And now, in reference to the expedient proposed by the minister, that the two Houses should empower and authorize the Lord Chancellor to affix the Great Seal to the bill, Burke, with great, but for him not unusual, violence, denounced both the proposal and the Chancellor, declaring that such a step would be the setting up of a phantom of sovereignty, a puppet, an idol, an idiot, to which he disclaimed all allegiance.

A more perilous amendment was one proposed to another clause by Mr.Rolle, enacting that if the Regent should marry a Roman Catholic his authority should cease.

Since the Bill of Rights, as we have seen, forbade a sovereign to marry a Roman Catholic without incurring the forfeiture of his crown, it was evidently reasonable that the same restriction should be imposed on every Regent; but it was hard at the moment altogether to dissociate such a clause from the discussions of the preceding year; and Mr.Rolle endeavored to give the clause a more pointed meaning by an amendment to enact that the forfeiture should be incurred by the mere celebration of any marriage ceremony, whether the marriage thus performed were legal and valid or not.

His amendment, however, was unanimously rejected.

The bill was passed without alteration by the House of Commons; the Prince, while protesting in an elaborate and most able letter, drawn up for him by Burke, against the restrictions imposed by the bill, nevertheless consented to sacrifice his own judgment to the general good of the kingdom, and to accept the authority, limited as it was.