question was nothing like so fully developed or so firmly established as it is at the present day. It is all very well to say that "William was his own Foreign Minister,"--a statement which is repeated by Whig writers, as though it sufficed to explain any conceivable irregularity,--but the mere fact of his being unable to complete the legal execution of a treaty without calling in the assistance of a Minister (or rather, as it really should have been, if the Chancellor had not taken upon him to dispense with the Secretary's co-operation, of two Ministers), must have been a sufficient indication to the King of the even _then_ constitutional limits of his prerogative. The _form_, in short, was eloquent of the _fact_. It would have been plainly irrational to suppose that the royal treaty-making power would have been made exercisable only under the authority of an instrument validated by an act which none but a Minister or Ministers could perform, unless it were intended that such Minister or Ministers should be as fully responsible for the doings of the executive in foreign as in domestic affairs. And assuredly it cannot be regarded as more than a colourable recognition of this responsibility to procure the merely mechanical assent of Ministers to the results of an international agreement, in the negotiations for which they have not been permitted to take any part. It seems difficult therefore to contend that William was not in this matter _knowingly_ over-riding constitutional restrictions, under the conviction probably that the pressing nature of the emergency, and the danger of delaying the Spanish settlement by deliberations with the English Ministers, sufficiently justified the irregularity.