But King James was a bad king with a good title, and
not an usurper. The princes who succeeded, according to the act of
parliament which settled the crown on the Electress Sophia and on
her descendants, being Protestants, came in as much by a title of
inheritance as King James did. He came in according to the law as it
stood at his accession to the crown; and the princes of the House of
Brunswick came to the inheritance of the crown, not by election, but
by the law as it stood at their several accessions of Protestant
descent and inheritance, as I hope I have shown sufficiently.
The law by which this royal family is specifically destined to the
succession is the act of the 12th and 13th of King William. The
terms of this act bind "us and our heirs, and our posterity, to
them, their heirs, and their posterity", being Protestants, to the end
of time, in the same words as the Declaration of Right had bound us to
the heirs of King William and Queen Mary. It therefore secures both an
hereditary crown and an hereditary allegiance. On what ground,
except the constitutional policy of forming an establishment to secure
that kind of succession which is to preclude a choice of the people
forever, could the legislature have fastidiously rejected the fair and
abundant choice which our country presented to them and searched in
strange lands for a foreign princess from whose womb the line of our
future rulers were to derive their title to govern millions of men
through a series of ages?
The Princess Sophia was named in the act of settlement of the 12th
and 13th of King William for a stock and root of inheritance to our
kings, and not for her merits as a temporary administratrix of a power
which she might not, and in fact did not, herself ever exercise.
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