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The History of England, from the Accession of James II — Volume 1

by Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay · English · Gutenberg #1468 · 1,360,284 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The History of England, from the Accession of James II — Volume 1

Author: Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay


        
Release date: June 26, 2008 [eBook #1468]
                Most recently updated: August 12, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1468

Credits: Produced by Ken West and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND, FROM THE ACCESSION OF JAMES II — VOLUME 1 ***




THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM THE ACCESSION OF JAMES II,

VOLUME I (of 5)

(Chapters I-V)

by Thomas Babington Macaulay

Philadelphia

Porter & Coates




CONTENTS:


CHAPTER I.

     Introduction
     Britain under the Romans
     Britain under the Saxons
     Conversion of the Saxons to Christianity
     Danish Invasions; The Normans
     The Norman Conquest
     Separation of England and Normandy
     Amalgamation of Races
     English Conquests on the Continent
     Wars of the Roses
     Extinction of Villenage
     Beneficial Operation of the Roman Catholic Religion
     The early English Polity often misrepresented, and why?
     Nature of the Limited Monarchies of the Middle Ages
     Prerogatives of the early English Kings
     Limitations of the Prerogative
     Resistance an ordinary Check on Tyranny in the Middle Ages
     Peculiar Character of the English Aristocracy
     Government of the Tudors
     Limited Monarchies of the Middle Ages generally turned into Absolute Monarchies
     The English Monarchy a singular Exception
     The Reformation and its Effects
     Origin of the Church of England
     Her peculiar Character
     Relation in which she stood to the Crown
     The Puritans
     Their Republican Spirit
     No systematic parliamentary Opposition offered to the Government of Elizabeth
     Question of the Monopolies
     Scotland and Ireland become Parts of the same Empire with England
     Diminution of the Importance of England after the Accession of James I
     Doctrine of Divine Right
     The Separation between the Church and the Puritans becomes wider
     Accession and Character of Charles I
     Tactics of the Opposition in the House of Commons
     Petition of Right
     Petition of Right violated; Character and Designs of Wentworth
     Character of Laud
     Star Chamber and High Commission
     Ship-Money
     Resistance to the Liturgy in Scotland
     A Parliament called and dissolved
     The Long Parliament
     First Appearance of the Two great English Parties
     The Remonstrance
     Impeachment of the Five Members
     Departure of Charles from London
     Commencement of the Civil War
     Successes of the Royalists
     Rise of the Independents
     Oliver Cromwell
     Selfdenying Ordinance; Victory of the Parliament
     Domination and Character of the Army
     Rising against the Military Government suppressed
     Proceedings against the King
     His Execution
     Subjugation of Ireland and Scotland
     Expulsion of the Long Parliament
     The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell
     Oliver succeeded by Richard
     Fall of Richard and Revival of the Long Parliament
     Second Expulsion of the Long Parliament
     The Army of Scotland marches into England
     Monk declares for a Free Parliament
     General Election of 1660
     The Restoration

CHAPTER II.

     Conduct of those who restored the House of Stuart unjustly censured
     Abolition of Tenures by Knight Service; Disbandment of the Army
     Disputes between the Roundheads and Cavaliers renewed
     Religious Dissension
     Unpopularity of the Puritans
     Character of Charles II
     Character of the Duke of York and Earl of Clarendon
     General Election of 1661
     Violence of the Cavaliers in the new Parliament
     Persecution of the Puritans
     Zeal of the Church for Hereditary Monarchy
     Change in the Morals of the Community
     Profligacy of Politicians
     State of Scotland
     State of Ireland
     The Government become unpopular in England
     War with the Dutch
     Opposition in the House of Commons
     Fall of Clarendon
     State of European Politics, and Ascendancy of France
     Character of Lewis XIV
     The Triple Alliance
     The Country Party
     Connection between Charles II. and France
     Views of Lewis with respect to England
     Treaty of Dover
     Nature of the English Cabinet
     The Cabal
     Shutting of the Exchequer
     War with the United Provinces, and their extreme Danger
     William, Prince of Orange
     Meeting of the Parliament; Declaration of Indulgence
     It is cancelled, and the Test Act passed
     The Cabal dissolved
     Peace with the United Provinces; Administration of Danby
     Embarrassing Situation of the Country Party
     Dealings of that Party with the French Embassy
     Peace of Nimeguen
     Violent Discontents in England
     Fall of Danby; the Popish Plot
     Violence of the new House of Commons
     Temple's Plan of Government
     Character of Halifax
     Character of Sunderland
     Prorogation of the Parliament; Habeas Corpus Act; Second General Election of 1679
     Popularity of Monmouth
     Lawrence Hyde
     Sidney Godolphin
     Violence of Factions on the Subject of the Exclusion Bill
     Names of Whig and Tory
     Meeting of Parliament; The Exclusion Bill passes the Commons; \
     Exclusion Bill rejected by the Lords
     Execution of Stafford; General Election of 1681
     Parliament held at Oxford, and dissolved
     Tory Reaction
     Persecution of the Whigs
     Charter of the City confiscated; Whig Conspiracies
     Detection of the Whig Conspiracies
     Severity of the Government; Seizure of Charters
     Influence of the Duke of York
     He is opposed by Halifax
     Lord Guildford
     Policy of Lewis
     State of Factions in the Court of Charles at the time of his Death

