descendants should succeed. This advice was taken, much to the surprise of William, who found the tories, now in the ascendant, endeavouring to curtail the royal prerogative, and by every one of their restrictions casting a decided censure upon him. The public, likewise, was so much puzzled by this conduct, that they suspected that the motion of Harley was intended to defeat the Brunswick succession altogether. But the terms on which William and Mary had been admitted to the throne were the work of the whigs, and the tories could not let slip this opportunity of showing how negligent they had been of the rights of the nation.
Accordingly, after great discussions carried on for about three months, the following resolutions were agreed to and embodied in the bill:—"That whoever should hereafter come to the possession of this crown shall join in communion with the church of England as by law established; that in case the crown and dignity of this realm shall hereafter come to any person not being a native of this kingdom of England, this nation be not obliged to engage in any war for the defence of any dominions or territories which do not belong to the crown of England without the consent of parliament; that no person who shall hereafter come to the possession of the crown shall go out of the dominions of England, Scotland, or Ireland without consent of parliament; that from and after the time that further limitations by this act shall take effect, all matters and things relating to the well-governing of this kingdom, which are properly cognisable in the privy council by the laws and customs of the realm, shall be transacted there, and all resolutions taken thereupon shall be signed by such of the privy council as shall advise and consent to the same; that after the limitations shall take effect, no person born out of the kingdom of England, Scotland, or Ireland, or the dominions thereunto belonging, although he be naturalised and made a denizen, except such as are born of English parents, shall be capable to be of the privy council, or a member of either house of parliament, or to enjoy any office or place of trust, either civil or military, or to have any grant of lands, tenements, or hereditaments from the crown to himself, or to any other in trust for him; that no person who has an office or place of profit under the king, or receives a pension from the crown, shall be capable of serving as a member of the house of commons; that after the limitation shall take effect, judges' commissions shall be made quamdiu se bene gesseriat, and their salaries ascertained and established, but, upon the address of both houses of parliament, it may be lawful to remove them; that no pardon under the great seal of England be pleadable to an impeachment by the commons in parliament." Having settled these preliminaries, the bill provided that the princess Sophia, duchess dowager of Hanover, be declared the next in succession to the crown of England in the protestant line after his majesty and the princess Anne, and the heirs of their bodies respectively, and that the further limitation of the crown be to the said princess Sophia and the heirs of her body, being protestants.
When this extraordinary bill was sent up to the lords it was not expected to pass there without much opposition and cutting down. There was, in fact, an evident reluctance there as well as in the commons to enter on the question. Many lords absented themselves, and others, as the marquis of Normanby, the earls of Huntingdon and Plymouth, and the lords Guildford and Jeffreys, opposed it. Burnet attempted to move some amendments; but some lords crying out "No amendments! no amendments!" none were further attempted, and the bill was sent down to the commons as it went up.
Had such a sweeping bill as this passed the houses some years ago, William would have refused to ratify it, as he did so long the triennial bill. Certainly it was from beginning to end the most trenchant piece of censure on his conduct, both as it regarded leading the nation into foreign wars, and as it concerned his lavish favouritism to Dutchmen, that ever was laid before a king for his signature. William had from the first made use of the lives and the substance of Englishmen to defend his beloved Holland with a most reckless disregard to the purse and the life-blood of this country, yet always under the pretence that it was for the honour and safety of England. He had gone away at his pleasure and spent his summers in Holland; here was a most marked reproof of the practice, and caution against its repetition. The condemnation of his making the partition treaties without the knowledge of his privy council, much less of parliament, was equally severe. His introduction of his Dutch favourites into the privy council and into the house of lords, to the prejudice of Englishmen, had its reproof; and his profuse and extravagant endowment of them with hundreds of thousands of English and Irish acres was shown to have excited the indignant observation of the nation. Most of these restrictions were most essentially conducive to the national good, and have been the greater part of them continued down to our time. Well would it have been if more of them had remained so; if placemen and pensioners had been rigorously excluded from parliament with the exception of the three or four chief ministers. Well, had the people united in abstaining from continental wars, but the succession of the house of Hanover led us deeper than ever in this fatal practice of meddling with foreign feuds, the result of which is an expenditure of three thousand millions on those foreign wars, of which eight hundred millions remain yet as a debt upon us and our posterity; whilst the utter waste of these enormous sums and of oceans of British blood is shown by the whole of Europe, including the very nations which we attempted to serve, lying under the most heartless and hopeless despotisms that the world ever saw. Europe, armed to the teeth, and its people from end to end held down at the points of millions of bayonets, and their minds trodden under the iron heels of freedom-hating despots, is the only result of our foolish and thankless interference.
There were politicians who saw clearly all the mischiefs which have followed even under these restrictions, and would have willingly imposed more. Though the nation, in electing William, and even Mary, out of her strict order of succession, had established de facto the doctrine of a nation choosing its own sovereign, there were many yet who would have had this doctrine clearly defined in this bill in express terms, and have carried it so far that the nation should be authorised to set aside at will an incompetent heir to the throne and substitute a more suitable one, either from the same or another family; that the well-governing of the realm should
