ACT FOR CONSOLIDATING ANNUITIES GRANTED IN 1759.

On the first day of February, a motion was made, and leave given, to bring in a bill for enabling his majesty to make leases and copies of offices, lands, and hereditaments, parcel of his duchy of Cornwall, or annexed to the same; accordingly it passed through both houses without opposition; and enacted that all leases and grants made, or to be made, by his majesty, within seven years next ensuing, in or annexed to the said duchy, under the limitations therein mentioned, should be good and effectual in law against his majesty, his heirs, and successors, and against all other persons that should hereafter inherit the said duchy, either by an act of parliament, or any limitation whatsoever. This act appears the more extraordinary as the prince of Wales, who has a sort of right by prescription to the duchy of Cornwall, was then of age, and might have been put in possession of it by the passing of a patent. The house having perused an account of the produce of the fund established for paying annuities granted in the year one thousand seven hundred and fifty-nine, with the charge on that fund on the fifth day of January in the succeeding year, it appeared that there had been a considerable deficiency in the said fund on the fifth day of July preceding, and this had been made good out of the sinking fund, by a resolution of the seventh of February, already particularized. They therefore instructed the committee of ways and means to consider so much of the annuity and lottery act passed in the preceding session as related to the three per centum annuities, amounting to the sum of seven millions five hundred and ninety thousand pounds, granted in the year one thousand seven hundred and fifty-nine; and also to consider so much of the said act as related to the subsidy of poundage upon certain goods and merchandise to be imported into this kingdom, and the additional inland duty on coffee and chocolate. The committee having taken these points into deliberation, agreed to the two resolutions we have already mentioned with respect to the consolidation; and a bill was brought in for adding those annuities granted in the year one thousand seven hundred and fifty-nine, to the joint stock of throe per centum annuities consolidated by the acts of the twenty-fifth, twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, and thirty-second years of his majesty’s reign, and for several duties therein mentioned, to the sinking fund. The committee was afterwards empowered to receive a clause for cancelling such lottery tickets as were made forth in pursuance of an act passed in the thirtieth year of his majesty’s reign, and were not then disposed of: a clause for this purpose was accordingly added to the bill, which passed through both houses without opposition, and received the royal assent at the end of the session.