CHAPTER III.

     Great Change in the State of England since 1685
     Population of England in 1685
     Increase of Population greater in the North than in the South
     Revenue in 1685
     Military System
     The Navy
     The Ordnance
     Noneffective Charge; Charge of Civil Government
     Great Gains of Ministers and Courtiers
     State of Agriculture
     Mineral Wealth of the Country
     Increase of Rent
     The Country Gentlemen
     The Clergy
     The Yeomanry; Growth of the Towns; Bristol
     Norwich
     Other Country Towns
     Manchester; Leeds; Sheffield
     Birmingham
     Liverpool
     Watering-places; Cheltenham; Brighton; Buxton; Tunbridge Wells
     Bath
     London
     The City
     Fashionable Part of the Capital
     Lighting of London
     Police of London
     Whitefriars; The Court
     The Coffee Houses
     Difficulty of Travelling
     Badness of the Roads
     Stage Coaches
     Highwaymen
     Inns
     Post Office
     Newspapers
     News-letters
     The Observator
     Scarcity of Books in Country Places; Female Education
     Literary Attainments of Gentlemen
     Influence of French Literature
     Immorality of the Polite Literature of England
     State of Science in England
     State of the Fine Arts
     State of the Common People; Agricultural Wages
     Wages of Manufacturers
     Labour of Children in Factories
     Wages of different Classes of Artisans
     Number of Paupers
     Benefits derived by the Common People from the Progress of
     Civilisation
     Delusion which leads Men to overrate the Happiness of preceding Generations

CHAPTER IV.

     Death of Charles II
     Suspicions of Poison
     Speech of James II. to the Privy Council
     James proclaimed
     State of the Administration
     New Arrangements
     Sir George Jeffreys
     The Revenue collected without an Act of Parliament
     A Parliament called
     Transactions between James and the French King
     Churchill sent Ambassador to France; His History
     Feelings of the Continental Governments towards England
     Policy of the Court of Rome
     Struggle in the Mind of James; Fluctuations in his Policy
     Public Celebration of the Roman Catholic Rites in the Palace
     His Coronation
     Enthusiasm of the Tories; Addresses
     The Elections
     Proceedings against Oates
     Proceedings against Dangerfield
     Proceedings against Baxter
     Meeting of the Parliament of Scotland
     Feeling of James towards the Puritans
     Cruel Treatment of the Scotch Covenanters
     Feeling of James towards the Quakers
     William Penn
     Peculiar Favour shown to Roman Catholics and Quakers
     Meeting of the English Parliament; Trevor chosen Speaker;
     Character of Seymour
     The King's Speech to the Parliament
     Debate in the Commons; Speech of Seymour
     The Revenue voted; Proceedings of the Commons concerning Religion
     Additional Taxes voted; Sir Dudley North
     Proceedings of the Lords
     Bill for reversing the Attainder of Stafford

CHAPTER V.

