George the Third came to the throne now
graced by his granddaughter, whose territories
have been acquired by the energy of England;
not one acre of them do we derive from our
German connexions. It was the boast of the
young king, on his accession, that he was the
first of his house who had been "born and bred
a Briton." Educated by his mother, a princess
of Saxe Gotha who had been trained in the
belief, dominant still in one Prussian head, that
a German potentate is the divine master of his
people, he inherited his disposition to take more
than a fair share of power. The great use of
the Whig party in those days, was, that it
distinctly fought, on behalf of the constitutional
rights of the people, the most necessary battle
against all undue stretching of the king's
prerogatives. As Elector of Hanover, King George
was a member of that confederation of princes
forming the Germanic empire. The supremacy
in this empire was not acquired by hereditary
descent; it was elective; and its chosen head
assumed to wear the diadem of the Cæsars, as
successor to the Emperors of Ancient Rome.
It was one of the rights—or wrongs—attached to
that sovereignty, that when a prince of the
empire married a lady of inferior rank, she was
denied her husband's title, and her children also
were denied the right of succession, if she
married without the sanction of an imperial
patent. That provision can be traced to the
military policy of the northern conquerors,
adopted from the barbarous code of their
Teutonic ancestors; and it was submitted to by the
Germanic sovereigns, because the reward of
submission was a voice in the election of the
emperor, and a personal right of elevation to
the same high office. Still, we are assured by
Gibbon that the first Duke of Brunswick and
Lunenberg was rather degraded than adorned
by his newly acquired title of Elector of Hanover,
since it imposed the obligation of feudal service
on his free and patrimonial estates. From the
restraint on the laws of nature resulting from
the exercise of that prerogative of patent-
granting, arose what was called the Morganatic
Marriage—a ceremonial in which a German prince
took to his wife a woman of inferior rank by
giving her his left hand instead of his right: in
sign that she, while accepting that hand, should
not rise to her husband's station, and that the
children of the marriage, though legitimate by
birth, were to be bastardised as to inheritance.
Such a marriage was called morganatic because
the morganatica or dowry paid on the wedding
morning was held to be payment in lieu of all
other property right.

It was one of the feudal wrongs which drove
the Norman barons to revolt in the days of
John, that the heir was forced to marry according
to the choice of his lord. That restriction
was modified by the great charter which the
barons wrung from the dejected tyrant at
Runnymede. A system of bondage originally
perhaps derived from the Hebrews, was,
nevertheless, by a forced construction of that title
to our liberties, retained in the control exercised
by the great lords over the villeins on their
domains. It continued to be one of the distinctive
badges of serfdom in the few despotic
countries where serfdom prevailed. It is still
a badge of slavery in the Southern American
States, that the owner is entitled to exercise
over his slave's marriage the same control that
he has over the pairing of the inferior animals
on his estates.

In the reign of Charles the Second, hereditary
feuds were extinguished in England, and the
last remnant ceased on the abolition of the
Court of Wards. One of the earliest acts of
our first Hanoverian sovereign, George the
First, was to revive, in 1717, the claim of wardship
over his grandchildren, to the exclusion of
their father. Adopting that example, George
the Third introduced into the laws of England a
control to which he was himself subject only
as an electoral prince within his Hanoverian
states; this being, in fact, the only change in
its law that England has ever derived from
Germany. It is a control which, disregarding
natural attachments and remote degrees of
relationship, seeks to prohibit the marriages of
all descendants of royal blood without the
previous express assent of the sovereign, and, in
the event of the solemnisation of such contract,
empowers human prejudice and human passion
to annul a rite, sanctified by divine authority,
and brand with degradation the unborn.
The admonition of ages was disregarded, that
families with progenitors of aristocratic
exclusiveness, "the tenth transmitters of a foolish
face," first dwindling into sterility, have died
out from exhaustion, and that the periodical
infusion of new blood into alliances is an essential
element in the vigorous perpetuation of the
human race.

The project of the Royal Marriage Act was
first announced by a message from the throne to
parliament on the 20th of February, 1772,
demanding some new provision more effectually to
guard the descendants of George the Second,
other than the issue of princesses who have
married or may hereafter marry into foreign
families, from marrying without the approbation
of the crown. In a private letter of the 26th of
that month to Lord North, then prime minister,
the king—whose chief characteristic was
unbending obstinacy—gave the following very
distinct monitory intimation of his purpose: "I
expect every nerve to be strained to carry the
bill. It is not a question of administration, but
personal to myself; and therefore I have a right
to expect a hearty support from every one in
my service, and I shall remember defaulters."
He resolved to follow up this declaration; for,
in a subsequent letter of the 14th of March to
the same minister, he thus expressed himself:
"I wish a list could be prepared of those that
went away, and of those that deserted to the
minority on division. That would be the rule
of my conduct in the drawing-room to-morrow."
The rule of conduct thus avowed was rigidly
observed in hostility through life to Mr. Fox,
who resisted the measure; and we are assured