British throne

“ Speaking of this circumstance, the Times said,—'The significance of this event is, that it marks the period when the heir to the British throne is about to take rank among men, and to enter formally upon a career, which every loyal subject of the queen will pray may be a long and a happy one, for his own sake and for the sake of the vast empire which, in the course of nature, he will one day be called to govern. ”

“ The throne of England is profaned by a base-born—the British nation is duped by a vile pretender! If right did prevail, thou wouldst be grovelling at my feet, for ’tis I who am thy sovereign. (Elizabeth retires. Leicester and Talbot follow.) ”

“ India to-day is honoured by another distinguished guest—the most distinguished, indeed save only one, whom the citizens of the British Empire could welcome, namely, the heir to the Empire's Throne—His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. ”

“ The papal throne itself is an antique bronze chair which stands in St Peter’s. Embassies frequently contain a throne for the use of the sovereign in whose territory the building technically stands. No ancient throne chair pertains to the British monarchy; the coronation chair is not, properly speaking, a throne, since it is used only during a portion of the coronation ceremonies. The actual throne of Great Britain is the oaken Gothic chair in the House of Lords occupied by the sovereign at the opening and prorogation of parliament. ”

“ But it has been the peculiar privilege of the kings of England that neither in life nor in death have they been parted from their people. As the Council of the Nation and the Courts of Law have pressed into the Palace of Westminster, and engirdled the very throne itself, so the ashes of the great citizens of England have pressed into the sepulchre of the kings, and surrounded them as with a guard of honour after their death. ”

“ Let them look upon the Prince of Wales, and fight for him, their fellow-soldier, who was now to share their fortune on the field; and who, once in possession of his rights, would not forget those to whose courage he owed the throne. The kingdom of England should be their inheritance, to be divided among them; the wealth of the rebellious cities should be their spoil; they should be rewarded for their devotion with all those titles which their enemies now proudly wore; and, above all, they should enjoy lasting fame and honor throughout the realm. ”

“ And when our kings have the same warrant as they had, whether it be to sit upon the throne of their fathers, or to destroy the house of the preceding sovereign, they will then, and not before, possess the crown of England by a right like theirs, immediately derived from heaven. ”

“ It was, however, a perilous step to take, and the prelates, nobles, and knights gasped and stared at the idea of a boy of ten occupying a throne that was menaced by royal and feudal warriors who had hosts of fighting men at their backs, nearly every English county at their feet, and the King of Scots and the Prince of Wales as their humble servants. ”

“ Before the final collapse of the great King's fortunes, and his death in a dishonoured old age, the ambition of his heir, the proudest hope of both dynasty and nation, had overleapt itself, and the Black Prince had preceded his father to the tomb. The good ship England (so sang a contemporary poet) was left without rudder or helm; and in a kingdom full of faction and discontent the future of the Plantagenet throne depended on a child. ”

“ No one pretends that the English would be less patriotic under a republic; and yet with the strengthening conception of the British Empire, the importance of the Crown as the symbol of imperial unity has been more keenly felt. ”

“ Infatuation! that England should sacrifice to her king so many thousands of her bravest men, and ruin so many thousands of her most industrious, in a vain attempt to destroy the very principles on which her strength and her glory are founded! The weakest prince that ever sat upon a throne, and the most needy and sordid Parliament that ever pandered to distempered power, are thrusting our blindfold nation from the pinnacle of prosperity. ”

“ The restoration of the imperial throne was necessary for the happiness of the French people. It is my sincere desire to render it at the same time subservient to the maintenance of the repose of Europe. Enough of glory has shone by turns on the colours of the various nations. The vicissitudes of fortune have often enough occasioned great reverse, followed by great success; a more brilliant arena is now open to sovereigns, and I am the first to descend into it. ”

“ T is not without some feeling of humiliation and regret that the historian finds England so badly off for a sovereign as to be obliged to borrow one from abroad, and her throne in the seventeenth century, like her stage of the nineteenth, to be indebted for its support to foreign adaptations. ”

“ We Englishmen believe that our crown is held by somewhat different rights from yours of France. At the coronations of our kings, we by our free voices confirm them on their throne. The people of England have a say in the question of a monarch's title; and without that recognition they are not kings of England. To our present sovereign, the nobles of the land offered their homage ere the crown was placed upon his brow; but he, as wise in this as in all else, would receive none till he was proclaimed King, not by a herald's trumpet, but by the tongues of Englishmen. ”

“ And greet with delight, the sixth Edward by name.
But only six years did this King fill the throne,
When called to resign it and lay his crown down.
A worthier we think, has never set
On the throne of Great Britain—at least not as yet.
With pleasure we love to contemplate him now,
With a bright crown of Glory, encircling his brow,
In the region of light, love, peace, and of joy,
Where pleasures eternal can have no alloy.
Sin, sickness, and death, never find entrance there,
For the air is all balm, and the skies ever fair ”

“ Had the late reigns, before the accession of the great William and Mary, to the throne of England, but taken the measures of them, and her present majesty, in depressing vice, and advancing the union and wealth, and encouraging the prowice and bravery of the nation, they might by this time have been capable to have given laws to any monarch on earth ”

“ It tells of the Empire of England over sea, of the passing and the mission of the Celt, of the power born in the West, and in the coming and crowning of the Seventh Edward do we see the beginnings of the reunion of the peoples into the greater force to be—mark them that assemble about the throne, heed ye the symbol of the crowning. For us mummers, we pass like shadows into the night. ”

“ And that work was surely an expansion, an expansion of England. We come once more to our paradox; may it not be that England herself may be expanded by the very cutting short of her dominion? Again, what is England? Do we mean by it simply the dominions of the Crown of England—or rather the dominion of a Crown of whose kingdom the British England is but a part? Or do we mean by it the land of the English folk, wherever they may dwell? ”

