[14] Lord Herbert, in his Life of Henry VIII, says, in allusion to this statute, ‘it was declared also how the Lords in Parliament should be placed,’ p. 218.

[15] Lord Coke clearly distinguishes between precedence in Parliament and Council and general precedence:—Thus far for avoiding contention about precedency in Parliament, Star Chamber, and all other assemblies, Council, &c. Now, they that desire to know the places and precedency of the nobility and subjects of the realm, as well men as women, and of their children (which we have added the rather, for that the contention about precedency between persons of that sex is even fiery, furious, and sometimes fatal), we will refer you to a record of great authority in the reign of Henry VII., entitled.’—4th Inst. 363.

The result, then, appears to be that, in the olden time, the king had unlimited power in matters of honour and precedence, and could confer whatever dignity or pre-eminence he thought fit, upon any of his subjects. That this power has been expressly restrained, quoad the Parliament Chamber and the Council, but exists unfettered in all other respects.

In Parliament (should Prince Albert be created a peer), he would only be entitled to a seat at the bottom of the degree to which he might belong, and he would be expressly prohibited from sitting nearer to the throne. In the Privy Council likewise (if made a Privy Councillor) he would be entitled to no especial place, but everywhere else, at ceremonials of every description, at royal marriages, christenings or funerals, at banquets, processions, and courtly receptions, at installations and investitures, at all religious, civil, or military celebrations, upon all occasions, formal or social, public or private, the Queen may grant to her husband an indisputable precedence and pre-eminence over every other subject in the realm. It will probably be less difficult to obtain a concurrence of opinion as to the extent of the Queen’s constitutional right in granting precedence, than as to the manner in which it would be morally fit, and just to others, that this right should be exercised.

The bill, as originally introduced in the House of Lords, was undoubtedly liable to serious objections; but it is difficult to discover any valid reason why the Prince, Consort to the Queen, should not be invested for his own life with the highest personal dignity which it is in the power of the Crown to confer.

It has been said, that to place Prince Albert before the princes of the blood royal would be an invasion of the birth right of these illustrious persons. This seems to be the result of a confused notion, that a privilege of precedence is identical with a beneficial interest—it may be a man’s birth right to succeed in some contingency to the throne, or to a title or to an estate, and it would be injurious, and therefore unjust, to thrust any interloper between him and his chance, however remote it might be, of such succession. But the same Act which limits the prerogative of the Crown, confers on the Royal Dukes and Great Officers of State the only right of precedence which they possess, and while they can claim no more than was given to them, the Crown is as surely entitled to all that was left to it by that Act. No individual can insist upon an indefeasible right never to be preceded, under any circumstances, by any other individual not having a status defined by this Act, and as the uncles of the Queen, and the hereditary Earl Marshal of England, occupy their respective steps in the ladder of precedence, by the self-same title, there would be no greater violation of birthright in placing an individual without a status before the Duke of Sussex, than there would in placing him before the Duke of Norfolk; if there be any injustice at all, the difference would not be in the principle, but in its local or personal application.

The question, then, is one of expediency, and of propriety, to be determined with reference to its own special circumstances, and according to the analogies which can be brought to bear upon it; there is not only no case exactly in point to refer to, but there is none sufficiently analogous to be taken as a precedent. When Queen Anne came to the throne, Prince George of Denmark was the only prince in England (all his children being dead), and no new Act was necessary to give him precedence, if the Queen had desired it, inasmuch as there was nobody for him to precede. The condition of a Queen Consort is certainly very different from that of a Prince Consort; but upon the broad principle of moral fitness, there seems no reason why the husband of the Queen regnant should not be invested, by virtue of his consortium, with the highest dignity, over other men, just as the wife of the king is participant by virtue of her marriage of divers prerogatives over other women. For the prerogatives with which the law invests her are allotted to her not upon her own account, but upon that of the king; she is considered as a feme sole, and has certain capacities and rights, ‘in order that the king whose continual care and study is for the public, should not be troubled and disquieted on account of his wife’s domestic affairs.’ And the law, which out of respect to the king makes it high treason to compass or imagine the death of his wife, when she becomes a widow ceases to surround her with this protection. It is the king alone, his dignity and his comfort, which the law regards, and the privileges and pre-eminences of his family are conferred or established in such modes and proportions as may be most conducive thereto.

The principle on which precedence is established is that of propinquity to the sovereign, and no propinquity can be so close as that of the husband to the wife, nor does it seem unreasonable that all other subjects should be required to yield the outward forms of honour and respect to the man who is elevated to a station so far above them, whom she is herself bound to ‘love, honour, serve, and obey,’ and who is superior to her in their natural, while still subordinate in their civil and political relations. Many people who are not unwilling to concede a high degree of precedence to the Prince, are very sensitive about the dignity of the heir apparent, and while they are content that he should precede his other children, would on no account allow him to be superior in rank to a Prince of Wales. The difficulty in these cases is to establish a principle; but that difficulty is rendered much greater if, when the principle is once admitted, it is not taken with all its legitimate and necessary consequences. If the Prince is entitled to claim precedency over any of the blood-royal of England, above all others, he may claim it upon every moral ground over his own children, nor is there any civil or political consideration in reference to the heir apparent, requiring that an exception should be made in his behalf. There seem to exist confused notions of something very extraordinary and transcendant in the status of a Prince of Wales, but the difference between him and his younger brother is not very great; and the only positive privilege with which the law certainly and exclusively invests the heir apparent, is that of making it high treason to attempt his life.[16]

[16] It is also treason to kill certain judicial officers when in actual execution of their offices.—Hale, P. C. 13.