     Whig Refugees on the Continent
     Their Correspondents in England
     Characters of the leading Refugees; Ayloffe; Wade
     Goodenough; Rumbold
     Lord Grey
     Monmouth
     Ferguson
     Scotch Refugees; Earl of Argyle
     Sir Patrick Hume; Sir John Cochrane; Fletcher of Saltoun
     Unreasonable Conduct of the Scotch Refugees
     Arrangement for an Attempt on England and Scotland
     John Locke
     Preparations made by Government for the Defence of Scotland
     Conversation of James with the Dutch Ambassadors; Ineffectual Attempts to prevent Argyle from sailing
     Departure of Argyle from Holland; He lands in Scotland
     His Disputes with his Followers
     Temper of the Scotch Nation
     Argyle's Forces dispersed
     Argyle a Prisoner
     His Execution.
     Execution of Rumbold
     Death of Ayloffe
     Devastation of Argyleshire
     Ineffectual Attempts to prevent Monmouth from leaving Holland
     His Arrival at Lyme
     His Declaration
     His Popularity in the West of England
     Encounter of the Rebels with the Militia at Bridport
     Encounter of the Rebels with the Militia at Axminster;
     News of the Rebellion carried to London;
     Loyalty of the Parliament
     Reception of Monmouth at Taunton
     He takes the Title of King
     His Reception at Bridgewater
     Preparations of the Government to oppose him
     His Design on Bristol
     He relinquishes that Design
     Skirmish at Philip's Norton; Despondence of Monmouth
     He returns to Bridgewater; The Royal Army encamps at Sedgemoor
     Battle of Sedgemoor
     Pursuit of the Rebels
     Military Executions; Flight of Monmouth
     His Capture
     His Letter to the King; He is carried to London
     His Interview with the King
     His Execution
     His Memory cherished by the Common People
     Cruelties of the Soldiers in the West; Kirke
     Jeffreys sets out on the Western Circuit
     Trial of Alice Lisle
     The Bloody Assizes
     Abraham Holmes
     Christopher Battiseombe; The Hewlings
     Punishment of Tutchin
     Rebels Transported
     Confiscation and Extortion
     Rapacity of the Queen and her Ladies
     Grey; Cochrane; Storey
     Wade, Goodenough, and Ferguson
     Jeffreys made Lord Chancellor
     Trial and Execution of Cornish
     Trials  and Executions of Fernley and Elizabeth Gaunt
     Trial and Execution of Bateman
     Persecution of the Protestant Dissenters





HISTORY OF ENGLAND.




CHAPTER I.

I PURPOSE to write the history of England from the accession of King
James the Second down to a time which is within the memory of men still
living. I shall recount the errors which, in a few months, alienated a
loyal gentry and priesthood from the House of Stuart. I shall trace the
course of that revolution which terminated the long struggle between our
sovereigns and their parliaments, and bound up together the rights of
the people and the title of the reigning dynasty. I shall relate how the
new settlement was, during many troubled years, successfully defended
against foreign and domestic enemies; how, under that settlement,
the authority of law and the security of property were found to be
compatible with a liberty of discussion and of individual action never
before known; how, from the auspicious union of order and freedom,
sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished
no example; how our country, from a state of ignominious vassalage,
rapidly rose to the place of umpire among European powers; how her
opulence and her martial glory grew together; how, by wise and resolute
good faith, was gradually established a public credit fruitful of
marvels which to the statesmen of any former age would have seemed
incredible; how a gigantic commerce gave birth to a maritime power,
compared with which every other maritime power, ancient or modern, sinks
into insignificance; how Scotland, after ages of enmity, was at length
united to England, not merely by legal bonds, but by indissoluble ties
of interest and affection; how, in America, the British colonies rapidly
became far mightier and wealthier than the realms which Cortes and
Pizarro had added to the dominions of Charles the Fifth; how in Asia,
British adventurers founded an empire not less splendid and more durable
than that of Alexander.

Nor will it be less my duty faithfully to record disasters mingled with
triumphs, and great national crimes and follies far more humiliating
than any disaster. It will be seen that even what we justly account our
chief blessings were not without alloy. It will be seen that the system
which effectually secured our liberties against the encroachments of
kingly power gave birth to a new class of abuses from which absolute
monarchies are exempt. It will be seen that, in consequence partly
of unwise interference, and partly of unwise neglect, the increase of
wealth and the extension of trade produced, together with immense good,
some evils from which poor and rude societies are free. It will be seen
how, in two important dependencies of the crown, wrong was followed
by just retribution; how imprudence and obstinacy broke the ties which
bound the North American colonies to the parent state; how Ireland,
cursed by the domination of race over race, and of religion over
religion, remained indeed a member of the empire, but a withered
and distorted member, adding no strength to the body politic, and
reproachfully pointed at by all who feared or envied the greatness of
England.

Yet, unless I greatly deceive myself, the general effect of this
chequered narrative will be to excite thankfulness in all religious
minds, and hope in the breasts of all patriots. For the history of our
country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history
of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement. Those who
compare the age on which their lot has fallen with a golden age which
exists only in their imagination may talk of degeneracy and decay: but
no man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take
a morose or desponding view of the present.

I should very imperfectly execute the task which I have undertaken if
I were merely to treat of battles and sieges, of the rise and fall
of administrations, of intrigues in the palace, and of debates in the
parliament. It will be my endeavour to relate the history of the people
as well as the history of the government, to trace the progress of
useful and ornamental arts, to describe the rise of religious sects
and the changes of literary taste, to portray the manners of successive
generations and not to pass by with neglect even the revolutions which
have taken place in dress, furniture, repasts, and public amusements. I
shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity
of history, if I can succeed in placing before the English of the
nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.

