which the settlement of the Crown was made, namely, the Bill of Rights, as incorporated with the act of settling the succession of the Crown, and the several acts passed as circumstances required, in corroboration of the principle then laid down. The Parliament of 1688, by a new Act of Supremacy, formed by retaining as much of the old oath as exclusively affected Roman Catholics, at the same time that they extended to the Throne the principle of exclusion, deliberately confirmed the existing laws, disqualifying from the legislation, and other

places of influence, all who "entertain scruples" of renouncing obedience to the jurisdiction or authority of "a foreign prince, prelate, state, or potentate within this realm." By incorporating, in one and the same resolution, these important provisions, affecting the sovereign and the subject, they stamped them with the same authority. Nothing can be better on this point than the following passage:

"The strong terms used in the establishment of these provisions with reference to the permanency of them, afford no ground to charge the Legislators of 1688 with entertaining the absurd design of attempting to give by words an immutability to their institutions, of which, in the nature of things, those institutions were not susceptible. Their language is to be taken with reference to the remarkable circumstances

under which it was used, and to the subknew that they could not, indeed, by the ject to which it was applied. They well employment of the most solemn and emphatic terms, stay the hand of innovation in after times. But they could, and they did, thereby render the enactments comprised, expressly or by implication, within the articles of that compact, fundamental Laws of the Constitution. Future Legislators might adopt principles opposed to those upon which they acted; future Sovereigns might reign by another tenure than that which they instituted; but it was for them to mark in indelible characters upon the records of the Revolution, a warning which should go down with their institu tions to posterity:-that, should any of those fundamental laws be abolished, the character of the Constitution would be changed, and the compact of the Revolution be at an end!"

In the Act of Settlement, (after confirming the law for excluding Papists from the Throne,) it is enacted that every king and queen who shall succeed to the Crown by virtue thereof," shall have the Coronation Oath administered to him, or her, or them, at their respective coronations, according to the act for establishing the Coronation Oath, and shall make, subscribe, and repeat the declaration (against Popery) in the Bill of Rights." Now, in thus coupling the Coronation Oath with the declaration against Popery, is it possible to doubt that they can intend to refer to the same objects, and were designed to have, in one important particular, the same operation, namely, to render the Crown a barrier against the encroachments of Popery? Mr Lane has some acute remarks, in

a note, respecting the declaration against Popery

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"It may here occur to the reader, that in none of the claims yet made by the Roman Catholics for unlimited concession,' has the exclusion of persons of that communion from the Throne, on account of their religious tenets, been touched upon as a grievance; and that it has been frequently declared by the advocates of those claims in Parliament, that the concession of them would in no degree affect the provisions for securing the Protestant succession. But let us suppose members of Parliament to be exempted from this and other tests against Popery; how long does any rational person suppose that this declaration would remain in force as regards the Sovereign? Would it not then be urged with great force, that when this Royal Test was required to be taken before the two Houses of Parliament, it was contemplated that it would be taken in an assembly of Protestants only, and that it is not to be endured that men should be sub

jected in this liberal age to the pain of having their religion thus stigmatized in their presence? an annoyance to which the Le gislature of 1688 obviously never intended Roman Catholics to be subjected. Before the next accession, doubtless this remaining barrier, the issue of the deliberate thoughts and consultations' of former Parliaments, and established at the Revolu tion as absolutely essential to the peace and security of this Protestant kingdom,' would be removed! To save appearances, some other form, with many holiday and lady terms,' as efficacious as the tests in use before this declaration was framed, would perhaps be substituted; and the principle of a Protestant succession be left (as the Church of England would have been left by the Bill proposed in 1825) to the security of the preamble of the Act of Parliament, in the body of which the existing security would be repealed !"

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Now, we ask, is the Coronation Oath what Lord Liverpool chose to call it, a bugbear? George the Third was not afraid of bugbears. He had too true a British soul for that too clear a conscience. We shall not say that no King of England could grant the Catholic claims without violating his Coronation Oath. It is a case of conscience. If, on consulting his conscience, often and long, and seeking to enlighten it by all discourse of reason with man, and all prayer to God, a King of England should-with the holiest reverence of his Coronation Oath-the most awful oath that ever fell from the lips of the Lord's anointed-grant the Catholic claims to their

fullest extent, we should feel that a fatal blow had been struck at the heart of the well-being of Britainbut we should feel still that the King did right. But this much is clear as day, that neither honest and enlightened king, nor honest and enlightened subject, can think that it is an easy thing to come to that conclusionthat any little difficulties with which the interpretation of the oath may be surrounded, can be all brushed away like old cobwebs, by the reckless and unhallowed hands of temporizing, say at once pettifogging lawyers. King William felt that oath "rounding his temples" with an awful weight; and had he tampered with its almost ineffable sanctity, he would have speedily been dismissed on the heels of the Abdicated, and reduced back again into the Prince of Orange.

