king on the one hand, or those which were presented to his consort on the other, as infallible criteria of public feeling, the sense of the House of Commons, with respect to her majesty's affairs, was pronounced in a very decided manner, as often as the subject was brought before them. On the 25th of January, lord Archibald Hamilton brought forward the motion of which he had given notice on the first day of the session. It was couched in these words. "That the order in council, dated the 12th Feb., 1820, in which the name of her majesty queen Caroline, consort of this realm, was directed to be omitted in the Liturgy, appears to this House to be a measure illadvised and inexpedient." After stating that matters could not rest in their present situation, and that her majesty could not remain satisfied merely with the allowance of a large income, which the ministers had declared to be all that they meant to do for her, the noble mover, in support of his resolution, argued that the ministers had no power to erase her name from the Liturgy; that it was unfair to imprint this stigma upon her, before she had been convicted or even accused of any offence; that the prayers of the church were accorded to the royal family, not in respect of their private merits or qualifications, but on account of the situation in which they stood; and that nothing could be more unwise, than, by contrasting the merits or demerits of different individuals of the royal blood with each other, to invite an inquiry throughout the nation, whether this or that prince were fit to be prayed for. The voice of the country had protested against the treatment which her majesty had met with; and while ministers persevered in their exclusion of her name from the ritual of the church, confusion and disorder must prevail. His lordship observed, that the order of council authorizing that exclusion was signed among others by Mr. Canning: yet that right hon. gentleman had subsequently, in his place in parliament, made a most ardent declaration of undiminished regard and affection for her majesty. He had protested, that under no circumstances would he be her accuser, and, rather than concur in the proceedings of his colleagues, he had resigned his office. How then could he give his assent to an act, which branded with disgrace the object of his admiration, and operated as a punishment of her, who in his opinion ought not even to be accused? Mr. Ellis having spoken in vindication of Mr. Canning, Mr. F. Robinson replied to lord Archibald Hamilton. After arguing for the legality of what had been done, he contended that ministers, in the situation in which matters had stood, could have followed no other course. Their majesties had been long separated: that separation had been sanctioned by the late king, and in some measure recognised by the legislature. An arrangement suggested by the other party had been, at the date of the order, under the consideration of ministers, by which her majesty was to remain abroad, and was to cease to assume the style and title of queen. If, therefore, with the prospect of such an arrangement being concluded, they had inserted her name in the Liturgy, 1 they would have been guilty of an absurdity, since they would have been binding themselves to designate her always by that royal title, which, according to the negotiation then pending, she was no longer to take. If they had done that, they must have gone a great deal farther, and must have advised the king to place his consort, in all respects, in the same situation as if there had been no imputation against her. This the ministers could not do, knowing as they did, that she laboured under charges of the gravest nature, supported by a formidable array of evidence, and aware that circumstances might arise to force them to commence proceedings against her. He contended also, that the noble mover, with the opinions which he professed, ought to have taken a more decided course, and should have brought forward a motion for the restoration of her majesty's name to the Liturgy, instead of proposing a mere abstract resolution. Without therefore putting a direct negative upon the resolution, he thought it sufficient to meet it by moving an adjournment of the House. Though the words of the motion related only to the impolicy of the exclusion of the Queen's name from the prayers of the church, the debate turned chiefly on its legality, and of course it was managed principally by the lawyers. Mr. Wetherell and sir James Macintosh maintained, that the council had, in the present case, assumed a power which the law did not allow them: the law officers of the crown asserted the contrary. Mr. Wetherell's argument was the most elaborate. Prior to the Reformation, the direction and management of ecclesiastical affairs lay entirely with the court of Rome. This authority was, in the reign of Henry VIII., transferred to the sovereign; and, for a short time, the Crown had the power of regulating the service of the church as it pleased. This power the Crown lost in the subsequent reigns; when the whole ecclesiastical system was altered, and became intermingled and identified with the civil ordinances of the state. A Liturgy was established by act of parlia ment, and varied from