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Henderson could prove to his Majesty even now that Episcopacy was not of divine appointment, then the plea of State-necessity might avail, and his Majesty might see his way more clearly! It was on this point that the repeated conversations of the King and Henderson at Newcastle did undoubtedly turn. Nay, there was more than mere conversation: there was an elaborate discussion in writing.
The antagonism between these two principles appeared in our own internal history as far back as the seventeenth century, when the Stuarts championed the theory of state-necessity and the practice of a prerogative free to act outside and above the law in order to meet the demands of state-necessity, and when Parliament defended the rule of law and sought to include the Crown under that law.
Could he lawfully now, on any mere plea of State-necessity, give up that Church of England in the principles of which he had been educated, which he had sworn at his coronation to maintain, and which he still believed in his conscience to be the true and divinely-appointed form of a Church? If Mr.
Anticipating the plea of state-necessity, which might possibly be set up in defence of the measures of the Governor-General, he breaks out into the following rhetorical passage: "State necessity! no, my Lords; that imperial tyrant, State Necessity, is yet a generous despot, bold is his demeanor, rapid his decisions, and terrible his grasp.
But what he does, my Lords, he dares avow, and avowing, scorns any other justification, than the great motives that placed the iron sceptre in his hand. But a quibbling, pilfering, prevaricating State-Necessity, that tries to skulk behind the skirts of Justice; a State-Necessity that tries to steal a pitiful justification from whispered accusations and fabricated rumors.
No, my Lords, that is no State Necessity; tear off the mask, and you see coarse, vulgar avarice, you see speculation, lurking under the gaudy disguise, and adding the guilt of libelling the public honor to its own private fraud. "My Lords, I say this, because I am sure the Managers would make every allowance that state-necessity could claim upon any great emergency. No."
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