But whatever be the privilege of inviolability attached to sovereigns, it must, on every rational ground, be confined to those who enjoy and exercise dominion in some independent territory. An abdicated or dethroned monarch may preserve his title by the courtesy of other states, but cannot rank with sovereigns in the tribunals where public law is administered. I should be rather surprised to hear any one assert that the parliament of Paris was incompetent to try Christina for the murder of Monaldeschi. And, though we must admit that Mary's resignation of her crown was compulsory, and retracted on the first occasion; yet after a twenty years' loss of possession, when not one of her former subjects avowed allegiance to her, when the King of Scotland had been so long acknowledged by England and by all Europe, is it possible to consider her as more than a titular queen, divested of every substantial right to which a sovereign tribunal could have regard? She was styled accordingly, in the indictment, "Mary, daughter and heir of James the Fifth, late King of Scots, otherwise called Mary Queen of Scots, dowager of France." We read even that some lawyers would have had her tried by a jury of the county of Stafford, rather than the special commission; which Elizabeth noticed as a strange indignity. The commission, however, was perfectly legal under the recent statute.[253] But, while we can hardly pronounce Mary's execution to have been so wholly iniquitous and unwarrantable as it has been represented, it may be admitted that a more generous nature than that of Elizabeth would not have exacted the law's full penalty. The Queen of Scots' detention in England was in violation of all natural, public, and municipal law; and if reasons of state policy or precedents from the custom of princes are allowed to extenuate this injustice, it is to be asked whether such reasons and such precedents might not palliate the crime of assassination imputed to her. Some might perhaps allege, as was so frequently urged at the time, that if her life could be taken with justice, it could not be spared in prudence; and that Elizabeth's higher duty to preserve her people from the risks of civil commotion must silence every feeling that could plead for mercy. Of this necessity different judgments may perhaps be formed; it is evident that Mary's death extinguished the best hope of popery in England: but the relative force of the two religions was greatly changed since Norfolk's conspiracy; and it appears to me that an act of parliament explicitly cutting her off from the crown, and at the same time entailing it on her son, would have afforded a very reasonable prospect of securing the succession against all serious disturbance. But this neither suited the inclination of Elizabeth, nor of some among those who surrounded her.