as must render all enquiries 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
consent, 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 it's
government and states, and the other loses them; the latter entirely
assimilates or is melted down in the former, and must adopt it's laws
and customs[c]. 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 monarchy of the west Saxons, through
all the united kingdoms.

[Footnote c: Puff. L. of N. and N. b. 8. c. 12. Sec. 6.]

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
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, seised 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 antient 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, sirnamed (from
his exile) the outlaw, still living. But this son was then in Hungary;
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 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, sirnamed Atheling, (which signifies in
the Saxon language the first of the b