by vote of Parliament.  All through the reign of William III. there was (in common speech) one king whom man had made, and another king whom God had made.  The king who ruled had no consecrated loyalty to build upon; although he ruled in fact, according to sacred theory there was a king in France who ought to rule.  But it was very hard for the English people, with their plain sense and slow imagination, to keep up a strong sentiment of veneration for a foreign adventurer.  He lived under the protection of a French king; what he did was commonly stupid, and what he left undone was very often wise.  As soon as Queen Anne began to reign there was a change of feeling; the old sacred sentiment began to cohere about her.  There were indeed difficulties which would have baffled most people; but an Englishman whose heart is in a matter is not easily baffled.  Queen Anne had a brother living and a father living, and by every rule of descent, their right was better than hers.  But many people evaded both claims.  They said James II. had “run away,” and so abdicated, though he only ran away because he was in duresse and was frightened, and though he claimed the allegiance of his subjects day by day.  The Pretender, it was said, was not legitimate, though the birth was proved by evidence which any Court of Justice would have accepted.  The English people were “out of” a sacred monarch, and so they tried very hard to make a new one.  Events, however, were too strong for them.  They were ready and eager to take Queen Anne as the stock of a new dynasty; they were ready to ignore the claims of her father and the claims of her brother, but they could not ignore the fact that at the critical period she had no children.  She had once had thirteen, but they all died in her lifetime, and it was necessary either to revert to the Stuarts or to make a new king by Act of Parliament.

According to the Act of Settlement passed by the Whigs, the crown was settled on the descendants of the “Princess Sophia” of Hanover, a younger daughter of a daughter of James I. There were before her James II., his son, the descendants of a daughter of Charles I., and elder children of her own mother.  But the Whigs passed these over because they were Catholics, and selected the Princess Sophia, who, if she was anything, was a Protestant.  Certainly this selection was statesmanlike, but it could not be very popular.  It was quite impossible to say that it was the duty of the English people to obey the House of Hanover upon any principles which do not concede the right of the people to choose their rulers, and which do not degrade monarchy from its solitary pinnacle of majestic reverence, and make it one only among many expedient institutions.  If a king is a useful public functionary who may be changed, and in whose place you may make another, you cannot regard him with mystic awe and wonder; and if you are bound to worship him, of course you cannot change him.  Accordingly, during the whole reigns of George I. and