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- 15586
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- that to go to the Duke’s benefit; we getting nothing at all for our
pains but our blisters?”
“It is his.”
“Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of
getting a livelihood?”
“It is his.”
“I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of
this whale.”
“It is his.”
“Won’t the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?”
“It is his.”
In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of
Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular
lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree be
deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman
of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to
take the case of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration. To
which my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were published)
that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be
obliged to the reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend
gentleman) would decline meddling with other people’s business. Is this
the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the three
kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of beggars?
It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the Duke
to the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs
inquire then on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested
with that right. The law itself has already been set forth. But Plowdon
gives us the reason for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs
to the King and Queen, “because of its superior excellence.” And by the
soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in such
matters.
But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason
for that, ye lawyers!
In his treatise on “Queen-Gold,” or Queen-pinmoney, an old King’s Bench
author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: “Ye tail is ye Queen’s,
that ye Queen’s wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone.” Now this
was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or
Right whale was largely used in ladies’ bodices. But this same bone is
not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for a
sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be
presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.
There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers—the whale
and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and
nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown’s ordinary revenue. I
know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by
inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same
way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head
peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be
humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there
seems a reason in all things, even in law.
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