But though the general tenor of the penal statutes was such as gave the king a superior interest in their execution, beyond any of his subjects, it could not but sometimes happen in a mixed government, that the parliament would desire to enact laws by which the regal power, in some particulars, even where private property was not immediately concerned, might be regulated and restrained. In the twenty-third of Henry VI., a law of this kind was enacted, prohibiting any man from serving in a county as sheriff above a year; and a clause was inserted, by which the king was disabled from granting a dispensation. Plain reason might have taught, that this law, at least, should be exempted from the king’s prerogative: but as the dispensing power still prevailed in other cases, it was soon able, aided by the servility of the courts of judicature, even to overpower this statute, which the legislature had evidently intended to secure against violation. In the reign of Henry VII., the case was brought to a trial before all the judges in the exchequer chamber; and it was decreed, that, notwithstanding the strict clause above mentioned, the king might dispense with the statute: he could first, it was alleged, dispense with the prohibitory clause, and then with the statute itself. This opinion of the judges, though seemingly absurd, had ever since passed for undoubted law; the practice of continuing the sheriffs had prevailed: and most of the property in England had been fixed by decisions which juries, returned by such sheriffs, had given in the courts of judicature. Many other dispensations of a like nature may be produced; not only such as took place by intervals, but such as were uniformly continued. Thus the law was dispensed with, which prohibited any man from going a judge of assize into his own county; that which rendered all Welshmen incapable of bearing offices in Wales; and that which required every one who received a pardon for felony, to find sureties for his good behavior. In the second of James I., a new consultation of all the judges had been held upon a like question: this prerogative of the crown was again unanimously affirmed,[*] and it became an established principle in English jurisprudence, that, though the king could not allow of what was morally unlawful, he could permit what was only prohibited by positive statute. Even the jealous house of commons who extorted the petition of right from Charles I., made no scruple, by the mouth of Glanville, their manager, to allow of the dispensing power in its full extent;[**] and in the famous trial of ship money, Holborne, the popular lawyer, had freely, and in the most explicit terms, made the same concession.[***] Sir Edward Coke, the great oracle of English law, had not only concurred with all other lawyers in favor of this prerogative, but seems even to believe it so inherent in the crown, that an act of parliament itself could not abolish it.[****] And he particularly observes, that no law