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 own 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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