ange and
clumsy fictions to describe its powers; their flatteries of the imaginary
being, whom they called the sovereign, are more monstrous than all the
harmless abstractions of James I.

They describe an English sovereign as a mysterious being, invested with
absolute perfection, and a fabulous immortality, whose person was
inviolable by its sacredness. A king of England is not subject to death,
since the sovereign is a corporation, expressed by the awful plural the
OUR and the WE. His majesty is always of full age, though in infancy; and
so unlike mortality, the king can do no wrong. Such his ubiquity, that he
acts at the same moment in different places; and such the force of his
testimony, that whatever the sovereign declares to have passed in his
presence, becomes instantly a perpetual record; he serves for his own
witness, by the simple subscription of _Teste me ipso_; and he is so
absolute in power, beyond the laws, that he quashes them by his negative
voice.[A] Such was the origin of the theoretical prerogative of an ideal
sovereign which James I. had formed: it was a mere curious abstraction of
the schools in the spirit of the age, which was perpetually referring to
the mysteries of state and the secrets of empires, and not a principle he
was practising to the detriment of the subject.

[Footnote A: Such are the descriptions of the British sovereign, to be
found in Cowell's curious book, entitled "The Interpreter." The reader may
further trace the modern genius of Blackstone, with an awful reverence,
dignifying the venerable nonsense--and the commentator on Blackstone
sometimes labouring to explain the explanations of his master; so obscure,
so abstract, and so delicate is the phantom which our ancient lawyers
conjured up, and which the moderns cannot lay.]

James I. while he held for his first principle that a sovereign is only
accountable to God for the sins of his government, an harmless and even a
noble principle in a religious prince, at various times acknowledged that
"a king is ordained for procuring the prosperity of his people." In his
speech, 1603, he says,

"If you be rich I cannot be poor; if you be happy I cannot but be
fortunate. My worldly felicity consists in your prosperity. And that I am
a servant is most true, as I am a head and governour of all the people in
my dominions. If we take the people as one body, then as the head is
ordained for the body and not the body for the head, so must a r