means of speedy triumph. They could not long be excluded from the city, when once they were allowed to form part of the garrison of the citadel.

It was on the 30th of April, that Mr. Canning moved for leave to bring in a bill to relieve Roman Catholic peers from the disabilities imposed on them by the act of the 30th of Charles II. with regard to the rights of sitting and voting in the House of Peers. After adverting very slightly, but with much rhetorical art to some objections which he anticipated, Mr. Canning entered into an historical review of the legislation of the reign of Charles II. towards the Catholics, and into an examination of the circumstances under which the act of the 30th of that king, had been passed. The result of his examination was, that the true intent of the act in question was, to exclude the duke of York, and that, though the provisions of it were general, its real aim was particular; whence he inferred, that it ought now to be repealed, as there was no longer any danger of a Popish successor to the throne. It was passed with great precipitation by the Commons, and urged with almost indecent haste through the Upper House, amid the various terrors, prejudices, and absurdities of the Popish plot. The Lords goaded from day to day by the Commons, assailed as they were by all the horrors of the Popish plot and with Titus Oates thundering at their doors, passed the bill, but with an exemption in favour of the duke of York. It was however, sufficiently comprehensive to exclude the whole of the Catholic Peers from their seats in parliament; not upon any ground of permanent disability, but because

they were then supposed to be involved in a particular plot for a specific purpose. This exclusion

could not have been intended for any other purpose, than to calm the alarms and agitation which then prevailed. If then the present motion were rejected, what must be the condition of the Catholic Peers? That the measure, which our ancestors devised as a precautionary security, must be declared, in the face of the world, to be permanently fixed upon the peers and their successors for ever, without the shadow of present justification, or the smallest imputation of crime.

In further support of his proposition, that the exclusion of the Catholic was originally intended to be only a temporary measure, he quoted a standing order of the House, made in 1675, "that no oath should be imposed by bill or otherwise upon the peers, with a penalty, in case of refusal, to lose their places or votes in parliament or liberty of debates therein." From the existence of this order unrepealed down to the present time, one of two things, Mr. Canning contended, must be inferredeither that the lords were at the moment in the possession and exercise of their calm deliberative functions, and, intending the expul sion of the peers to be but temporary, did not revoke the standing order; or that, in the hurry and rage of their proceeding, they forebore to pause and look back at the order, they had just before adopted. The more probable inference was, that acting under the influence of the menaces of the Commons, and under the hazard, if they refused their assent to the measures then demanded, of being involved in the charge of conspiracy to murder the king, and subvert the constitution,

their sober and deliberate judgment was overpowered by the sense of the temporary danger, but that they yet looked forward to a time, when, after the passing of the storm, they might recur to the principles of their standing order. That order was therefore suffered to remain unnoticed (for to bring it into notice would have been, in the heat of the time, to ensure its repeal and yet surely it was too recent to be forgotten), a dormant but solemn recognition of those privileges of the peerage which were suspended, not annihilated, by the act of parliament. There was no other rational way of reconciling so apparent a contradiction. When a bill is passed for suspending the operation of the Habeas Corpus act, the Habeas Corpus act remains upon the Statute book unrepealed; to break out again with unchanged lustre, when the veil of the suspension is removed.

In

like manner this standing order was probably considered as retaining its force, while it retained its situation; though overlaid for a time by the oppression of the occasional statute. This construction, he added, derived considerable force from the act itself; which was indeed a sad specimen of legislative skill. The preamble declared, that divers good laws had been made to prevent the increase and dangers of popery; which had not had the desired effect by reason of the free access of popish recusants to his majesty's person and court, and by reason of their privilege of late merely to sit in parliament. Now the latter part of this preamble was nonsense; for it was not of late that the Catholic lords had the privilege of sitting in parliament; up to that period they sat in the House of Lords as a matter of

right, and were not excluded by the restrictions of the 5th of Elizabeth, which affected the House of Commons. In the latter House, some Catholics had contrived by evasions of one kind or another to retain their seats, and there had been two or three expulsions of popish recusants. The declaration in the preamble could therefore apply only to the Commons; and yet the exclusion, which the bill effected, comprehended both, and in its consequences excluded the Lords, not only from their seats in their own House of Parliament, but also from presenting themselves at court. From the latter disability the Catholic peer had been freed by the 31st of Geo. III., on condition of denying the temporal and civil power of the Pope within the realm. After he had made this disclaimer, he had a right to enter the court and closet of the monarch, and there tender his advice

he might, if he were an assassin, plunge a poniard into his sovereign's breast at such an interview, so easily and simply acquired he might influence the royal mind without danger or risk, or personal responsibility; but if he turned his horses heads towards the parliament House to justify, in his place as a peer, the advice he had given in the royal closet, he was met by a justice of the peace, and told that into the parliament he could not enter until he took the spiritual oaths, and that the taking of these was a necessary preliminary to the privilege of defending the counsel he had given. "But the strange anomalies," continued Mr. Canning, "in the situation of Catholic peers are not yet exhausted. Fertile as was the reign of George III. in acts of re

coronation.