The events which I propose to relate form only a single act of a great
and eventful drama extending through ages, and must be very imperfectly
understood unless the plot of the preceding acts be well known. I shall
therefore introduce my narrative by a slight sketch of the history of
our country from the earliest times. I shall pass very rapidly over many
centuries: but I shall dwell at some length on the vicissitudes of that
contest which the administration of King James the Second brought to a
decisive crisis. [1]

Nothing in the early existence of Britain indicated the greatness which
she was destined to attain. Her inhabitants when first they became
known to the Tyrian mariners, were little superior to the natives of the
Sandwich Islands. She was subjugated by the Roman arms; but she
received only a faint tincture of Roman arts and letters. Of the western
provinces which obeyed the Caesars, she was the last that was conquered,
and the first that was flung away. No magnificent remains of Latin
porches and aqueducts are to be found in Britain. No writer of British
birth is reckoned among the masters of Latin poetry and eloquence. It is
not probable that the islanders were at any time generally familiar with
the tongue of their Italian rulers. From the Atlantic to the vicinity
of the Rhine the Latin has, during many centuries, been predominant. It
drove out the Celtic; it was not driven out by the Teutonic; and it is
at this day the basis of the French, Spanish and Portuguese languages.
In our island the Latin appears never to have superseded the old Gaelic
speech, and could not stand its ground against the German.

The scanty and superficial civilisation which the Britons had derived
from their southern masters was effaced by the calamities of the fifth
century. In the continental kingdoms into which the Roman empire was
then dissolved, the conquerors learned much from the conquered race. In
Britain the conquered race became as barbarous as the conquerors.

All the chiefs who founded Teutonic dynasties in the continental
provinces of the Roman empire, Alaric, Theodoric, Clovis, Alboin, were
zealous Christians. The followers of Ida and Cerdic, on the other hand,
brought to their settlements in Britain all the superstitions of the
Elbe. While the German princes who reigned at Paris, Toledo, Arles, and
Ravenna listened with reverence to the instructions of bishops, adored
the relics of martyrs, and took part eagerly in disputes touching the
Nicene theology, the rulers of Wessex and Mercia were still performing
savage rites in the temples of Thor and Woden.

The continental kingdoms which had risen on the ruins of the Western
Empire kept up some intercourse with those eastern provinces where the
ancient civilisation, though slowly fading away under the influence of
misgovernment, might still astonish and instruct barbarians, where the
court still exhibited the splendour of Diocletian and Constantine,
where the public buildings were still adorned with the sculptures of
Polycletus and the paintings of Apelles, and where laborious pedants,
themselves destitute of taste, sense, and spirit, could still read and
interpret the masterpieces of Sophocles, of Demosthenes, and of Plato.
From this communion Britain was cut off. Her shores were, to the
polished race which dwelt by the Bosphorus, objects of a mysterious
horror, such as that with which the Ionians of the age of Homer had
regarded the Straits of Scylla and the city of the Laestrygonian
cannibals. There was one province of our island in which, as Procopius
had been told, the ground was covered with serpents, and the air was
such that no man could inhale it and live. To this desolate region the
spirits of the departed were ferried over from the land of the Franks at
midnight. A strange race of fishermen performed the ghastly office. The
speech of the dead was distinctly heard by the boatmen, their weight
made the keel sink deep in the water; but their forms were invisible
to mortal eye. Such were the marvels which an able historian, the
contemporary of Belisarius, of Simplicius, and of Tribonian, gravely
related in the rich and polite Constantinople, touching the country in
which the founder of Constantinople had assumed the imperial purple.
Concerning all the other provinces of the Western Empire we have
continuous information. It is only in Britain that an age of fable
completely separates two ages of truth. Odoacer and Totila, Euric and
Thrasimund, Clovis, Fredegunda, and Brunechild, are historical men and
women. But Hengist and Horsa, Vortigern and Rowena, Arthur and Mordred
are mythical persons, whose very existence may be questioned, and whose
adventures must be classed with those of Hercules and Romulus.

