Proceedings of the Estates of the Kingdom of Württemberg

[p. 494]

|494| realm, the beginning is made, in that partly the formerly privileged classes, partly those summoned in order to be estates of the realm, jointly declared that they find themselves outside the new constitution of right of the state and that they do not enter at all into the constitution given by the King.

First of all, the agnates of the royal house (I. Section, pp. 26 ff.) declare that they expressly wish to reserve to themselves and to all future agnates, heirs and heirs of heirs of the royal house the rights of the former condition. – Then a number of mediatised lords declare that they expect from the Congress of the monarchs in Vienna the determination of their rights and relations and therefore cannot subject themselves in advance to a particular constitution of estates of the realm; they accordingly renounced any participation in the proceedings. – In general, the declaration was inserted in the first address of the estates (without its being at all evident from what authorisation) that the remaining princes and counts and the whole nobility also can engage in it only with reservation of their rights and of the pronouncement of the Congress. – To these reserved rights a strikingly wide sense is given in particular in a petition of grievances addressed to the estates by Herr Count von Waldek in the name of the High-Countly House of Limpurg (VI. Section, pp. 91 ff.). It says there, p. 93, that this high-countly house never accepted the abdication of the Roman Emperor (an abdication which has otherwise been accepted by all the potentates of Europe) and (p. 97) that after the dissolution of the Confederation of the Rhine it entered into the legal possession of all its earlier legal competences, and that up to this moment the actual possession of them is lacking only unlawfully; – that is, in other words, it thereby formally renounces the legal incorporation into the state of Württemberg and the relation of subjection to it, and even adds that the Herr

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