English throne

“ 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 ”

“ An accomplished sovereign, disciplined in the school of adversity, of brilliant talents, amiable temper, fascinating manners, and singular experiences, had returned to the throne of his ancestors, and had sworn to rule by the laws, to forget old offences, and promote liberty of conscience. No longer should there be a government of soldiers, nor the rule of a man hostile to those pleasures and opinions which had ever been dear to the English people. With the return of the exiled prince, should also return joy, peace, and prosperity. ”

“ Every man who has moral worth, and who respects himself accordingly, must entertain a degree of honest contempt for such company, somewhat akin to that of good old Johnson, in his thread-bare coat, when he wrote his inimitable letter to Chesterfield.
However, their Lordships’ House! There is the Throne; and I defy any one to look at the Throne of England without veneration. It is a gorgeous seat, over which appear the royal arms, while on its right and left are seats for the Prince Consort and the Prince of Wales. ”

“ I think it is helpful to the memory, and useful, because of the great influence of the crown throughout English History, to bring out the personality of every sovereign, so that the names of each dynasty will not be a list of names and nothing more. But in every century we shall find certain great personalities, either on the throne or off it, which should be made as vivid as may be. ”

“ Before concluding, let us add a few words of comment upon the signal loyalty of the English people in the times we live in; for whereas our forefathers were for the most part content to express their loyalty to the throne by the choice of such vague tavern signs as The King’s Head, or The Queen’s Head, we of the nineteenth century are not nearly so half-hearted. ”

“ We find ourselves to-day amid a great hurly-burly of dramatists, poets, prose-writers, among whom we have to pick our way—making a descriptive dash at some few of them—seeing the old pedant [88] of a king growing more slipshod and more shaky, till at last he yields the throne to that unfortunate son of his, Charles I., in whose time we shall find some new singing-birds in the fields of British poesy, and birds of a different strain. ”

“ The king names his ministers, and the law names the king. In popular or constitutional governments far more elaborate precautions are required. It is one of the real merits of the English constitution that it has solved this problem—in a roundabout way perhaps, after its fashion—but with perfect success. The ostensible seat of power is the throne, and down to a time not long distant the demise of the crown suspended all the other powers of the state. ”

“ The only instance you produce, or rather insinuate, to prove the late invectives against the King, Queen, and Royal Family, is drawn from that deduction of the English history, published in several papers by the Craftsman; wherein are shewn the bad consequences to the public, as well as to the prince, from the practices of evil ministers in most reigns, and at several periods, when the throne was filled by wise monarchs as well as by weak. ”

“ UR present Volume opens upon a new and brilliant phase of English History. After a bloodless Revolution, a new dynasty, whose title to power is founded in the choice of the People, succeeds the arbitrary and senseless misgovernment of the House of Stuart. The vigorous attempts of the exiled Royal Family to regain their lost throne are, one after another, crushed out ”

“ Hail to the Crown by Freedom shaped—to gird
An English Sovereign's brow! and to the Throne
Whereon he sits! Whose deep foundations lie
In veneration and the People's love,
Whose steps are equity, whose seat is law. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There lies before Your Royal Highness in prospect the occupation—I trust at a distant date—of a throne which, to me at least, appears the most illustrious in the world, from its history and associations, from its legal basis, from the weight of the cares it brings, from the loyal love of the people, and from the unparalleled opportunities it gives, in so many ways and so many regions, of doing good to the almost countless numbers whom the Almighty has placed beneath the sceptre of England. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.) ”

“ To the people of the Continent it was a sight not every day to be had, to behold the King and Queen of England, and all its collected nobility in their highest grandeur; and foreign princes and princesses and nobility flocked thither from all parts, as they flock now-a-days to the coronation of a Russian emperor, and either were entertained by the proud and prodigal English king, or swelled the crush in the little town of Guisnes. ”

“ No; but when begirt, in the halls of thine ancestors, with the peers of England, the victorious banner of Saint George waving above the throne which thy servant hath rebuilt,—then, when the trumpets are sounding thy rights without the answer of a foe; then, when from shore to shore of fair England the shout of thy people echoes to the vault of heaven,—then will Warwick kneel again to King Henry, and sue for the pardon he hath not ignobly won! ”

“ The moment he was dead, his physicians, priests, and nobles, not knowing what contest for the throne might now take place, or what might happen in it, hastened away, each man for himself and his own property; the mercenary servants of the court began to rob and plunder; the body of the King, in the indecent strife, was rolled from the bed, and lay alone, for hours, upon the ground. O Conqueror, of whom so many great names are proud now, of whom so many great names thought nothing then, it were better to have conquered one true heart, than England! ”

“ The king, the prince, earls, barons, knights, squires, and yeomen were leaving their homes to take part in the great enterprise. All England was ringing with predictions of victory and conquest: and my young heart beat to the music of the hour, as I thought of Philip of Valois listening to the terms of King Edward's defiance, and trembling on his throne at the approach of King Edward's vengeance. ”

“ We have left the race of barons, grown too powerful for both Crown and country, and a divided Royal house which consumed the energies and the intellect of the nation in bloody conflicts for the possession of the throne. ”

“ Not a dynasty that is trembling out its little span of days now, but represents in its shattered tottering throne some great hero, some great heroic movement, that has won the gratitude of the medieval world. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 graceful tip of its nose has, it must be admitted, yet to show. But there are other sides still, and one of them immense—the light we may take as flooding, I mean, the whole question of the solidity of the throne. It is impossible to live long in England without feeling that the monarchy is—below-ground, so to speak, in particular—a rock ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whatever be the cause, the examples of such deficiency in the sons of such great men are prominent and numerous, and none are more melancholy than the one now before us.
The great monarch whose proud ambition it had been to embrace the whole island in his empire, to maintain his possessions in France, and to rule his kingdom by new and superior institutions, was gone, and there appeared on the throne a youth of three-and-twenty, handsome, generous, and agreeable, but destitute of any trait which implied the elements of future greatness. ”

“ Necessity, on the contrary, which produces a thousand advantages whether we will or no, served them for education; and nothing was to be seen among them but an emulation in glory, politeness, and virtue.
With this little court, in such high esteem for merit, the King of England returned two years prior to the period we mention, to ascend a throne which, to all appearances, he was to fill as worthily as the most glorious of his predecessors. The magnificence displayed on thus occasion was renewed at his coronation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For here it is! 'Tis ticking in my brain!
It is the clock which wakes me every morning,
Drives me exhausted by my midnight toil
Back to my narrow table, to my toil,
To be more fit by night-fall for the throne!
The Emperor.
The throne! the throne! Oh, never hope again
That you may reign in France, you—Upstart's son,
Because our nobler blood has made you look
Rather more kingly than your father was.
The Duke. ”

“ 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! ”