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Subject Area: Political Theory
Subject Area: Law

PREAMBLE. - Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 3 [1843]

Edition used:

The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-1843). 11 vols. Vol. 3.

Part of: The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols.

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PREAMBLE.

By the King, with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Commons in Parliament assembled; for the more adequate representation of the People in the Commons House, it is thus enacted:

[]King is the word employed here: employed in deference to custom. Monarch would be the proper word. In this country, there are three sorts of monarchs: a King, a Queen Regnant, and a Prince Regent: not to speak of William’s Mary, who in name was a Queen Regnant with her husband, but in authority, as expressly declared, a Queen Consort and nothing more. Had the Princess Charlotte survived her father, her grandfather being still alive, she might have added to the list a fourth species of monarch—a Princess Regent.—Protector, being an unpopularised denomination—unpopularised, first by Richard, who became King Richard the Third, then by Cromwell—is already a fourth species of monarch: but a species not very likely to be revived.

Precision, such as this, is not to the taste of the man of law. Monarch would, in his eyes, be an innovation: the use of the word, a mark of theory and ignorance. He will not, so long as he can help it, part with the profitable wit of saying, upon occasion, that a man and a woman are the same person: or of contending, according as the vane of professional or official interest points, upon some occasions, that a Queen is a King, upon others that she is not; and so in regard to Princes and Princesses Regent.