At length the darkness begins to break; and the country which had been
lost to view as Britain reappears as England. The conversion of the
Saxon colonists to Christianity was the first of a long series of
salutary revolutions. It is true that the Church had been deeply
corrupted both by that superstition and by that philosophy against which
she had long contended, and over which she had at last triumphed. She
had given a too easy admission to doctrines borrowed from the ancient
schools, and to rites borrowed from the ancient temples. Roman policy
and Gothic ignorance, Grecian ingenuity and Syrian asceticism, had
contributed to deprave her. Yet she retained enough of the sublime
theology and benevolent morality of her earlier days to elevate many
intellects, and to purify many hearts. Some things also which at a later
period were justly regarded as among her chief blemishes were, in the
seventh century, and long afterwards, among her chief merits. That
the sacerdotal order should encroach on the functions of the civil
magistrate would, in our time, be a great evil. But that which in an age
of good government is an evil may, in an ago of grossly bad government,
be a blessing. It is better that mankind should be governed by wise
laws well administered, and by an enlightened public opinion, than by
priestcraft: but it is better that men should be governed by priestcraft
than by brute violence, by such a prelate as Dunstan than by such
a warrior as Penda. A society sunk in ignorance, and ruled by mere
physical force, has great reason to rejoice when a class, of which the
influence is intellectual and moral, rises to ascendancy. Such a class
will doubtless abuse its power: but mental power, even when abused,
is still a nobler and better power than that which consists merely in
corporeal strength. We read in our Saxon chronicles of tyrants, who,
when at the height of greatness, were smitten with remorse, who abhorred
the pleasures and dignities which they had purchased by guilt, who
abdicated their crowns, and who sought to atone for their offences by
cruel penances and incessant prayers. These stories have drawn forth
bitter expressions of contempt from some writers who, while they boasted
of liberality, were in truth as narrow-minded as any monk of the dark
ages, and whose habit was to apply to all events in the history of the
world the standard received in the Parisian society of the eighteenth
century. Yet surely a system which, however deformed by superstition,
introduced strong moral restraints into communities previously governed
only by vigour of muscle and by audacity of spirit, a system which
taught the fiercest and mightiest ruler that he was, like his meanest
bondman, a responsible being, might have seemed to deserve a more
respectful mention from philosophers and philanthropists.

The same observations will apply to the contempt with which, in the
last century, it was fashionable to speak of the pilgrimages, the
sanctuaries, the crusades, and the monastic institutions of the middle
ages. In times when men were scarcely ever induced to travel by liberal
curiosity, or by the pursuit of gain, it was better that the rude
inhabitant of the North should visit Italy and the East as a pilgrim,
than that he should never see anything but those squalid cabins and
uncleared woods amidst which he was born. In times when life and when
female honour were exposed to daily risk from tyrants and marauders,
it was better that the precinct of a shrine should be regarded with
an irrational awe, than that there should be no refuge inaccessible to
cruelty and licentiousness. In times when statesmen were incapable
of forming extensive political combinations, it was better that the
Christian nations should be roused and united for the recovery of the
Holy Sepulchre, than that they should, one by one, be overwhelmed by
the Mahometan power. Whatever reproach may, at a later period, have been
justly thrown on the indolence and luxury of religious orders, it was
surely good that, in an age of ignorance and violence, there should be
quiet cloisters and gardens, in which the arts of peace could be safely
cultivated, in which gentle and contemplative natures could find an
asylum, in which one brother could employ himself in transcribing the
Æneid of Virgil, and another in meditating the Analytics of Aristotle,
in which he who had a genius for art might illuminate a martyrology or
carve a crucifix, and in which he who had a turn for natural philosophy
might make experiments on the properties of plants and minerals. Had
not such retreats been scattered here and there, among the huts of
a miserable peasantry, and the castles of a ferocious aristocracy,
European society would have consisted merely of beasts of burden and
beasts of prey. The Church has many times been compared by divines
to the ark of which we read in the Book of Genesis: but never was the
resemblance more perfect than during that evil time when she alone rode,
amidst darkness and tempest, on the deluge beneath which all the great
works of ancient power and wisdom lay entombed, bearing within her that
feeble germ from which a Second and more glorious civilisation was to
spring.

Even the spiritual supremacy arrogated by the Pope was, in the dark
ages, productive of far more good than evil. Its effect was to unite the
nations of Western Europe in one great commonwealth. What the Olympian
chariot course and the Pythian oracle were to all the Greek cities, from
Trebizond to Marseilles, Rome and her Bishop were to all Christians
of the Latin communion, from Calabria to the Hebrides. Thus grew up
sentiments of enlarged benevolence. Races separated from each other by
seas and mountains acknowledged a fraternal tie and a common code of
public law. Even in war, the cruelty of the conqueror was not seldom
mitigated by the recollection that he and his vanquished enemies were
all members of one great federation.