time to time by the legislature; and these parliamentary regulations and enactments, with all others made in furtherance of the same object, were of equal validity and effect, as any other statutes of the realm, and incapable of being altered or modified by any exercise of the royal prerogative. The act of Uniformity of 1661 settled and established the Liturgy of the church; and that Liturgy, being annexed to the act of Uniformity, and authenticated under the great seal, was, to all intents and purposes, part and parcel of the act, as much as if it had been written in the parliament-roll, and thence transcribed into the Statute book. Therefore, it was not competent to the king or his council to make an alteration in the Liturgy, except so far as the words of the act of Uniformity gave them the power. The words of the act were these: "Provided always, and be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, that in all those prayers, litanies, and collects, which do in any way relate to the king, queen, or royal progeny, the names be altered and changed from time to time, and fitted to the present occa sion, according to the direction of lawful authority." Now it was singular, if more was intended than to change the name to George or Frederick, to Anne or Caroline, that the framers of the act should not have thought of inserting the word "omit," or something to that effect. The vocabulary of the English language was nearly as full and perfect at that time, as at the present day; and yet how happened it, that sir Matthew Hale, lord Clarendon, and the other learned men who had drawn up the act, with all the copia verborum which the language presented, should not have hit upon a word which would bear the construction of "expunge, or omit, or leave out?" But they had done no such thing. They merely left it "to be altered and changed." At the time of passing this act Charles II. was not tnarried, and a blank was left in one collect for the name of the Queen; leaving it perfectly to be understood, that it was to stand for the insertion of the queen consort's name, when the king should marry; and not only was the blank left for the name, but also for the titles; and, in fact, after the marriage of the king, some copies of the book of Common Prayer had the blank filled up, and the name of her majesty the queen consort inserted. We had one uninterrupted course of precedents from this time down to the reign of Geo. I.; and in this period would any one attempt to say, that it was not the consuetudo regni? We had the proof of the constant practice of three centuries; and a constant custom for three centuries, was fully sufficient to establish a prescriptive right. And who were they who disputed this usage? Who were they who denied this presumptive right? They were those from whom no man would have thought, that the infraction of a long-established usage would have come. Who could have expected from the present anti-radical monarchical administrationthey who in and out of doors were so loud in combating every thing like reform or change, who trembled at the bare idea of the least deviation from any and every long-established custom;-who could have expected that such a violation of the constant practice of three centuries would have come from them? If the name of the Queen might be left out by the order of the privy council, might not the name of the king be also omitted by the same authority? Might not this monarchical administration by the same authority leave out the head of the church-him who would lose the throne, if he married a papist? Would they not be justified in leaving out of the Liturgy, the bishops, the privy council, and the other public authorities, who were there mentioned, as directed by the act? If no one would contend, that the king, the privy council, the bishops, and others, could be omitted;-why was the name of the Queen alone to be at the mercy of a faction? Henrietta, the queen of Charles I., was highly unpopular, and the Commons impeached her: yet they never thought of such an expedient, as the erasure of her name from the Liturgy. Would the ministers attempt to defend themselves by the omission of the name of the consort of George I. That monarch ascended the throne in 1714. For the preceding 18 years the princess of Zell had been a prisoner in Hanover, where she breathed her last, in the same dungeon in which she had so long dragged on a melancholy existence. She was never mentioned in any public document, nor on any public occasion, as the consort of the king; she was never recognised as queen; her name did not appear in any statepaper or address to the throne, and was not even to be found in the index to Tindal's History. This was not all. It was sufficiently established in Coxe's Memoirs of Sir R. Walpole, who was minister at the time, that George I. was actually divorced from his queen; and that what was called by German jurisconsults a left-handed marriage, had been solemnized between that monarch and the duchess of Kendal. This most wretched rag of a precedent, drawn from the case of an absentee a prisoner a person never recognized as queen, and whose conjugal relation with the king, had been dissolved by the decree of a court of judicature-such a precedent could