I have listened with much pleasure to this deduction which your
lordship has made from that important circumstance of the crown’s
supremacy in spirituals. I think it throws great light on the subject
under consideration, and accounts in a clear manner for that appearance
of despotism which the _English_ government has worn from the times of
reformation. I have only one difficulty remaining with me: but it is
such an one as seems to bear hard on the great hypothesis itself, so
learnedly maintained by my Lord Commissioner in our late conversation,
of the original free constitution of the _English_ government. For,
allowing all you say to be true, does not the very translation of the
pope’s supremacy to the king, considered in itself, demonstrate that we
had then, at least, no free constitution at all, to be invaded by the
high claims of that prerogative? If we admit the existence of any such,
the supremacy of the church should, naturally, I think, have devolved
upon the supreme civil power; which with us, according to the present
supposition, is in the three estates of the legislature. But this
devolution, it seems, was on the king alone; a public acknowledgment,
as I take it, that the constitution of the government was at that
time conceived to be, in the highest sense of the word, absolutely
MONARCHICAL.