Upon the infant luminary gaze.
They find their heaven’s enlarged, and wait from thence,
Some blest, some more than common influence;
But suddenly, alas! the fleeting light
Retiring, leaves their hopes involved in endless night.”
The Duke of Gloucester was the last Protestant heir to the Crown recognized in the Act of Settlement. His death therefore exposed the Royal succession to new perils, revived the hopes of the Jacobites, and created anxiety in the minds of William and his Ministers. The King at the time had left England nearly a month; and as, amidst the gardens of his retreat at Loo, he saw the shortening of the summer days, he had pondered future contingencies, and laid plans for preserving the work which he had wrought. When, in the following February, 1701, he, bearing evident signs of increasing frailty, met Parliament, he told the Houses that the loss just sustained made it necessary there should be a further provision for a Protestant succession; adding, that the happiness of the nation, and the security of religion, seemed to depend so much upon this, that he could not doubt it would meet with general concurrence. The addresses echoed the same sentiment, and in March the Bill of Succession came under Parliamentary debate. It determined that the Princess Sophia, Duchess-Dowager of Hanover, or her heirs, should succeed upon failure of issue to William and Anne; and it laid down the principle that whosoever wore the Crown should commune with the Church of England, as by law established. Other important resolutions, which it does not come within my province to notice, were incorporated in the Bill; and these gave rise to fierce discussions between the two great political parties, who, throughout the whole of this reign, were teasing William out of his life, provoking the phlegmatic Dutchman to exclaim, that “all the difference he knew between the two parties was, that the Tories would cut his throat in the morning, and the Whigs in the afternoon.”[312] The Act of Settlement at length passed, and received the Royal assent.
THE SUCCESSION.
It is curious to observe with respect to this Act, that Sophia, who was made the protectress of the Reformed faith, and who was to supersede the Stuarts on the throne, was neither a zealous Protestant nor a foe to the exiled family. For when asked what was the religion of her blooming daughter, at the time just thirteen years of age, she replied she had none as yet; “we are waiting to know what prince she is to marry, and whenever that point is determined, she will be duly instructed in the religion of her future husband—whether Protestant or Catholic.” And in a communication, which Lord Chancellor Hardwicke called her Jacobite letter, she bewailed the fate of the poor Prince of Wales, who, if restored, she said, might be easily guided in a right direction.[313]
1701.
A limitation of the heirship, within the pale of any particular Protestant community, which may become less and less national as time rolls on, is open to grave objections; but the limitation of descent within Protestant lines of some kind, appears to rest upon a sound basis. The reasons for it are furnished not by the religious, but by the political character of Romanism. No doctrinal or ecclesiastical opinions ought to exclude a legitimate heir, but a Popish claimant is the subject of another and an ambitious power, which associates temporal with spiritual authority, and exercises assumed prerogatives after an elastic fashion, which can contract or expand them with exquisite cunning, as fear darkens, or as hope brightens the prospect of futurity. A Roman Catholic Sovereign is involved in complications intolerable to a Protestant people, with a history full of warning against foreign interference. It was a true instinct which led Lord William Russell, amidst the aberrations of party zeal, to deprecate as a terrible calamity the accession of a Papist; the same instinct prompted the limitation of the Succession Act. Taught by the story of the past, our ancestors guarded against Romish intermeddling, and it is well for the fortunes of this country, that, acting on this maxim, our fathers did not, in a fit of blind generosity, mistaken for justice, open or keep open a door of mischief which, in some perilous hour, it might be impossible to shut.