I know not whether you have noticed the following:
"Droit le Roy; or, A Digest of the Rights and Prerogatives of the Imperial Crown of Great Britain. By a Member of the Society of Lincoln's Inn. 'Dieu et Mon Droit.' [Royal Arms, with G. R.] London: printed and sold by W. Griffin, in Fetter Lane, MDCCLXIV."
Lord Mahon (History of England, vol. v. p. 175.) says:
"It was also observed, and condemned as a shallow artifice, that the House of Lords, to counterbalance their condemnation of Wilkes's violent democracy, took similar measures against a book of exactly opposite principles. This was a treatise or collection of precedents lately published under the title of Droit le Roy, to uphold the prerogative of the crown against the rights of the people. The Peers, on the motion of Lord Lyttleton, seconded by the Duke of Grafton, voted this book 'a false, malicious, and traitorous libel, inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution to which we owe the present happy establishment;' they ordered that it should be burned by the hands of the common hangman, and that the author should be taken into custody. The latter part of the sentence, however, no one took any pains to execute. The author was one Timothy Brecknock, a hack scribbler, who, twenty years afterwards, was hanged for being accessary to an atrocious murder in Ireland."
A copy of the book (an octavo of xii. and 95 pages) is in my possession. It was apparently a presentation copy, and formerly belonged to Dr. Disney; at whose sale it was purchased by the late Richard Heber, as his MS. note testifies. Against the political views which this book advocates, I say not one word; as a legal treatise it is simply despicable.
H. Gough.
Lincoln's Inn.
The following extract is at the service of Balliolensis:
"In the seventh year of King James I., Dr. Cowel's Interpreter was censured by the two Houses, as asserting several points to the overthrow and destruction of Parliaments and of the fundamental laws and government of the kingdom. And one of the articles charged upon him to this purpose by the Commons, in their complaint to the Lords, was, as Mr. Petyt says, out of the Journal, this that follows:
"'4thly. The Doctor draws his arguments from the imperial laws of the Roman Emperors, an argument which may be urged with as great reason, and with as great authority, for the reduction of the state and the clergy of England to the polity and laws in the time of those Emperors; as also to make the laws and customs of Rome and Constantinople to be binding and obligatory in the cities of London and York.'
"The issue of which complaint was, that the author, for these his outlandish politics, was taken into custody, and his book condemned to the flames: nor could the dedication of it to his then grace of Canterbury save it."—Atterbury's Rights, Powers, and Privileges of Convocation, p. 7. of Preface.
Wm. Fraser, B.C.L.