doubt that the Regents must be appointed by Parliament. The effect,
therefore, of this contrivance, a contrivance intended to preserve
unimpaired the sacred principle of hereditary monarchy, would be that
the monarchy would become really elective.

Another unanswerable reason was urged against Sancroft's plan. There was
in the statute book a law which had been passed soon after the close of
the long and bloody contest between the Houses of York and Lancaster,
and which had been framed for the purpose of averting calamities such as
the alternate victories of those Houses had brought on the nobility and
gentry of the realm. By this law it was provided that no person should,
by adhering to a King in possession, incur the penalties of treason.
When the regicides were brought to trial after the Restoration, some of
them insisted that their case lay within the equity of this act. They
had obeyed, they said, the government which was in possession, and were
therefore not traitors. The Judges admitted that this would have been
a good defence if the prisoners had acted under the authority of an
usurper who, like Henry the Fourth and Richard the Third, bore the regal
title, but declared that such a defence could not avail men who had
indicted, sentenced, and executed one who, in the indictment, in the
sentence, and in the death warrant, was designated as King. It followed,
therefore, that whoever should support a Regent in opposition to James
would run great risk of being hanged, drawn, and quartered, if ever
James should recover supreme power; but that no person could, without
such a violation of law as Jeffreys himself would hardly venture to
commit, be punished for siding with a King who was reigning, though
wrongfully, at Whitehall, against a rightful King who was in exile at
Saint Germains. [648]

It should seem that these arguments admit of no reply; and they were
doubtless urged with force by Danby, who had a wonderful power of
making every subject which he treated clear to the dullest mind, and by
Halifax, who, in fertility of thought and brilliancy of diction, had no
rival among the orators of that age. Yet so numerous and powerful were
the Tories in the Upper House that, notwithstanding the weakness of
their case, the defection of their leader, and the ability of their
opponents, they very nearly carried the day. A hundred Lords divided.
Forty-nine voted for a Regency, fifty-one against it. In the minority
were the na