There was no doubt that the Regents must be appointed by Parliament.

The effect, therefore, of this contrivance, a contrivance intended to preserve unimpaired the sacred principle of hereditary monarchy, would be that the monarchy would become really elective.
Another unanswerable reason was urged against Sancroft's plan.

There was in the statute book a law which had been passed soon after the close of the long and bloody contest between the Houses of York and Lancaster, and which had been framed for the purpose of averting calamities such as the alternate victories of those Houses had brought on the nobility and gentry of the realm.

By this law it was provided that no person should, by adhering to a King in possession, incur the penalties of treason.
When the regicides were brought to trial after the Restoration, some of them insisted that their case lay within the equity of this act.

They had obeyed, they said, the government which was in possession, and were therefore not traitors.