SETTLEMENT OF THE SUCCESSION. [XV. 394 line of York was crossed by attainder!: so also was the claim of Lancaster. Well, all this argument serves not to prove that Henry VII had a hereditary claim, but to explain what he meant when he said he had. And, although not very important, it is as well to try to understand it. In truth, the law of royal succession, except where it has been settled by parliament, has never been very certain. Mary I and Elizabeth were akin by the half-blood only to Edward VI, yet they claimed hereditary right : disputable perhaps in itself, that position was strengthened by Henry VIII's will and acts of settlement. But Edward VPs will was set aside, and, although conflicting opinions did conflict, the crown descended in the natural and legal order to James I. There ''can, I think, be no doubt that Henry VII was legitimately Duke of Lancaster, if we suppose that such a title could pass through a female, notwithstanding the half-blood. It is quite possible to maintain that he was king of England by , hereditary right. Anyhow, he said he was. In his first address to the collected parliament, Nov. 9, 1485, he declared that he had come to the crown by just tide of inheritance, and by the true judgment of God in giving him the victory over his enemy: the parliament accepted the fact, and passed a statute, in avoiding all ambiguities and questionings, ordaining, establishing, and enacting that the inheritance of the crowns of England and France, and so on, be, rest and remain, in the person of our now sovereign lord and in the heirs of his body. You may think that this was enough, but the pope clenched the matter in a bull of March 27, i486, declaring that Henry was king not only -by the right of war, and by the notorious and undoubted nearest title of succession, but also by the choice and vote of all the prelates, peers, magnates, nobles, and of the whole realm of England, and