Note 297 — Chapter XVI · ON THE STATE OF THE CONSTITUTION IN THE REIGNS OF ANNE, GEORGE I., AND GEORGE II.

"The managers appointed by the House of Commons," says an ardent jacobite, "behaved with all the insolence imaginable. In their discourse they boldly asserted, even in her majesty's presence, that, if the right to the crown was hereditary and indefeasible, the prince beyond the seas, meaning the king, and not the queen, had the legal title to it, she having no claim thereto, but what she owed to the people; and that by the revolution principles, on which the constitution was founded and to which the laws of the land agreed, the people might turn out or lay aside their sovereigns as they saw cause. Though, no doubt of it, there was a great deal of truth in these assertions, it is easy to be believed that the queen was not well pleased to hear them maintained, even in her own presence and in so solemn a manner, before such a great concourse of her subjects. For, though princes do cherish these and the like doctrines, whilst they serve as the means to advance themselves to a crown, yet being once possessed thereof, they have as little satisfaction in them as those who succeed by an hereditary unquestionable title." Lockhart Papers, i. 312.

It is probable enough that the last remark has its weight, and that the queen did not wholly like the speeches of some of the managers; and yet nothing can be more certain than that she owed her crown in the first instance, and the preservation of it at that very time, to those insolent doctrines which wounded her royal ear; and that the genuine loyalists would soon have lodged her in the Tower.