never establish the legality of the conduct of ministers in the present case. The Attorney-general, on the other hand, contended, that the case of the queen of George I. was completely in point. The divorce mentioned by Coxe could not be a divorce actually annulling the marriage between the parties; for in the very same page of that writer's book it was stated, that the queen was gazetted as duchess of Zell, and duchess dowager of Hanover; and therefore, if the law was as imperative as Mr. Wetherell had represented it to be, she would have been entitled upon the accession of Geo. I. to have had her name inserted in the prayers of the church. He argued, that the queen and the royal progeny were placed by the act of Uniformity in the same situation; and that the insertion of the name of the former was not more obligatory on the sovereign, than was that of the latter. When the act passed, a distinct prayer for the king was specified in a schedule annexed to it, but none for the queen or the royal progeny. The words of the statute empowered the Crown to alter and change, and one mode of altering was by adding or omitting. Now, it was only necessary to refer to the form of prayer annexed to the act, to find a blank, which, unless by the power of adding and omitting, could never be supplied. Instances upon instances might be cited, in which, between the passing of the acts of Uniformity and the present day, omissions had taken place. It would be seen by the prayerbook used in the time of Philip and Mary, that a queen, not a queen consort, but a queen regnant, had been in that situation; for during that reign the king was prayed for, and the queen, though queen regnant, was not. The book was to be found in the British Museum: and the form stood "pro rege, et principibus suis." The name of Frederick prince of Wales had been struck out of the form of prayer. In the commencement of the late reign, the same measure had been adopted with respect to the duke of Cumberland. In reply, sir James Macintosh observed, that with regard to the omission of the names of the prince of Wales and the duke of Cumberland, in the year 1728, it was not a little remarkable that, in the year 1731, when Geo. II. and his eldest son were in open hostility, both names were restored. Why was this done? or upon what supposition could it be explained, but that the omission was discovered to have been illegal? As to the omission of the duke of Cumberland's name at the commencement of the late reign, he had never meant to deny, that the words "royal progeny" must be understood with some limita tion, and that it was for the lawful authority to judge how that limitation should apply. The whole progeny of the princess Sophia now consisted of several hundreds, the mention of some of whom might excite a smile in that House; for, in fact, amongst them were two young gentlemen of the name of Buonaparte. But could one instance in the year 1760 justify a proceeding directly contrary to law? The interpretation of the words employed in the act of Uniformity appeared to him plain and obvious, and to involve no legal subtilty whatever. The words were, "that the names of the king, queen, or royal progeny, be altered and changed from time to time." Now, did not the words "from time to time" exclude every notion of delinquency as a cause of such alteration? Was it possible to suppose, that the framers of that act would have been so grossly absurd as to refer to the subject of delinquency in these terms, and to talk of future acts of delinquency as necessarily occurring from time to time? No: what was meant was, the occur rence of events in the ordinary course of nature-of death or .marriage, and the daily casualties of life. Language so cold or neutral would not have been used in allusion to possible cases of delinquency, by men so distinguished for their learning, and wisdom, and piety, as the authors of that measure. It was not even the change of persons which was provided for, but a change of names,' "as fitted to the present occasion." Then, with regard to the words, "according to the direction of lawful authority," there could be no difficulty in pointing out their import. The alterations were hardly to be left to county or subordinate jurisdiction. Had the authority been so delegated, Charles, prince of Wales, Henry, duke of York, and the princess Clementina, might have been publicly prayed for seventy years ago, as, in point of fact, they had been in some parts of the kingdom. The very word "direction" had a peculiar signification: it was distinguished from command: that which was simply directory was not imperative; it related to matters of convenience and arrangement; "the lawful authority," beyond all doubts vesting in the king. Lord Castlereagh spoke near the end of the debate, and some remarks in which he indulged, called up Mr. Brougham. Neither of these gentlemen entered into the argumentative part of the question: but they, no doubt, gratified their respective partisans by the general declamation and political invective which they poured forth. The debate was prolonged till between six and seven in the morning. The result was, that 310 voted for the adjournment, and 209 against it; so that ministers had a majority of 101. |