92 TKANSACTIONS. I9.12 



bit of popular sovereignty, among them the following : Ex- 

 pressing himself in the presence of Lord Chance'lor Thurlow 

 to the effect that he wonld rather retire to Hanover than 

 accept ministers or measures of which he disapproved, the 

 grim lawyer pithily replied : "Your Majesty may go ; nothing 

 is more eas)^ ; but you may not find it so easy to return when 

 your Majesty becomes tired of staying there" (1). 



Although George III, until his reason failed him, zealous- 

 ly sought to bring the independent Kingship out of the study 

 of th&jui^e divino doctrinaire into the practical domain of 

 State affairs, it may be said that it disappeared from our 

 political history when his son and successor, George IV, 

 after much perturbation of soul and many overt struggles 

 against the unswerving march of progress of Britisli freedom, 

 consented to the policy of his Ministers in introducing a Bill 

 for Roman Catholic I£mancipation in 1829 (2). There have? 

 indeed, since then been one or two shadowy and fleeting 

 reappearances of this constitutional phantasm upon the stage 

 of history, but they only serve to remind us of the royal 

 apparition in Hamlet — 



So like the King that was ; 



and prompt us to ask of it — 



Why the sepulchre, 

 Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn'd. 

 Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws 

 To- cast thee up again ? 



Listen to some thought-compelling remarks on the 

 present relative positions of Crown and People by a Cambridge 

 Professor, to whom I have already referred in this paper, and 

 of whom I have come to hold the opinion that as an exponent 

 of legal history he has few, if any, equals in Europe to-day. 

 I speak of Professor Maitland. He says : (3) 



In the course of the eighteenth century it became a parliamentary commonplace 

 that ' all political power is a trust' ; and this is now so common a commonplace that 

 we seldom think over it. But it was useful. Applied to the Kingly power it gently 

 relaxed that royal chord in our polity which had been racked to the snapping point by 



(1) See May's Eng. Const. Hist. cap. i. 64. 



(2) Gladstone : Gleanings, i, 38, 78. 



(3) Introduction to Gierke's Political Theories of the Middle Age, p. xxxvi. 