Times indeed are different - but times are also the same. The Tree of British Liberty-the oak in whose shadow dethroned monarchs have slept, till their restoration to their thrones, in foreign lands-has flung out more gigantic limbs, and its trunk is more tower-like. But its sap is the same→ and rough and thick as is its venerable rind, and enclosed within the wisdom of those who dropt it of old sacred pale planted around it by the an acorn into the soil, that has sent up that Glory to the sun, it may be perforated and drilled through by foolish foresters seeking, perhaps, as they say, but to revivify-till the plague of poison penetrate to the heart, and in far less time-many, many centuries less-than it took to grow up into the monarch of all the woods, will it decay, while weeping Liberty, ere she leave the land, will inscribe on the stem,

"Magni stat nominis umbra." Let no man, then, who has the heart and soul of an Englishman, the conscience of a Christian, dare to degrade himself by talking of the bigoted prejudices of King George the Third on the subject of his own Coronation Oath. It is easy for paltry persons who break their word, either in letter or spirit, on every occasion that suits their interest or convenience, to turn up their lips and noses at a king's Coronation Oath. The creatures have only for a moment to imagine themselves, by the grace of God, King of

Great Britain, France, and Ireland, with the same character on a throne, that had hitherto dignified an imitation mahogany arm-chair bought cheap at a sale of the household furniture of a retired retailer of brown sugar and black tea, neatly wrapped up in ounce-weight paper pyramids; and such a "cutpurse of the Empire,' would have no more scruple in cheating his country than his customers. But we expect the gentlemen of England to speak in a very different mood of the solemn sanction of a great oath. Dr Phillpotts has, with well-merited and unsparing severity, slashed up a paltry article in the Edinburgh Review on this subject-making use, all along, not unwarrantably, though we wish it had been otherwise, of the name of Mr Jeffrey. One writer at least, name ungiven but not unknown, (Mr Brougham, beyond all doubt, although Dr Phillpotts says he has been assured on good authority of the contrary,) in that Journal, which, though brought on its marrow-bones by the Doctor, still keeps striking ineffectually at its victorious assailant, has written often indeed, before this -of the late king, in a style most revolting and loathsome. Mr Jeffrey, we all know, is not that writer; but we are altogether at a loss to understand how he could ever have brought himself to declare, indignantly too, that he is not responsible for any statements made by others in the Review of which he is editor. He is not, we grant, responsible for every sentence, word, or syllable; and on subjects of mere literature, or even philosophical speculation,-though then too, surely a certain consistency is expected, and a certain responsibility incurred, it would be absurd to take him, or any other editor of a periodical journal, too severely to task for sentiments and opinions, to which he might give his" imprimatur," without stamping upon them the authority of his own approbation. But in a most momentous and mighty question of national politics, involving the character and conscience of his king, and the best, nay all the in terests of his country, how can an eminent and distinguished person like Mr Jeffrey have the folly to declare, that he, the editor, stands aloof from his contributors, and that, in fact, were they to be guilty of high trea

son, and compass the king's death, not only "his withers would be unwrung," but his body undecapi tated? Such declaration is utterly irreconcilable with his manly charac ter-it is absolute infatuation-and covers himself, as editor of his journal, with deep, dark, and ineffaceable disgrace. As the head of the Whig party in Scotland, the only man of great genius among them, he not only is answerable for all such articles, but he ought either to rejoice in them when in print, or suitably to dispose of them in manuscript. He is under no physical necessity-we shall not profane the term moral-of editing either high or petty treason-insolent insults on his dead king's capa city and conscience-inhuman insults on that disorder in his reason with which it pleased God to visit him; though, perhaps, the visitation was one of mercy on his old age. Mr Jeffrey cannot regard such things with absolute indifference, still less can he, like others, chuckle over them in the same savage glee in which they were scribbled by "certainly the First Man in the House." Neither is it credible that he can have overlooked them; and therefore he inust stand the brunt of Dr Phillpotts's fire, which is kept up with great steadiness, quickness, and precision, till the fort in which the editor has taken up a position is reduced to ashes, the governor made prisoner, after narrowly escaping death, and the garrison marched out without the honours of war.