Into this federation our Saxon ancestors were now admitted. A regular
communication was opened between our shores and that part of Europe in
which the traces of ancient power and policy were yet discernible.
Many noble monuments which have since been destroyed or defaced still
retained their pristine magnificence; and travellers, to whom Livy and
Sallust were unintelligible, might gain from the Roman aqueducts and
temples some faint notion of Roman history. The dome of Agrippa, still
glittering with bronze, the mausoleum of Adrian, not yet deprived of its
columns and statues, the Flavian amphitheatre, not yet degraded into a
quarry, told to the rude English pilgrims some part of the story of that
great civilised world which had passed away. The islanders returned,
with awe deeply impressed on their half opened minds, and told the
wondering inhabitants of the hovels of London and York that, near the
grave of Saint Peter, a mighty race, now extinct, had piled up buildings
which would never be dissolved till the judgment day. Learning followed
in the train of Christianity. The poetry and eloquence of the Augustan
age was assiduously studied in Mercian and Northumbrian monasteries. The
names of Bede and Alcuin were justly celebrated throughout Europe. Such
was the state of our country when, in the ninth century, began the last
great migration of the northern barbarians.

During many years Denmark and Scandinavia continued to pour forth
innumerable pirates, distinguished by strength, by valour, by merciless
ferocity, and by hatred of the Christian name. No country suffered so
much from these invaders as England. Her coast lay near to the ports
whence they sailed; nor was any shire so far distant from the sea as
to be secure from attack. The same atrocities which had attended the
victory of the Saxon over the Celt were now, after the lapse of ages,
suffered by the Saxon at the hand of the Dane. Civilization,--just as
it began to rise, was met by this blow, and sank down once more. Large
colonies of adventurers from the Baltic established themselves on the
eastern shores of our island, spread gradually westward, and, supported
by constant reinforcements from beyond the sea, aspired to the dominion
of the whole realm. The struggle between the two fierce Teutonic breeds
lasted through six generations. Each was alternately paramount. Cruel
massacres followed by cruel retribution, provinces wasted, convents
plundered, and cities rased to the ground, make up the greater part of
the history of those evil days. At length the North ceased to send forth
a constant stream of fresh depredators; and from that time the mutual
aversion of the races began to subside. Intermarriage became frequent.
The Danes learned the religion of the Saxons; and thus one cause
of deadly animosity was removed. The Danish and Saxon tongues, both
dialects of one widespread language, were blended together. But the
distinction between the two nations was by no means effaced, when
an event took place which prostrated both, in common slavery and
degradation, at the feet of a third people.

The Normans were then the foremost race of Christendom. Their valour and
ferocity had made them conspicuous among the rovers whom Scandinavia had
sent forth to ravage Western Europe. Their sails were long the terror of
both coasts of the Channel. Their arms were repeatedly carried far into
the heart of: the Carlovingian empire, and were victorious under the
walls of Maestricht and Paris. At length one of the feeble heirs of
Charlemagne ceded to the strangers a fertile province, watered by
a noble river, and contiguous to the sea which was their favourite
element. In that province they founded a mighty state, which gradually
extended its influence over the neighbouring principalities of Britanny
and Maine. Without laying aside that dauntless valour which had been the
terror of every land from the Elbe to the Pyrenees, the Normans rapidly
acquired all, and more than all, the knowledge and refinement which they
found in the country where they settled. Their courage secured their
territory against foreign invasion. They established internal order,
such as had long been unknown in the Frank empire. They embraced
Christianity; and with Christianity they learned a great part of what
the clergy had to teach. They abandoned their native speech, and adopted
the French tongue, in which the Latin was the predominant element. They
speedily raised their new language to a dignity and importance which it
had never before possessed. They found it a barbarous jargon; they fixed
it in writing; and they employed it in legislation, in poetry, and in
romance. They renounced that brutal intemperance to which all the other
branches of the great German family were too much inclined. The polite
luxury of the Norman presented a striking contrast to the coarse
voracity and drunkenness of his Saxon and Danish neighbours. He loved
to display his magnificence, not in huge piles of food and hogsheads of
strong drink, but in large and stately edifices, rich armour, gallant
horses, choice falcons, well ordered tournaments, banquets delicate
rather than abundant, and wines remarkable rather for their exquisite
flavour than for their intoxicating power. That chivalrous spirit, which
has exercised so powerful an influence on the politics, morals, and
manners of all the European nations, was found in the highest exaltation
among the Norman nobles. Those nobles were distinguished by their
graceful bearing and insinuating address. They were distinguished also
by their skill in negotiation, and by a natural eloquence which they
assiduously cultivated. It was the boast of one of their historians that
the Norman gentlemen were orators from the cradle. But their chief
fame was derived from their military exploits. Every country, from
the Atlantic Ocean to the Dead Sea, witnessed the prodigies of their
discipline and valour. One Norman knight, at the head of a handful of
warriors, scattered the Celts of Connaught. Another founded the monarchy
of the Two Sicilies, and saw the emperors both of the East and of the
West fly before his arms. A third, the Ulysses of the first crusade, was
invested by his fellow soldiers with the sovereignty of Antioch; and
a fourth, the Tancred whose name lives in the great poem of Tasso, was
celebrated through Christendom as the bravest and most generous of the
deliverers of the Holy Sepulchre.

