on,
had gone the length of denying that the two Houses had any right to be
regarded as a Parliament while the King, an essential part of
Parliament, was incapacitated. But such an objection could have had no
force, even in the mind of him who raised it, since the proceedings of
the two Convention Parliaments of 1660 and 1689 labored under a similar
defect; and yet their acts had been recognized as valid, and ratified by
subsequent Parliaments. And now, in reference to the expedient proposed
by the minister, that the two Houses should empower and authorize the
Lord Chancellor to affix the Great Seal to the bill, Burke, with great,
but for him not unusual, violence, denounced both the proposal and the
Chancellor, declaring that such a step would be the setting up of a
phantom of sovereignty, a puppet, an idol, an idiot, to which he
disclaimed all allegiance. A more perilous amendment was one proposed to
another clause by Mr. Rolle, enacting that if the Regent should marry a
Roman Catholic his authority should cease. Since the Bill of Rights, as
we have seen, forbade a sovereign to marry a Roman Catholic without
incurring the forfeiture of his crown, it was evidently reasonable that
the same restriction should be imposed on every Regent; but it was hard
at the moment altogether to dissociate such a clause from the
discussions of the preceding year; and Mr. Rolle endeavored to give the
clause a more pointed meaning by an amendment to enact that the
forfeiture should be incurred by the mere celebration of any marriage
ceremony, whether the marriage thus performed were legal and valid or
not. His amendment, however, was unanimously rejected. The bill was
passed without alteration by the House of Commons; the Prince, while
protesting in an elaborate and most able letter, drawn up for him by
Burke, against the restrictions imposed by the bill, nevertheless
consented to sacrifice his own judgment to the general good of the
kingdom, and to accept the authority, limited as it was. And by the
middle of February the bill was sent up to the House of Lords. There
Lord Camden had charge of it, and his position as a former Chancellor
gave irresistible weight to his opinion that the mode proposed to give
the final sanction to the bill was strictly in accordance with the
spirit and practice of the constitution. The point with which he dealt
was the previous one, how Parliament, which was to pass the bill, was to
be opened, for, "circumstan