Master of the Rolls, whereupon many commissions were sealed by it, and the government was carried on under its authority.”  That precedent, he reminded the peers, had been followed as recently as the year 1754, when, during an illness of George II., Lord Chancellor Hardwicke affixed the Great Seal to a commission for opening a session of Parliament.  And, finally, he concluded by moving, “That it is expedient and necessary that letters-patent for opening the Parliament should pass under the Great Seal."[119] The motion was carried, and Parliament was opened in accordance with it; and, if it had been necessary, the same expedient would have sufficed to give the requisite assent to the Regency Bill, a necessity which was escaped by the fortunate recovery of the royal patient, which was announced by his medical advisers a day or two before that fixed for the third reading of the bill in the House of Lords.

Though the question was thus left undetermined for the moment, it was revived twenty-two years afterward, when the same sovereign was attacked by a recurrence of the same disease, and the existing ministry, then presided over by Mr. Perceval, brought forward a Regency Bill almost identical with that which on this occasion had been framed by Mr. Pitt; and the Opposition, led by Lord Grey and Sir Samuel Romilly, raised as nearly as possible the same objections to it which were now urged by Fox and his adherents.  The ministerial measure was, however, again supported by considerable majorities; so that the course proposed by Mr. Pitt on this occasion may be said to have received the sanction of two Parliaments assembled and sitting under widely different circumstances; and may, therefore, be taken as having established the rule which will be adopted if such an emergency should, unfortunately, arise hereafter.  And indeed, though the propriety of Pitt’s proposals has, as was natural, been discussed by every historical and political writer who has dealt with the history of that time, there has been a general concurrence of opinion in favor of that statesman’s measure.  Lord John Russell, while giving a document, entitled “Materials for a Pamphlet,” in which he recognizes the handwriting of Lord Loughborough, and which “contains the grounds of the opinion advanced by him, and adopted by Mr. Fox, that, from the moment the two Houses of Parliament declared the King unable to exercise his royal authority, a right to exercise that authority attached to the Prince of Wales,” does not suppress his own opinion of the “erroneousness of this or any other doctrine that attributes to any individual or any constituted authority existing in the state a strict or legal right to claim or to dispose of the royal authority while the King is alive, but incapable of exercising it."[120]