lief, ameliorating the condition of his Roman Catholic subjects;-it remained for his present majesty, at the opening of his auspicious reign, to add a further anomaly to the condition of his Catholic peers, by a distinction the most gracious and benevolent in design, but bringing some mixture of bitterness with enjoyment; a distinction exalting, indeed, the dignity of the Catholic peer, but at the same time sharpening the sting of his recollections. I allude to the Last year, for the first time for upwards of one hundred and thirty years, were Catholic peers summoned to attend a coronation :-an august and awful ceremony; not to be viewed as an unmeaning pomp-a mere gorgeous pageant; but as a public ratification, by the sovereign of a free people, of the compact which binds together all the orders of the realm. This solemn political rite was celebrated with all the magnificence becoming a monarch, surrounded by his nobles, his prelates, and his counsellors, and by crowds of his loving subjects-receiving their united homage, and pledging himself to their protection and good government in return. It was celebrated in the presence of the representatives of Catholic as well as Protestant Europe. Imagine the ministers of foreign potentates collecting for their respective courts the details of this splendid and affecting consecration. Who is it that overtops the barons as they march? the Catholic lord Clifford. is it that does homage to the throne on behalf of the highest order of the peerage?-the Catholic duke of Norfolk. Whom has the king selected to return thanks to this assemblage of all that is most splendid and most worthy in

Who

the realm, in acknowledgment of their libation to his majesty's health?-again the Catholic duke of Norfolk. Did it occur to the representatives of Europe, when contemplating this animating spectacle-did it occur to the ambassadors of Catholic Austria, of Catholic France, or of states more bigotted in matters of religion, that the moment this ceremony was over, the duke of Norfolk would become disseised of the exercise of his privileges among his fellow peers? That his robes of ceremony, were to be laid aside and hung up, until the distant (be it very distant!) day, when the coronation of a successor to his present most gracious sovereign might again call him forth to assist at a similar solemnization ?-that, after being thus exhibited to the eyes of the peers and people of England, and to the representatives of the princes and nations of the world, the duke of Norfolk, highest in rank among the peers, the lord Clifford, and others, like him, representing a long line of illustrious ancestry-as if called forth and furnished for the occasion, like the lustres and banners that flamed and glittered in the scene, were to be, like them, thrown by as useless and trumpery formalities?-That they might bend the knee and kiss the handthat they might bear the train or rear the canopy-might discharge the offices assigned by Roman pride to their barbarian ancestors

Purpurea tollant aulæa Britanni, but that with the pageantry of the hour, their importance faded away; that as their distinction vanished, their humiliation returned; and that he, who headed the procession of peers to day, could not sit

among them as their equal on the

morrow?"

Mr. Canning, after this appeal to the fancy of his hearers, returned to his former theme-the popish plot-endeavoured in a series of observations to identify or connect the law of exclusion with that monstrous instance of credulity and wickedness; and he then summed up the essence of his argument. "The questions," said he, "which I require to be answered are 1st:-Were not Catholic peers first excluded from the House of Lords by the 30th of Charles II., after they had been expressly and anxiously retained there by queen Elizabeth, at the time when she imposed the Oath of Supremacy on the House of Commons?-Not that I think it by any means clear, that Elizabeth imposed that oath, even on the House of Commons, with a decided intention of excluding Roman Catholics from parliament. The oaths at different times administered to Catholics, have been of two sorts: some have been put to them bona fide as tests of their allegiance; while others have been framed as tests, not of loyalty, but of Catholicism; the framers of this latter sort of oath assuming Catholicism to be disloyalty. The Oath of Supremacy of Elizabeth was framed, I am inclined to believe, in the hope that Catholics might be brought to take it. Partially perhaps they did; generally speaking, they did not. But when that oath was subsequently imposed on the peers, together with the declaration against transubstantiation, those enactments were clearly and confessedly not intended as tests of allegiance, but were prescribed with a fore-knowledge that the Catholics would not take them

or rather with a pre-determination that they should be such as Catholics could not take.-2ndly :Wherefore were the Roman Catholic peers thus expelled from parliament? With the view of excluding the Duke of York from the throne? or in consequence of the Popish plot? If with a view to the exclusion of popery from the throne, that object is long ago attained; the throne is unalterably Protestant. If in consequence of the popish plot, then arise the further questions-Were the five Catholic peers justly or unjustly accused of participation in that plot? If justly, why were they not put upon their trial? One only of them was brought to trial: he, it is true, was condemned; but has not even his innocence been since established?—and even if upon that point there is any scepticism, what is the species of justice which condemns four accused persons upon the trial of one ?-and which deduces from four charges and one trial the proscription of thrice the number not only innocent but unaccused, and not only in their own persons, but throughout all succeeding generations of their posterity?"

Mr. Peel met Mr. Canning's motion by a direct negative; dwelling in his reply more upon the extraneous topics which that gentleman had pressed into the service of his eloquence, than upon the essence of the argument. After some desultory remarks on the historical statements of Mr. Canning, he contended (undoubtedly with much truth), that, notwithstandstanding all the exaggerations of party and faction, the act of the 30th of Charles II. had been called for by the peculiar circumstances of those times. This, it is clear, was