The king, in one of his letters to Mr Pitt, had said that he considered the Coronation Oath as a religious obligation on him to maintain the fundamental maxims of the Constitution, namely, that the Church of England, being the established one, those who hold employments in the State must be members of it, and consequently obliged, not only to take oaths against Popery, but to receive the Holy Communion agreeably to the rites of the Church of England. He adds, that this opinion was not formed on the moment, but had been imbibed by him for forty years. The Reviewer, says Dr Phillpotts, "with the folly, as well as the malice, of a Thersites, is pleased to charge his Majesty, in very plain terms, for expressing these sentiments, with the alternative either of dotage or falsehood. "It is quite im

possible," says he, "that one having all his faculties about him could write this, with the regard to truth which the late King has been so much praised for." Nothing, truly, can be more disgusting than that-a traitorous sneer. But Dr Phillpotts goes on to expose the gross ignorance of the Reviewer, who has said, "To say nothing of the Forty Indemnity Bills, which he had made acts, how came he to pass the Irish acts of 1778 and 1793, which took off infinitely more restrictions from the Catholics than they left behind!" The Reviewer also says, in reference to the late King's having consulted the late Lord Kenyon, as in a case of conscience, respecting the Coronation Oath, "we much question the fairness, if not the constitutionality, of secretly consulting a Chief-Justice and an Attorney-General, instead of a CabinetMinister, upon the policy to be pursued in a great question of state." Now, is it not 66 quite refreshing" to behold here the infliction of the bastinado?

"Mr Jeffrey knows quite well, what is the nature of an Indemnity Act, and he has probably looked into one of those of which he is speaking. He must know, therefore, that there is nothing whatever in such an Act at variance with the principle which his Majesty professed ;-that, so far from it, a Bill of Indemnity proceeds on the very principle of recognising the binding character of the Law which has been violated, though it excuse the violation, in consideration of the special circumstances of the occasion. As far, therefore, as the Indemnity Acts are concerned, it is quite plain, that Mr Jeffrey has made this indecent charge absolutely without a particle of ground on which to sustain it.

"But he speaks further of the Irish Acts of 1778 and 1793, saying that His Majesty could not with truth, if he were in his senses, assert that he had the view he professes of his Coronation Oath, when he assented to them. Did Mr Jeffrey ever look into these Statutes? The first of them, I am bound in charity to believe, that he never so much as saw. For if he had seen it, he could not have had the effrontery to affect to adduce it in derogation of his Majesty's honour. That Act enables Papists, on taking certain oaths, to enjoy the rights of property on the same footing as their Protestant fellow-subjects. What is there in this at variance with his Majesty's principle, of maintaining it as a fundamental maxim of the Constitution, that those who

hold employments in the State must be members of the Established Church?

"There remains the statute of 1793. And

what are the provisions of that Act? Why, that Roman Catholics may hold all of fices civil and military,' except those which are properly, and according to all reasonable construction, employments in the State; from these they are, by that very statute, expressly excluded.

"Let my readers now look back to the insolent charge brought by Mr Jeffrey against this prince, who, beyond all who ever sat before him on the British throne, deserved and acquired the glorious title of a Patriot King, and then let them assign to his calumniator that measure of indignation which their own feelings will dictate.

"But Mr Jeffrey is not satisfied with reviling the late King; he must also give us his notion of what is the duty of all kings, in the very delicate matter of informing their own conscience, in a case in which their own conscience alone is responsible; and the result is, that the sovereign must, in fact, have no conscience at all. He must consider himself as degraded from the rank of a moral and accountable creature, and must submit to be directed in all his sentiments, even of religious duty, by his cabinet for the time being. This is really the sum and substance of Mr Jeffrey's opinion, though he has thought fit to express it in the following very peculiar terms: We much question the fairness, if not the constitutionality, of secretly consulting a chief justice, and an attorneygeneral, instead of a cabinet minister, upon the policy to be pursued in a great question of State.' Mr Jeffrey is no fool; he knows as well as any man, that the point on which the King consulted Lord Kenyon, was nothing like what he has thought proper here to state it. He knows, that his Majesty did not, on this occasion, consult his chief justice on any matter of State at all, but on a previous question, which, whatever may be Mr Jeffrey's sentiments upon it, appeared to George III., and, thank God, appears to George IV., infinitely more im. portant to him than any matter of State whatever. His previous question was, whether, if a measure which had been, in fact, rejected by his cabinet at that particular time, should ever hereafter be proposed to him, he, the King, was not so bound by his Coronation Oath, that he must give his decided negative to it? This, I say, was the point on which Lord Kenyon was consulted; it was a point of conscience; and on it the King, with perfect fairness,' and perfect constitutionality,' might have consulted any person whatsoever, Mr Jeffrey, if he had pleased. If it were not so, what

It was not revived during the next six years.

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