Throne of England

“ 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. ”

“ 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.) ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If it is fair to estimate the importance of a reign by the contrast which may be drawn between the two that precede and follow it, the reign of Henry VII should be regarded as one of the most important, and in some respects the most important reign in English History. But to argue thus would really be a mistake; really much of the importance that does attach to it is not its own, but arises from the general character of the age in which it fell, the criftical, transitional age, which would have been very much what it was whatever sort of king was on the throne of England. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I am descending the throne; I confirm all the benefits of my fathers, while releasing you from your oaths to the Monarchy."
Say if that end would not have surpassed all that is most wonderful in that dynasty! Say if ever a magnificent enough temple could have been raised to its memory! Compare that end with that which the decrepit sons of Henry IV. would make, stubbornly pinning themselves to a throne swamped by democracy, trying to preserve their power with the aid of measures of police, measures of violence, methods of corruption, and dragging on for a few short moments a degraded existence! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The crown of England was never transmitted from father to son with greater tranquillity than it passed from the family of Tudor to that of Stuart. During the whole reign of Elizabeth, the eyes of men had been employed in search of her successor; and when old age made the prospect of her death more immediate, there appeared none but the king of Scots who could advance any just claim or pretension to the throne. ”

“ England has received her kings and her nobles from Normandy, Anjou, the Provence, Scotland, Holland, Hanover, often seeing a foreigner ascend her throne; yet the sturdy Anglo-Saxon character held its own, spite of the new element infused into its blood: change the ministries, change the dynasties often as they will, John Bull is obstinate as ever, and himself changes not; no philosophy or religion makes him less material. ”

“ ACCESSION OF GEORGE III.
Few monarchs ever ascended a throne under more auspicious circumstances than George III. The sources of national wealth and prosperity were daily becoming developed, and the British arms were everywhere victorious. So extensive were their conquests, indeed, that it may be said, the sun rose and set, at this date, within the limits of the British dominions. ”

“ All these then order themselves about the throne, whereupon the Nineteenth Century, now on the front stage and before the veil, beckons, and there shall enter behind the veil & led by the Twentieth Century, the figure of King Edward VII. robed for the crowning. He ascends the steps of the throne. The Twentieth Century then beckons before the throne and there enter the men of her meinie, to wit, youths from Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and among them shall be an Irish Guardsman. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Here it was that he meant to be buried, for just because his claim to the throne was not a very good one, he was doubly anxious to link himself on by many different ways to the kings of the past. Everywhere in his chapel, round his tomb, on the roof, and on the doorways, you will find his different badges set up, as if to say, "Each one of these badges gave me the right to be king of England." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 term was not used in England even for such things as the will by which Henry VIII. regulated the succession to the throne, which would have been a pragmatic sanction in a country of the Roman law. The term and the thing signified by it have become obsolete owing to the spread of constitutional government in modern Europe. ”

“ The throne of the King of England, the opulence of her bishops, and the enormous estates of her nobles were perhaps dependent upon the issue of this conflict. The demolition of all exclusive privileges, and the establishment of perfect equality of rights among all classes of men [Pg 748] in France, must have shaken the throne, the aristocracy, and the hierarchy of England, with earthquake power. The government of England was mainly in the hands of the king, the bishops, and the lords. Their all was at stake. In a temptation so sore, frail human nature must not be too severely censured. ”

“ In the early portion of his life, the throne was occupied by "the greatest of the Plantagenets;" in his middle life, by one of the weakest; and the latter portion witnessed that change of dynasty which resulted in the Wars of the Roses, sweeping off vast numbers of the Norman lords, and leaving England more Saxon than it had been since the Conquest. In the century preceding his birth the feudal barons had been struggling with John and Henry III. against oppressive monarchial prerogative; had wrested from John the Magna Charta ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 ”

“ During the reign of Geo-ge III., indeed, England presented from the throne the example of those virtues that form the great and binding link of the social chain. To this may be in part ascribed our happiness in having withstood the storm which visited the rest of Europe with all the horrors of invasion or anarchy. “The wicked are overthrown, and are not ”

“ For more than 800 years the coronations of English monarchs have regularly taken place in Westminster Abbey. Duke William of Normandy claimed the throne as lawful successor of Edward the Confessor, and upon the Confessor's gravestone the burly Norman stood to receive the crown of England. ”

“ Every generation takes about thirty-six years; every reign is, one with the other, about twenty. Thirty kings of England have swayed the sceptre from William the Conqueror to George I., the years of whose reigns added together amount to six hundred and forty-eight years; which, being divided equally among the thirty kings, give to every one a reign of twenty-one years and a half very near. Sixty-three kings of France have sat upon the throne ”