d was still confided to the
militia.

As the King had no standing army, and did not even attempt to form one,
it would have been wise in him to avoid any conflict with his people.
But such was his indiscretion that, while he altogether neglected the
means which alone could make him really absolute, he constantly put
forward, in the most offensive form, claims of which none of his
predecessors had ever dreamed. It was at this time that those strange
theories which Filmer afterwards formed into a system and which became
the badge of the most violent class of Tories and high churchmen, first
emerged into notice. It was gravely maintained that the Supreme Being
regarded hereditary monarchy, as opposed to other forms of government,
with peculiar favour; that the rule of succession in order of
primogeniture was a divine institution, anterior to the Christian, and
even to the Mosaic dispensation; that no human power, not even that
of the whole legislature, no length of adverse possession, though it
extended to ten centuries, could deprive a legitimate prince of his
rights, that the authority of such a prince was necessarily always
despotic; that the laws, by which, in England and in other countries,
the prerogative was limited, were to be regarded merely as concessions
which the sovereign had freely made and might at his pleasure resume;
and that any treaty which a king might conclude with his people was
merely a declaration of his present intentions, and not a contract of
which the performance could be demanded. It is evident that this theory,
though intended to strengthen the foundations of government, altogether
unsettles them. Does the divine and immutable law of primogeniture admit
females, or exclude them? On either supposition half the sovereigns of
Europe must be usurpers, reigning in defiance of the law of God, and
liable to be dispossessed by the rightful heirs. The doctrine that
kingly government is peculiarly favoured by Heaven receives no
countenance from the Old Testament; for in the Old Testament we read
that the chosen people were blamed and punished for desiring a king, and
that they were afterwards commanded to withdraw their allegiance
from him. Their whole history, far from countenancing the notion that
succession in order of primogeniture is of divine institution, would
rather seem to indicate that younger brothers are under the especial
protection of heaven. Isaac was not the eldest son of Abraham, nor Ja