“ Magnificent as the pageant has been of the Diamond Jubilee of the Queen of England, what was invisible in it was far greater than what was so brilliantly visible in the royal procession passing through the crowded streets of London. Has there ever been an empire like the British, not excluding the Babylonian, the Persian, the Macedonian, or the Roman empires? Sixty years of one reign is not a mere numerical expression ”

“ The Conqueror's sons had to make concessions to the great lords, because their succession was not secure; they needed a voluntary recognition, the price of which consisted in a relaxation of the harsh laws with which the monarchy had at first fettered every department of life. But when the great nobles had managed, or decided, contests for the throne, Were they likely to feel bound unconditionally to obey the man whom they had raised? ”

“ Side by side with these two elements in the situation was the conviction which has now become fixed throughout the Empire that the Crown is the pivot upon which its unity and future co-operation naturally and properly turns; that the Sovereign is the one possible central figure of allegiance for all its scattered countries and world-wide races; that without the Crown as the symbol of union and the King as the living object of allegiance and personal sentiment the British realms would be a series of separated units. ”

“ But if any man said there was in England a conspiracy to remove the Queen from the throne, we should look upon him as one suffering from acute hallucination. The rulers of England had come down through generation after generation hand-in-hand with the people. ”

“ England will turn with pride to the origin of her power—The reign of her maiden Queen. When the traitor in the council, or the coward in the field, shall betray his country, his honour, his faith, his God, England will fling aside the infamy and take courage from her maiden Queen. When her empire shall gird the globe, with arts, science, commerce, and peace—When the elements themselves shall obey her, and flash from land to land, from sea to sea, her mandates of liberty and law, England will look to her maiden Queen as the starting point of it all. ”

“ That great and victorious empire, on the throne of which George the Third had taken his seat eighteen years before, with brighter hopes than had attended the accession of any of the long line of English sovereigns, had, by the most senseless misgovernment, been brought to the verge of ruin. In America millions of Englishmen were at war with the country from which their blood, their language, their religion, and their institutions were derived, and to which, but a short time before, they had been as strongly attached as the inhabitants of Norfolk and Leicestershire. ”

“ If ever, in the revolutions of ages, a King of England should be brought before the awful tribunal of his nation, his defenders will urge in his favour the 344sacred character of a king, the respect due to the throne, to all crowned heads, to the anointed of the Lord! ”

“ The completion of the Sixtieth year of the Queen’s reign will be the occasion of much retrospect and review, in the course of which the great men who, under the auspices of Her Majesty and her predecessors, have helped to make the British Empire what it is to-day, will naturally be brought to mind. ”

“ To have given a savage continent an image of the British Constitution is, indeed, the greatest glory of the British crown, "a greater than any other nation ever acquired;" and from the consequences of the genius of Henry, Duke of Viseo, did the British American empire arise, an empire which, unless retarded by the illiberal and inhuman spirit of religious fanaticism, will in a few centuries, perhaps, be the glory of the world. ”

“ Henry VII., the founder of the house of Tudor, sat on the throne, and was successful in suppressing the power of the feudal nobility, and in increasing the royal authority. Kings, in the (p. 031) fifteenth century, were the best protectors of the people, and aided them in their struggles against their feudal oppressors. England, however, had made but little advance in commerce or manufactures, and the people were still rude and ignorant. ”

“ As the typical instance of a convenient convention that I am inclined to think is now reacting very badly upon our future, the Crown of the British Empire, considered as the symbolical figurehead of a system of hereditary privilege and rule, serves extremely well. ”

“ Thus England’s peace begins in Henry’s reign, And bloody wars are closed with happy league. Let England live but true within itself, And all the world can never wrong her state. Lewis, thou shalt be bravely shipped to France, For never Frenchman got of English ground The twentieth part that thou hast conquered. Dolphin, thy hand; to Worster we will march. Lords all lay hands to bear your sovereign With obsequies of honor to his grave. If England’s peers and people join in one, Nor Pope, nor France, nor Spain can do them wrong. ”

“ The Tudor dynasty filled the throne of England for a hundred and eighteen years. A hundred and six years of that period belong to the reigns of Henry VII., Henry VIII., and Elizabeth, three rulers of consummate ability. No other reigning house has maintained so high a level of governing faculty during so large a proportion of its existence, and it is not the least part of the wonderful good fortune of England that her destinies should have been directed, at a time of change and growth, by sovereigns of eminent capacity. ”

“ We open a new volume with a new dynasty, and an entirely new order of things. The direct line of the Tudors ceased in Elizabeth, and the collateral one of the Stuarts introduced the kings of Scotland to the English throne, After all the ages of conflict to unite the two kingdoms under one crown, it was effected, but in the reverse direction to that in which all the monarchs of England had striven. They had not mounted the throne of Scotland, but Scotland sent her king to rule over England. With Elizabeth and the Tudors terminated the reign of unresisted absolutism ”

“ But the nation about the throne seemed to the Puritan not less divinely ordered a thing than the throne itself; it was the voice of God, inspiring and directing, which spoke through its history and its laws; it was God that guided to wisdom the hearts of Englishmen in Parliament assembled as He guided to wisdom the hearts of kings. Never was the respect for positive law so profound; never was the reverence for Parliaments so great as at the death of Elizabeth. There was none of the modern longing for a king that reigned without governing ”

“ The rise of the British Empire has immensely increased the significance and importance of these functions, formal and personal, of the Crown. This vast aggregation of sea-divided races, religions, languages, degrees of civilization, laws, and customs, does not rest upon those natural foundations upon which States like England, France, or Germany have been built. Force can annex territory or coerce rebellious minorities; it cannot by itself hold together an empire. ”