ced as it was, Parliament could not at
present take a single step." The law, as he put it, declared that the
King must be present, either in person or by a representative. When he
could not attend personally, the legal and constitutional process was to
issue letters-patent under the Great Seal. In the present dilemma,
therefore, he recommended that the two Houses should direct
letters-patent to be issued under the Great Seal, authorizing
commissioners to open Parliament in the name of his Majesty. He "must
use the liberty to say that those who treated this proposal with
ridicule were ignorant of the laws of their country. A fiction it might
be termed, but it was a fiction admirably calculated to preserve the
constitution, and, by adopting its forms, to preserve its substance."
The authority of the Great Seal he explained to be such that, "even if
the Lord Chancellor, by caprice, put it to any commission, it could not
afterward be questioned;" and he adduced a precedent of a very similar
character to the course now proposed, which occurred "at the
commencement of the reign of Henry VI., when, the sovereign being an
infant of nine months old, the Great Seal was placed in his hand, and it
was supposed to be given to him by the Master of the Rolls, whereupon
many commissions were sealed by it, and the government was carried on
under its authority." That precedent, he reminded the peers, had been
followed as recently as the year 1754, when, during an illness of George
II., Lord Chancellor Hardwicke affixed the Great Seal to a commission
for opening a session of Parliament. And, finally, he concluded by
moving, "That it is expedient and necessary that letters-patent for
opening the Parliament should pass under the Great Seal."[119] The
motion was carried, and Parliament was opened in accordance with it;
and, if it had been necessary, the same expedient would have sufficed to
give the requisite assent to the Regency Bill, a necessity which was
escaped by the fortunate recovery of the royal patient, which was
announced by his medical advisers a day or two before that fixed for the
third reading of the bill in the House of Lords.

Though the question was thus left undetermined for the moment, it was
revived twenty-two years afterward, when the same sovereign was attacked
by a recurrence of the same disease, and the existing ministry, then
presided over by Mr. Perceval, brought forward a Regency Bill almost
identical with that wh