The heir apparent is Prince of Wales, and Duke of Cornwall, but he is not necessarily either the one or the other, and except on a certain condition he cannot be the latter.[17] For as the king creates his elder son, or heir apparent, Prince of Wales, he has the power of withholding such creation, and though the eldest son of the king is Duke of Cornwall by inheritance, the dukedom is limited to the first begotten son of the king.[18]

[17] Two months elapsed between the death of Frederick Prince of Wales, and the creation of his son, George III., Prince of Wales.

[18] If, for example, George IV. had died in his youth, his next brother might have been heir apparent, with no other title than that of Bishop of Osnaburgh. Henry VIII. after the death of Prince Arthur, and Charles I. after that of Prince Henry, were Dukes of Cornwall, but by special new creation.—H., P.C. 13.

The Prince of Wales has no right or privilege beyond those of any other subject; he owes the same faith and allegiance to the sovereign; and since 1789 none have ever ventured to assert that he could claim the regency rather than any other subject. His political condition, therefore, is little if at all different from that of the rest of the Royal Family. His personal propinquity to the sovereign must be less than that of his father, and the question is, whether there is anything so peculiar in his status as to supersede those natural relations of father and son, which, according to all human custom, as well as divine injunction, involve the duty of honour from the latter to the former.

The son’s enfranchisement from parental rule when he arrives at years of discretion does not exempt him from the honour he is bound by the law of God and nature to pay to his parents.[19] The son is under a perpetual obligation to honour his father by all outward expressions, and from this obligation no state can absolve him. ‘The honour due to parents’ (says Locke) ‘a monarch on his throne owes his mother, and yet this lessens not his authority, nor subjects him to her government.’[20] The monarchical theory ascribes to the King of England two bodies or capacities, a natural body, and a politic or mystical body, and ‘from this mystical union of the ideal with the real king, the enquirer after constitutional information is led through childish reasoning and unintelligible jargon, to practical consequences founded on expediency.’[21] These practical consequences are the complete subordination of the natural to the politic capacity of the sovereign, and that moral revolution which supersedes the duty of the son to the father by the superior duty of the subject to the sovereign. Nothing less transcendental seems sufficient to cancel the force of this natural obligation, and while father and son are both in the condition of subjects, the filial and parental relations need not be outwardly reversed.

[19] Locke, vol. iv. p. 347.

[20] Ibid. vol. iv. p. 376.

[21] Allen on the Royal Prerogative, p. 29.

If the Queen, therefore, should be advised to grant to her Royal Consort letters patent of precedence immediately next to her own person, and at the same time make him a Privy Councillor, there would be no practical difficulty with regard to his place at the Council Board, notwithstanding the legal exception; there custom has in a great measure superseded law. The occasions are very rare when any of the Royal Dukes are present; and upon all others, the Prince would sit upon the right hand of Her Majesty, and precedence would be conceded to him as a matter of course. The Council Board is no longer what it was in the days of Henry VIII., at which time the King sat there regularly in person. The greater part of the Privy Councillors were in constant attendance upon him.[22] They resided in the Court, and accompanied him wherever he went; much (though far from all) of the most important business of the State was transacted there, and the order of sitting, when the members had to deliver their opinions seriatim, beginning with the lowest, was not unimportant. Councils are now merely formal assemblies, for the expedition of certain orders, which must emanate from the sovereign in person.

[22] Sir H. Nicholas’ Preface to Council Register, vol. i. p. 13.

When any of the Royal Dukes are present, they sit next the Queen on her right hand, the Lord President always next her on her left. And, although the Lord President and the Chancellor (when present) sit on either side of the Queen, all the other officers are indiscriminately placed. It would not probably be deemed advisable to go back to the end of the seventeenth century for a precedent, or it would be found that Prince George of Denmark sat in council, without taking any oaths; not, therefore, as a Privy Councillor, but pro honoris causâ. He always, however, occupied the place of honour, and his attendance was very regular, though there is no record of his having ever taken the oaths; and, at the accession of King William, when all the other Privy Councillors were sworn, it is expressly stated that Prince George was not.[23]

[23] He was first brought into Council by James II. in person, and placed on his right hand, but not sworn.

It is much to be regretted that such heat and irritation have been manifested in the discussion of this question, and certainly between the proceedings in both Houses of Parliament. Prince Albert may well have thought his reception neither cordial nor flattering; but the truth is, that any mortification which either the Prince or the Queen may have felt (and in her it is only natural, whether just or not) is at least as attributable to the really objectionable nature of the propositions which were made, as to the opposition which they encountered.

Nothing herein is more to be deplored than that any mistaken zeal should misrepresent the conduct, or any hasty impression misconstrue the motives, of the Duke of Wellington. His whole life has been a continual manifestation of loyalty and of superiority to petty purposes, and unworthy inducements; but his notions of loyalty are of a nature which mere courtiers are unable to comprehend, because he always considers the honour and the interests of the Crown, in preference to the personal inclination of the sovereign.

Of all men who ever lived he has sought the least the popularity he has so largely acquired—the tide of which, sometimes diverted by transient causes, has always returned with accumulated force. With him it is no ’echo of folly, and shadow of renown,’ but a deep, affecting, almost sublime national feeling, which exults in him as the living representative of national glory. If there be an exception in any place to this universal sentiment, let us hope that the impression will not endure, that the cloud of momentary error will be dispersed, and that justice, ample and not tardy, will be rendered to

‘The noblest man
 That ever lived in the tide of time.’

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

INDEX.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M
N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z