adjective
definition
Lasting or continuing seven years.
example
septennial parliaments
definition
Happening or returning once in every seven years.
example
septennial elections in England
Examples of septennial in a Sentence
Also the system of Government and opposition and septennial elections almost ensured instability unless the Government had a huge majority.
Hasselt is best known for its great septennial fete held on the day of Assumption, August 15th.
This new and obedient legislature, to which only nineteen liberals were returned, made itself into a septennial parliament, thus providing time, it was thought, to restore some part of the ancien regime.
But they were reluctant to face an immediate dissolution, and the Septennial Act was passed (1716) to extend to seven.
He was a friend of the Whig leaders Stanhope and Sunderland, took a share in defeating the Jacobite conspiracy of Bolingbroke on the death of Queen Anne, and supported the passing of the Septennial Act.
He hated Dissenters, and stock-jobbers, the excise and the army, septennial parliaments, and Continental connexions.
The Lords were at this time, as a matter of fact, not merely wealthier but wiser than the Commons; and it is no wonder that, in days when the Commons, by passing the Septennial Act, had shown their distrust of their own constituents, the peers should show, by the Peerage Bill, their distrust of that House which was elected by those constituencies.
The Excise Bill in 1733 and the Septennial Bill in the following year offered opportunities for further attacks on the government, which Bolingbroke supported by a new series of papers in the Craftsman styled "A Dissertation on Parties"; but the whole movement collapsed after the new elections, which returned Walpole to power in 1735 with a large majority.
At the same time the government's tenure of office was obviously drawing to its close; the usual interpretation of the Septennial Act involved a dissolution either in 1905 or 1906, and the government whips found increased difficulty in keeping a majority at Westminster, since neither the pronounced Chamberlainites nor the convinced free-trade Unionists showed any zeal, and a large number of the uncertain Unionists did not intend to stand again for parliament.