that Prince George of Cambridge is
entitled to no precedence of his own, inseparable from his royal
birth, but such, nevertheless, is undoubtedly the fact. By law,
he can only take _royal_ rank as the son, brother, uncle, or
nephew, of the reigning sovereign, none of which he is, and he
derives none whatever from having been nephew of William IV. and
George IV., and grandson of George III. The princes of the Blood
Royal have, as to precedence, a moveable and not a fixed status,
constantly shifting, with their greater or less propinquity to
the actual sovereign; and in the event of Prince George's
succession to his father's dukedom, he would only be entitled to
a place _in Parliament and in the Council_, according to the
ancienty of his peerage.

The practice, however, does not wait upon the right, and is
regulated by the universal sense and feeling of the respect and
deference which is due to the Blood Royal of England. The
Archbishop of Canterbury does not take a legal opinion or pore
over the 31st of Henry VIII. to discover whether he has a right
to jostle for that precedence with the cousin, which he knows he
is bound to concede to the uncle, of the Queen; but he yields it
as a matter of course, and so uniform and unquestionable is the
custom, that in all probability neither the Prince nor the
Prelate are conscious that it is in the slightest degree at
variance with the right.

The obscurity which involves the question of precedence, and the
prevailing doubts as to the extent of the Royal prerogative,
proceed, in a great measure, from the intermixture of law and
custom, by which the practice is regulated and enforced. The
table of precedence, the authority of which is recognised for all
social and ceremonial purposes, rests upon statutory enactments,
ancient usages, and the king's letters patent; usage creeping in
to disarrange the order, and break the links of the chain forged
by the law; for, while the 31st of Henry VIII. places earls after
marquises, custom interposes and postpones the former to the
eldest sons of dukes (and so of Marquis's eldest sons and
viscounts), though these are only commoners in the eye of the
law. Now, as no custom (unless expressly saved) can prevail
against the force of a statute, this renders it still more clear,
that nothing was intended by the 31st Henry VIII. but 'the
placing the Lords' in Parliament,[14] and that the question of
general precedence (with all the prerogatives of