any limitations whatever on the power of the Regent; and then the question whether the Prince was to derive his right to the Regency from the authority of Parliament, or from his natural position and inalienable preceding right as his father’s heir, became one of practical importance.  If the Parliament had the right to confer authority, it had clearly the right to limit the authority it conferred.  If the Prince had an indefeasible right to the Regency, independently of the will of Parliament, then Parliament could have no pretence to limit or restrain the exercise of an authority which in no degree flowed from itself.  Fox, indeed, took another objection to the imposing of limitations to the authority to be intrusted to the Regent, contending that this would be to create a power unknown to the constitution—­a person in the situation of King without regal power.  But, not to mention precedents drawn from the reigns of Edward III., Richard II., and Henry VI., in the twenty-fourth year of the very last reign, George II., on the death of his son, the father of the present King, had enjoined the Parliament to provide for the government, in the case of his own death, while the heir was still a minor, recommending to them the appointment of the Princess Dowager of Wales as Regent, “with such powers and limitations as might appear expedient.”  And, in conformity with his desire, the Parliament had appointed the Princess Regent, with a Council of Regency to assist her; and had enacted that “several portions of the regal power” should be withheld from the Regent, if she could not obtain the consent of the Council thus appointed.[118]

This part of the case was so plain, that when, after the different resolutions proposed by Pitt had been adopted in both Houses, Fox insisted that, instead of proceeding by a bill to create a Regency, and to appoint the Prince of Wales Regent, the only course which could be adopted with propriety would be to present an address to the Prince, to entreat him to assume the government, he failed to induce the House to agree with him; and finally, as if he were determined to find a battle-field in every clause, he made a vigorous resistance to the expedient by which Pitt proposed that the formal royal assent which was necessary to make the bill law should be given.  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