Again, in that strange debate occasioned by the too sudden death of Sir James Hales, Brown J. says that suicide is an offence not only against God and Nature, but against the King, for "he, being the Head, has lost one of his mystical members".

But, for reasons that lie for the more part outside the history of law, this thought fell into the
background. The king was left with "two bodies"; one of them was natural, the other non-natural. Of this last body we can say little; but it is "politic", whatever "politic" may mean.

Meanwhile the concept of a corporation sole was being fashioned in order to explain, if this were possible, the parson's relation to the glebe. Then came Coke and in his masterful fashion classified Persons for the coming ages. They are natural or artificial. Kings and parsons are artificial persons, corporations sole, created not by God but by the policy of man.

Abortive as I think the attempt to bring the parson into line with corporations aggregate -- abortive,
for the freehold of the glebe persists in falling into abeyance whenever a parson dies -- the attempt to play the same trick with the king seems to me still more abortive and infinitely more mischievous. In the first place, the theory is never logically formulated even by those who are its inventors. We are taught that the king is two "persons", only to be taught that though he has "two bodies" and "two capacities" he "hath but one person". Any real and consistent severance of the two personalities would naturally have led to "the damnable and damned opinion", productive of "execrable and detestable consequences", that allegiance is due to the corporation sole and
not to the mortal man. In the second place, we are plunged into talk about kings who do not die, who are never under age, who are ubiquitous, who do no wrong and (says Blackstone) think no wrong; and such talk has not been innocuous. Readers of Kinglake's Crimea will not have forgotten the instructive and amusing account of "the two kings" who shared between them control of the British army: "the personal king" and "his constitutional rival". But in the third place, the theory of the two kings or two persons stubbornly refuses to do any real work in the case of jurisprudence.

We might have thought that it would at least have led to a separation of the land that the king held as king from the land that he held as man, and to a legal severance of the money that was in the Exchequer from the money that was in the king's pocket. It did nothing of the sort. All had to be done by statute, and very slowly and clumsily it was done. After the king's lands had been made inalienable, George III had to go to Parliament for permission to hold some land as a man and not as a king, for he had been denied rights that were not denied to "any of His Majesty's subjects". A deal of legislation, extending into Queen Victoria's reign, has been required in order to secure "private estates" for the king. "Whereas it is doubtful", says an Act of 1862. "And whereas it may be doubtful", says an Act of 1873. Many things may be doubtful if we try to make two persons of one man, or to provide one person with two bodies.

The purely natural way in which the king was regarded in the Middle Ages is well illustrated by the
terrible consequences of what we now call a demise of the Crown, but what seemed to our ancestors the death of a man who had delegated many of his powers to judges and others. At the delegator's death the delegation ceased. All litigation not only came to a stop but had to be begun over again. We might have thought that the introduction of phrases which gave the king an immortal as well as a mortal body would have transformed this part of the law. But no. The consequences of the old principle had to be picked off one after another by statute. At the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign it was discovered that "great inconvenience had arisen on occasion of the demise of
the Crown from the necessity of renewing all military commissions under the royal sign manual". When on a demise of the Crown we see all the wheels of the State stopping or even running backwards, it seems an idle jest to say that the king never dies.

But the worst of it is that we are compelled to introduce into our legal thinking a person whose
personality our law does not formally or explicitly recognize. We cannot get on without the State, or the Nation, or the Commonwealth, or the Public, or some similar entity, and yet that is what we are professing to do. In the days when Queen Elizabeth was our Prince -- more often Prince than Princess -- her secretary might write in Latin De republica Anglorum, and in English Of the Commonwealth of England: Prince and Republic were not yet incompatible. A little later Guy Fawkes and others, so said the Statute Book, had attempted the destruction of His Majesty and "the overthrow of the whole State and Commonwealth". 1623 the Exchequer Chamber could speak of the inconvenience that "remote limitations" had introduced "in the republic". But the great struggle that followed had the effect of depriving us of two useful words. "Republic" and "Commonwealth" implied kinglessness and therefore treason. As to "the State", it was a late comer -- but little known until after 1600 -- and though it might govern political thought, and on rare occasions make its way into the preamble of a statute, it was slow to find a home in English law-books. There is wonderfully little of the State in Blackstone's Commentaries. It is true that "The people" exists, and "the liberties of the People" must be set over against "the prerogatives of the
King"; but just because the King is no part of the People, the People cannot be the State or
Commonwealth.

Our Taxes
Crown as Corporation - Page 1
Crown as Corporation - Page 2
Crown as Corporation - Page 4
Crown as Corporation - Page 5
Crown as Corporation - Page 6
Crown as Corporation - Page 7
Crown as Corporation - Page 8