the House of Commons had seated as member for
Middlesex; and perhaps still more at the discovery that his other
brother, the Duke of Gloucester, to whom he was greatly attached, had
married another subject, the widowed Lady Waldegrave. His Majesty's
dissatisfaction was, perhaps, heightened by the recollection that he
himself, in early manhood, had also been strongly attracted by the
charms of another subject, and had sacrificed his own inclinations to
the combined considerations of pride of birth and the interests of his
kingdom. And, though there was a manifest difference between the
importance of the marriage of the sovereign himself and that of princes
who were never likely to become sovereigns, he thought it not
unreasonable that he should be empowered to exercise such a general
guardianship over the entire family, of which he was the head, as might
enable him to control its members in such arrangements, by making his
formal sanction indispensable to the validity of any matrimonial
alliances which they might desire to contract. A somewhat similar
question had been raised in 1717, when George I., having quarrelled with
the Prince of Wales (afterward George II.), asserted a claim to control
and direct the education of all the Prince's children, and, when they
should be of marriageable age, to arrange their marriages. The Prince,
on the other hand, insisted on his natural and inalienable right, as
their father, to have the entire government of his own offspring, a
right which, as he contended, no royal prerogative could be enabled or
permitted to override. That question was not, however, brought before
Parliament, to which, at that time, the King could, probably, not have
trusted for any leanings in his favor; but he referred it, in an
informal way, to the Lord Chancellor (Lord Cowper) and the Common-law
Judges. They investigated it with great minuteness. A number of
precedents were adduced for the marriage and education of the members of
the royal family being regulated by the sovereign, beginning with Henry
III., who gave his daughter Joan, without her own consent, in marriage
to the King of Scotland, and coming down to the preceding century, at
the commencement of which the Council of James I. committed the Lady
Arabella Stuart and Mr. Seymour to the Tower for contracting a secret
marriage without the King's permission, and at the end of which King
William exercised the right of selecting a tutor for the Duke of
Glo