The concept of ‘legitimacy’ as a matter of sovereignty first enters English discourse as a response to Napoleon
Excerpt from British Radicals and 'Legitimacy': Napoleon in the Mirror of History by Stuart Semmel
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The introduction of ‘legitimacy’ into British political discourse seems to have been directly connected to the peculiar case of Napoleon. His superficial similarity to a king, in the wake of France’s republican experiment, made it necessary to distinguish him from other monarchs by dwelling on the quality he lacked, that of hereditary descent from a line of kings. Perhaps the earliest appearance of the new usage came in 1801, when the True Briton newspaper contrasted the ‘obtrusive upstart’ Napoleon with France’s ‘legitimate Monarchs’. The adjective occurred frequently in discussions of Napoleon (an 1803 broad-side, for example, called on the French to remove Bonaparte from ‘his usurped station . . . and hail the return of their legitimate prince’). The ultra-loyalist journalist Lewis Goldsmith employed the word frequently — as when he bemoaned Napoleon’s placing members of his own ‘bastard family on the thrones of ancient legitimate monarchs’. Goldsmith, in accusing the entire Bonaparte clan of bastardy, was not claiming that every member had been born out of wedlock. The new meaning rather accused Napoleon and his siblings of having been born outside of dynasty. Even as we chart the emergence of the new usage, however, Goldsmith’s language should remind us that the older meaning lurked underneath the surface (as it perhaps still lurks). The double meaning was present in contemporaries’ minds, as occasional wordplay suggested — not least because it was a common loyalist tactic to question the purity of Napoleon’s mother, and thus Napoleon's paternity. . .
As far as its critics were concerned, the virtue now trumpeted by continental dynasts amounted to nothing less than the ‘old doctrine of Divine Right, new-vamped up’, as the radical journalist William Hazlitt put it. ‘Legitimacy’ seemed an anachronism to Hazlitt, a ‘mock-doctrine’ dug up by ‘resurrection-men’. Thomas Babington Macaulay, in a similar spirit, would write in 1825 of ‘the doctrine of Divine Right’ having ‘come back to us, like a thief from transportation, under the alias of Legitimacy’. To those who worried about the strength of the executive, the new term ‘legitimacy’ seemed a bare-faced admission of a plot, on the Stuart model, against British liberties. Necessity had often been invoked, during the French wars, to justify infringements on traditional freedoms. Many now shared Hazlitt’s foreboding, expressed as news of Napoleon’s 1814 fall reached Britain, that ‘The restoration of the Bourbons in France will be the re-establishment of the principles of the Stuarts in this country’.