illustrative of the right of the one party, and not dependent or
contingent upon the mere will of the monarch. The origin of the king's
ceremonial was lost in remote antiquity; but the numerous tenures and
dependencies determinable by the non-performance of services at the
solemnity, showed how important it was intended to be in the eyes of the
people. The only grounds of right for the king's coronation, the queen
equally had for hers; and there were, as he had already stated, separate
forms prescribed for those who were officially to attend her ceremony.
The learned counsel then quoted some passages from the _Liber Regalis_,
being merely directions for particular parts of the ceremonial to be
observed on the queen's coronation. Every solemnity of which the origin
was lost in distant antiquity, which was in itself of a most high and
public nature, and which occupied a great and important space in the
history of the country, he would fearlessly assert, must be deemed and
taken as the right of the realm, and not as a mere appanage of the king.
He held the coronation of the king himself to be a right of this
nature; and that, not merely in the present times on account of the
coronation oath, (which had been devised by the legislature on the
coronation of William and Mary,) but also in times long before them:
indeed, it had always been considered as a high and august ceremony with
which the monarch himself could not dispense; it being the right of the
sovereign, not in his individual but in his political capacity, for the
benefit of the whole nation, in which capacity alone the nation knew him
at his coronation. So much with regard to the coronation of the king.
The coronation of the queen ought to be considered in a similar light,
from its having been celebrated almost without interruption with the
same publicity, and from being in its nature such as he had repeatedly
described it. The king and the queen being both of them the mere
creations of the law, the solemnities of their coronations were mere
creations of the law also, and were known to it in no other light than
as the rights of the whole realm of England. He, therefore, who was
ready to take one step, and to get rid of the queen's coronation, as a
mere optional ceremony, ought to be ready to take also another step, and
to get rid of the king's coronation, on the ground of its being a vain,
idle, empty, and expensive pageant. Her claim to a coronation rested
upon immemorial usage, and the numerous rights of individuals which were
interwoven and connected with it. Indeed, it rested on the same
foundation as the king's: it was supported by the same arguments, and
the interruptions which it had experienced admitted of the same
explanations that he had given to those which had occurred in the case
of the king. He had mentioned, in the course of his argument, the rights
which belonged to other individuals in consequence of the queen's right
to a coronation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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