in the legislative power was a right merely
human, but that the right of the king to the
obedience of his people was from above; that the
Great Charter was a statute which might be
repealed by those who had made it; but that
the rule which called the princes of the blood
royal to the throne in order of succession
was of celestial origin, and that any act of
parliament inconsistent with that rule was a
nullity."*

* Macaulay.

Three years after Augustus Frezer had obeyed
the traditions of his order, the people and the
Commons took the matter once more in hand.
"The king could do no wrong;" but James the
Second "invaded the fundamental constitution
of the realm;" so James the Second was politely
told that he had abdicated, and the throne was
declared vacant. Gracious majesty was
"irresponsible," and the law of hereditary succession
the divine appointment of God; but the Declaration
of Right asserted the practical sovereignty
of the people in asserting the "superiority of
the laws above the king;" and, later, Blackstone
ruled the English crown to be hereditary, not
de jure divino, but by custom—a custom which
parliament may change from time to time, as
occasion serves. This was the good got out of
the cold but clever Dutchman and his loving
wife. The cannon which boomed over the
Thames, announcing the coronation of William
and Mary, announced also the end of the long
battle between king and people, divine right and
parliamentary power; and, although conducted
with such rigid adherence to legal forms, and
such a keen sense of loyalty to the office, it was
yet the most subversive and revolutionary, as
it was the most stable, of all the political
changes of England.

That cannon gave life to Milton's noble words,
and power and meaning to the Coronation Oath;
it bound the monarch to the service of duty
towards the nation; it recognised the so-called
'graces' of royalty as the inalienable rights of the
people; it shattered the brazen idol which men
had so long been content to worship, and levelled
the temple of royal fetishism to the dust; it
proclaimed the beginning of the reign of law
and reason, and placed in the hands of the
people a weapon of defence which can never be
wrested from them; it did all that the French
revolution did a hundred years later, but in a
statelier, milder, and a more stable manner.

This, then, was the end of Colville's broken-
backed Palinody, of Sir Robert Filmer's
patriarchal theory, and Adam's transmitted
divinity, of Tillotson's sad letter to Lord Russell
in Newgate, lamenting his wrong-headedness in
holding the faith that "resistance to authority
was lawful," of Augustus Frezer's crawling
sycophancy, of the vile despotism of the Star
Chamber, and of all the nonsense which the
British Solomon and his adherents had upheld as
the essence of wisdom and the real meaning and
object of kingcraft. "That mystery, the
prerogative of kings, which is a point so tender as it
will hardly bear mention," as noble Eliot wrote
from the Tower, was now handled gravely, but
firmly, by men determined to set the truth
before themselves, cost what it might; and like
many other superstitions, it was found to
collapse and shrink into comparative nothingness
when examined side by side with human rights
and the majesty of reason.

This principle of interrupted succession
according to popular choice, had been vindicated
before now in the rough and bloody form of a
victorious army—William Rufus, Henry the
First, Stephen, John, Henrys Fourth, Fifth,
and Sixth, Richard the Third, and Henry the
Seventh, were all out, of course; while of
Mary, the daughter of the royal Spaniard, and
Elizabeth of the usurping "Gospel-eyed," both
were doubtful, for both could not be legitimate.
As for the Tudors, they were always tampering
with the succession. Henry the Eighth, when
he got parliament to pass a bill enabling him
to leave the crown as he might desire—to
the exclusion of the Stuarts, whom he hated;
Edward the Sixth, when, unauthorised by
parliament, he assumed the like power, for which
he was much commended by certain eminent
reformers; Elizabeth, when she got a decree
from both Houses enacting that whoso would
deny her right to appoint her successor, with
the consent of the Estates, should suffer death
as a traitor; in all of which acts the
hereditary principle was thrust on one side, and
the iconoclasts of royalty were the kings
themselves.

Part of the divine hedge grew out of the
mixing up of the sacred element with the secular
—the anointing as well as crowning, by which
both here and in other Christian countries, the
king became priest as well as prince. For what
else than consecration to the invisible priesthood
was typified by the holy oil—the
"ampoule" which angels carried to Saint Rémy for
the sacred person of Clovis, and which is still
used in the consecration of the kings of France?
Yet few people know that the holy oil and the
kingly crown had the same meaning
originally, and that the emblem of secular
sovereignty was once as much the emblem of the
priesthood as is now the mitre and the cowl. But
it was so. Crowns were originally sacred only to
the gods. First there was the little band or
bandelet, that fitted tight round the heads of
the ancient gods; then two strings, or fillets;
then leaves, and branches, and flowers; and finally
the conventional crown or circlet, much as we
have it at the present day. But soon the emblem
of the divinities was transferred to men and
victors and statesmen and lawgivers and kings
and heroes of all sorts, even to a well-developed
athlete, were duly crowned, until at last the
proudest of the rulers adopted the rayed or
spiked crown, which was the last form held
peculiar to the gods. This was in those, days of
degeneracy when kings, pretending to be gods,
forgot to be men. With the Jews the original
crown was pointed, like horns—horns being the
emblems of power and prowess with them; and