Parliament had, indeed, granted Henry VIII.

the still greater power of nominating a series of successors; but the appointment which he consequently made by will was eventually superseded, when, on the failure of his immediate descendants, the representative of his elder sister, whom he had passed over, was seated on the throne, to the exclusion of the descendants of his younger sister, to whom he had given the preference.

In France, the last two kings, Louis XIII.

and XIV., had both, when on their death-beds, assumed the right of making the arrangements for the Regency which would become necessary, the heir to the throne being in each case a minor; but in each instance the arrangements which they had made were disregarded.
However, on the present occasion the minister (who must be taken to have framed the King's speech) and the Parliament agreed in the propriety of conferring the nomination of the Regent on the King himself;[16] and the bill might have passed almost without notice, had it not been for a strange display of the Prime-minister's ill-temper and mismanagement.
Mr.Grenville was at all times uncourtly and dictatorial in his manner, even to the King himself; he was also of a suspicious disposition; and though he was universally believed to have owed his promotion to his present office to the recommendation of Lord Bute,[17] he was extremely jealous of his predecessor.

He professed to believe, and probably did believe, that the King was still greatly under Lord Bute's influence (though, in fact, they had never met since that minister had quitted the Treasury), that Lord Bute was still as closely connected with the Princess of Wales as scandal had formerly reported him to be, and that George III., under the pressure of their combined influence, would be induced to name his mother rather than his wife as the future Regent.
And he was so entirely swayed by this ridiculous and wholly groundless fear, that, when the bill to give effect to the royal recommendation was introduced into the House of Lords, he instigated one of his friends to raise the question who were included in the general term "the royal family," which Lord Halifax, as Secretary of State, answered by saying that he regarded it as meaning "those only who were in order of succession to the throne." Such a definition would have excluded the Queen as effectually as the Princess Dowager; and when Mr.Grenville found the peers reluctant to accept this view (which, indeed, his own Lord Chancellor pronounced untenable), he then sent another of his colleagues to represent to the King that his mother was so unpopular that, even if the Lords should pass the bill in such a form as rendered her eligible for nomination, the Commons would introduce a clause to exclude her by name.