The restrictions of the Prerogative with which Mr. Pitt thought proper to
encumber the transfer of the Royal power to the Prince, formed the second
great point of discussion between the parties, and brought equally
adverse principles into play. Mr. Fox, still maintaining his position on
the side of Royalty, defended it with much more tenable weapons than the
question of Right had enabled him to wield. So founded, indeed, in the
purest principles of Whiggism did he consider his opposition, on this
memorable occasion, to any limitation of the Prerogative in the hands of
a Regent, that he has, in his History of James II., put those principles
deliberately upon record, as a fundamental article in the creed of his
party. The passage to which I allude occurs in his remarks upon the
Exclusion Bill; and as it contains, in a condensed form, the spirit of
what he urged on the same point in 1789, I cannot do better than lay his
own words before the reader. After expressing his opinion that, at the
period of which he writes, the measure of exclusion from the monarchy
altogether would have been preferable to any limitation of its powers, he
proceeds to say:--"The Whigs, who consider the powers of the Crown as a
trust for the people, a doctrine which the Tories themselves, when pushed
in argument, will sometimes admit, naturally think it their duty rather
to change the manager of the trust than impair the subject of it; while
others, who consider them as the right or property of the King, will as
naturally act as they would do in the case of any other property, and
consent to the loss or annihilation of any part of it, for the purpose of
preserving the remainder to him, whom they style the rightful owner."
Further on he adds:--"The Royal Prerogative ought, according to the
Whigs, to be reduced to such powers as are in their exercise beneficial
to the people; and of the benefit of these they will not rashly suffer
the people to be deprived, whether the executive power be in the hands of
an hereditary or of an elective King, of a Regent, or of any other