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The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria cover

The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria

Chapter 1096: BILL FOR PROVIDING THE SUCCESSION TO THE CROWN.
By Edward Farr
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About This Book

The volume traces British political, parliamentary, and military developments from the accession of George III through the early nineteenth century, chronicling changes of ministry and cabinet, debates over colonial taxation and the American conflict, parliamentary controversies involving figures such as Wilkes and Warren Hastings, questions of Catholic relief and slave-trade abolition, and responses to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, including major naval and continental campaigns, the union with Ireland, and domestic legislation on finance, civil liberties, and parliamentary reform.

BILL FOR PROVIDING THE SUCCESSION TO THE CROWN.

A bill for providing for the contingency of another demise of the crown was brought into the upper house by the lord chancellor on the 3rd of July. Its object was to make provision for the carrying on of the executive government, in such an event, during the possible absence of the heir presumptive from the country. The bill provided that certain great officers of state, namely, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the lord-chancellor, the lord-treasurer, the president of the council, the lord privy seal, the lord high admiral, and the chief-justice of the Queen’s Bench at the time being respectively, should act as lords-justices, to exercise all the powers and authorities of the successor of the crown, as a king would exercise them at present, until his arrival in the kingdom, or until he should otherwise order. The bill also provided that the heir presumptive to the throne might at any time deposit a list—which list was revocable at pleasure—of such persons as he might appoint to act with such justices, and to be considered as part of them; and the persons named in that list were to exercise, in common with the lords already named, the functions of royalty, until the successor to the throne should otherwise determine. By another provision in the bill, however, the powers of the lords-justices were restricted to those only which were necessary to carry on the government of the country. They were not to have the power of dissolving parliament; nor of creating peers; nor of giving the royal assent to any bill altering the succession to the throne; or for changing the established religion of England, Scotland, or Ireland. The bill passed almost unanimously through both houses of parliament, Lord Brougham only urging an objection against the omission of any portion of the royal family in the lists of lords-justices named in the bill. His lordship even made this omission the subject of a protest entered in the journals of the house. His lordship began at this time to display an obstructive disposition towards the government with which he had so long acted. He had proved that his exaltation to the office of lord-chancellor had inflated his vanity, and made him so self-willed and crotchetty as to render co-operation with him either in the government of the country, or in conducting bills through the legislature, next to impossible.