III. A THIRD attribute of the king's majesty is his _perpetuity_. The law ascribes to him, in his political capacity, an absolute immortality. The king never dies. Henry, Edward, or George may die; but the king survives them all. For immediately upon the decease of the reigning prince in his natural capacity, his kingship or imperial dignity, by act of law, without any _interregnum_ or interval, is vested at once in his heir; who is, _eo instanti_, king to all intents and purposes. And so tender is the law of supposing even a possibility of his death, that his natural dissolution is generally called his _demise_; _dimissio regis, vel coronae_: an expression which signifies merely a transfer of property; for, as is observed in Plowden[z], when we say the demise of the crown, we mean only that in consequence of the disunion of the king's body natural from his body politic, the kingdom is transferred or demised to his successor; and so the royal dignity remains perpetual. Thus too, when Edward the fourth, in the tenth year of his reign, was driven from his throne for a few months by the house of Lancaster, this temporary transfer of his dignity was denominated his _demise_; and all process was held to be discontinued, as upon a natural death of the king[a]. [Footnote z: Plowd. 177. 234.] [Footnote a: M. 49 Hen. VI. pl. 1-8.] WE are next to consider those branches of the royal prerogative, which invest this our sovereign lord, thus all-perfect and immortal in his kingly capacity, with a number of authorities and powers; in the exertion whereof consists the executive part of government. This is wisely placed in a single hand by the British constitution, for the sake of unanimity, strength and dispatch. Were it placed in many hands, it would be subject to many wills: many wills, if disunited and drawing different ways, create weakness in a government: and to unite those several wills, and reduce them to one, is a work of more time and delay than the exigencies of state will afford. The king of England is therefore not only the chief, but properly the sole, magistrate of the nation; all others acting by commission from, and in due subordination to him: in like manner as, upon the great revolution in the Roman state, all the powers of the antient magistracy of the commonwealth were concentred in the new emperor; so that, as Gravina[b] expresses it, "_in ejus unius persona veteris reipublicae vis atque majestas per cumulatas magistratuum potestates exprimebatur_." [Footnote b: _Orig._ 1. Sec. 105.]