_Act of settlement._--The immediate settlement of the Crown at the revolution extended only to the descendants of Anne and of William. The former was at that time pregnant, and became in a few months the mother of a son. Nothing therefore urged the convention-parliament to go any farther in limiting the succession. But the king, in order to secure the elector of Hanover to the grand alliance, was desirous to settle the reversion of the Crown on his wife the Princess Sophia and her posterity. A provision to this effect was inserted in the bill of rights by the House of Lords. But the Commons rejected the amendment with little opposition; not, as Burnet idly insinuates through the secret wish of a republican party (which never existed, or had no influence) to let the monarchy die a natural death, but from a just sense that the provision was unnecessary and might become inexpedient.[270] During the life of the young Duke of Gloucester the course of succession appeared clear. But upon his untimely death in 1700, the manifest improbability that the limitations already established could subsist beyond the lives of the king and Princess of Denmark made it highly convenient to preclude intrigue, and cut off the hopes of the jacobites, by a new settlement of the Crown on a protestant line of princes. Though the choice was truly free in the hands of parliament, and no pretext of absolute right could be advanced on any side, there was no question that the Princess Sophia was the fittest object of the nation's preference. She was indeed very far removed from any hereditary title. Besides the pretended Prince of Wales, and his sister, whose legitimacy no one disputed, there stood in her way the Duchess of Savoy, daughter of Henrietta Duchess of Orleans, and several of the Palatine family. These last had abjured the reformed faith, of which their ancestors had been the strenuous assertors; but it seemed not improbable that some one might return to it; and, if all hereditary right of the ancient English royal line, the descendant of Henry VII., had not been extinguished, it would have been necessary to secure the succession of any prince, who should profess the protestant religion at the time when the existing limitations should come to an end. Nor indeed, on the supposition that the next heir had a right to enjoy the Crown, would the act of settlement have been required.[271] According to the tenor and intention of this statute, all prior claims of inheritance, save that of the issue of King William and the Princess Anne, being set aside and annulled, the Princess Sophia became the source of a new royal line. The throne of England and Ireland, by virtue of the paramount will of parliament, stands entailed upon the heirs of her body, being protestants. In them the right is as truly hereditary as it ever was in the Plantagenets or the Tudors. But they derive it not from those ancient families. The blood indeed of Cerdic and of the Conqueror