Fox, on one occasion,
had gone the length of denying that the two Houses had any right to be
regarded as a Parliament while the King, an essential part of
Parliament, was incapacitated. But such an objection could have had no
force, even in the mind of him who raised it, since the proceedings of
the two Convention Parliaments of 1660 and 1689 labored under a similar
defect; and yet their acts had been recognized as valid, and ratified by
subsequent Parliaments. And now, in reference to the expedient proposed
by the minister, that the two Houses should empower and authorize the
Lord Chancellor to affix the Great Seal to the bill, Burke, with great,
but for him not unusual, violence, denounced both the proposal and the
Chancellor, declaring that such a step would be the setting up of a
phantom of sovereignty, a puppet, an idol, an idiot, to which he
disclaimed all allegiance. A more perilous amendment was one proposed to
another clause by Mr. Rolle, enacting that if the Regent should marry a
Roman Catholic his authority should cease. Since the Bill of Rights, as
we have seen, forbade a sovereign to marry a Roman Catholic without
incurring the forfeiture of his crown, it was evidently reasonable that
the same restriction should be imposed on every Regent; but it was hard
at the moment altogether to dissociate such a clause from the
discussions of the preceding year; and Mr.
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