The vicinity of so remarkable a people early began to produce an effect
on the public mind of England. Before the Conquest, English princes
received their education in Normandy. English sees and English estates
were bestowed on Normans. The French of Normandy was familiarly spoken
in the palace of Westminster. The court of Rouen seems to have been
to the court of Edward the Confessor what the court of Versailles long
afterwards was to the court of Charles the Second.

The battle of Hastings, and the events which followed it, not only
placed a Duke of Normandy on the English throne, but gave up the whole
population of England to the tyranny of the Norman race. The subjugation
of a nation by a nation has seldom, even in Asia, been more complete.
The country was portioned out among the captains of the invaders.
Strong military institutions, closely connected with the institution of
property, enabled the foreign conquerors to oppress the children of the
soil. A cruel penal code, cruelly enforced, guarded the privileges,
and even the sports, of the alien tyrants. Yet the subject race, though
beaten down and trodden underfoot, still made its sting felt. Some bold
men, the favourite heroes of our oldest ballads, betook themselves to
the woods, and there, in defiance of curfew laws and forest laws, waged
a predatory war against their oppressors. Assassination was an event of
daily occurrence. Many Normans suddenly disappeared leaving no trace.
The corpses of many were found bearing the marks of violence. Death by
torture was denounced against the murderers, and strict search was
made for them, but generally in vain; for the whole nation was in a
conspiracy to screen them. It was at length thought necessary to lay
a heavy fine on every Hundred in which a person of French extraction
should be found slain; and this regulation was followed up by another
regulation, providing that every person who was found slain should be
supposed to be a Frenchman, unless he was proved to be a Saxon.

During the century and a half which followed the Conquest, there is, to
speak strictly, no English history. The French Kings of England
rose, indeed, to an eminence which was the wonder and dread of all
neighbouring nations. They conquered Ireland. They received the homage
of Scotland. By their valour, by their policy, by their fortunate
matrimonial alliances, they became far more popular on the Continent
than their liege lords the Kings of France. Asia, as well as Europe,
was dazzled by the power and glory of our tyrants. Arabian chroniclers
recorded with unwilling admiration the fall of Acre, the defence of
Joppa, and the victorious march to Ascalon; and Arabian mothers
long awed their infants to silence with the name of the lionhearted
Plantagenet. At one time it seemed that the line of Hugh Capet was about
to end as the Merovingian and Carlovingian lines had ended, and that a
single great monarchy would spread from the Orkneys to the Pyrenees. So
strong an association is established in most minds between the greatness
of a sovereign and the greatness of the nation which he rules, that
almost every historian of England has expatiated with a sentiment of
exultation on the power and splendour of her foreign masters, and has
lamented the decay of that power and splendour as a calamity to our
country. This is, in truth, as absurd as it would be in a Haytian negro
of our time to dwell with national pride on the greatness of Lewis the
Fourteenth, and to speak of Blenheim and Ramilies with patriotic regret
and shame. The Conqueror and his descendants to the fourth generation
were not Englishmen: most of them were born in France: they spent the
greater part of their lives in France: their ordinary speech was French:
almost every high office in their gift was filled by a Frenchman: every
acquisition which they made on the Continent estranged them more and
more from the population of our island. One of the ablest among them
indeed attempted to win the hearts of his English subjects by espousing
an English princess. But, by many of his barons, this marriage was
regarded as a marriage between a white planter and a quadroon girl would
now be regarded in Virginia. In history he is known by the honourable
surname of Beauclerc; but, in his own time, his own countrymen
called him by a Saxon nickname, in contemptuous allusion to his Saxon
connection.

Had the Plantagenets, as at one time seemed likely, succeeded in uniting
all France under their government, it is probable that England would
never have had an independent existence. Her princes, her lords, her
prelates, would have been men differing in race and language from
the artisans and the tillers of the earth. The revenues of her great
proprietors would have been spent in festivities and diversions on the
banks of the Seine. The noble language of Milton and Burke would have
remained a rustic dialect, without a literature, a fixed grammar, or a
fixed orthography, and would have been contemptuously abandoned to the
use of boors. No man of English extraction would have risen to eminence,
except by becoming in speech and habits a Frenchman.

