on the other hand, insisted on his natural and inalienable right, as
their father, to have the entire government of his own offspring, a
right which, as he contended, no royal prerogative could be enabled or
permitted to override. That question was not, however, brought before
Parliament, to which, at that time, the King could, probably, not have
trusted for any leanings in his favor; but he referred it, in an
informal way, to the Lord Chancellor (Lord Cowper) and the Common-law
Judges. They investigated it with great minuteness. A number of
precedents were adduced for the marriage and education of the members of
the royal family being regulated by the sovereign, beginning with Henry
III., who gave his daughter Joan, without her own consent, in marriage
to the King of Scotland, and coming down to the preceding century, at
the commencement of which the Council of James I. committed the Lady
Arabella Stuart and Mr. Seymour to the Tower for contracting a secret
marriage without the King's permission, and at the end of which King
William exercised the right of selecting a tutor for the Duke of
Gloucester, the son of the Princess Anne, without any consultation with
the Princess herself; and finally the judges, with only two dissenting
voices, expressed their conviction that the King was entitled to the
prerogative which he claimed. The case does not, however, seem to have
been regularly argued before them; there is no trace of their having
been assisted in their deliberations by counsel on either side, and
their extra-judicial opinion was clearly destitute of any formal
authority;[25] so that it came before Parliament in some degree as a new
question.

But George III. was not of a disposition to allow such matters to remain
in doubt, and, in compliance with his desire, a bill was, in 1772,
introduced by Lord Rochfort, as Secretary of State, which proposed to
enact that no descendants of the late King, being children or