England owes her escape from such calamities to an event which her
historians have generally represented as disastrous. Her interest was so
directly opposed to the interests of her rulers that she had no hope but
in their errors and misfortunes. The talents and even the virtues of her
first six French Kings were a curse to her. The follies and vices of the
seventh were her salvation. Had John inherited the great qualities of
his father, of Henry Beauclerc, or of the Conqueror, nay, had he even
possessed the martial courage of Stephen or of Richard, and had the King
of France at the same time been as incapable as all the other successors
of Hugh Capet had been, the House of Plantagenet must have risen to
unrivalled ascendancy in Europe. But, just at this conjuncture, France,
for the first time since the death of Charlemagne, was governed by a
prince of great firmness and ability. On the other hand England,
which, since the battle of Hastings, had been ruled generally by wise
statesmen, always by brave soldiers, fell under the dominion of a
trifler and a coward. From that moment her prospects brightened. John
was driven from Normandy. The Norman nobles were compelled to make their
election between the island and the continent. Shut up by the sea with
the people whom they had hitherto oppressed and despised, they gradually
came to regard England as their country, and the English as their
countrymen. The two races, so long hostile, soon found that they had
common interests and common enemies. Both were alike aggrieved by the
tyranny of a bad king. Both were alike indignant at the favour shown by
the court to the natives of Poitou and Aquitaine. The great grandsons of
those who had fought under William and the great grandsons of those who
had fought under Harold began to draw near to each other in friendship;
and the first pledge of their reconciliation was the Great Charter, won
by their united exertions, and framed for their common benefit.

Here commences the history of the English nation. The history of the
preceding events is the history of wrongs inflicted and sustained by
various tribes, which indeed all dwelt on English ground, but which
regarded each other with aversion such as has scarcely ever existed
between communities separated by physical barriers. For even the mutual
animosity of countries at war with each other is languid when compared
with the animosity of nations which, morally separated, are yet locally
intermingled. In no country has the enmity of race been carried farther
than in England. In no country has that enmity been more completely
effaced. The stages of the process by which the hostile elements were
melted down into one homogeneous mass are not accurately known to us.
But it is certain that, when John became King, the distinction between
Saxons and Normans was strongly marked, and that before the end of the
reign of his grandson it had almost disappeared. In the time of Richard
the First, the ordinary imprecation of a Norman gentleman was "May I
become an Englishman!" His ordinary form of indignant denial was "Do you
take me for an Englishman?" The descendant of such a gentleman a hundred
years later was proud of the English name.

The sources of the noblest rivers which spread fertility over
continents, and bear richly laden fleets to the sea, are to be sought
in wild and barren mountain tracts, incorrectly laid down in maps,
and rarely explored by travellers. To such a tract the history of our
country during the thirteenth century may not unaptly be compared.
Sterile and obscure as is that portion of our annals, it is there that
we must seek for the origin of our freedom, our prosperity, and our
glory. Then it was that the great English people was formed, that the
national character began to exhibit those peculiarities which it has
ever since retained, and that our fathers became emphatically islanders,
islanders not merely in geographical position, but in their politics,
their feelings, and their manners. Then first appeared with distinctness
that constitution which has ever since, through all changes,
preserved its identity; that constitution of which all the other free
constitutions in the world are copies, and which, in spite of some
defects, deserves to be regarded as the best under which any great
society has ever yet existed during many ages. Then it was that the
House of Commons, the archetype of all the representative assemblies
which now meet, either in the old or in the new world, held its first
sittings. Then it was that the common law rose to the dignity of
a science, and rapidly became a not unworthy rival of the imperial
jurisprudence. Then it was that the courage of those sailors who manned
the rude barks of the Cinque Ports first made the flag of England
terrible on the seas. Then it was that the most ancient colleges which
still exist at both the great national seats of learning were founded.
Then was formed that language, less musical indeed than the languages
of the south, but in force, in richness, in aptitude for all the highest
purposes of the poet, the philosopher, and the orator, inferior to the
tongue of Greece alone. Then too appeared the first faint dawn of that
noble literature, the most splendid and the most durable of the many
glories of England.

Early in the fourteenth century the amalgamation of the races was
all but complete; and it was soon made manifest, by signs not to be
mistaken, that a people inferior to none existing in the world had been
formed by the mixture of three branches of the great Teutonic family
with each other, and with the aboriginal Britons. There was, indeed,
scarcely anything in common between the England to which John had been
chased by Philip Augustus, and the England from which the armies of
Edward the Third went forth to conquer France.

A period of more than a hundred years followed, during which the chief
object of the English was to establish, by force of arms, a great empire
on the Continent. The claim of Edward to the inheritance occupied by
the House of Valois was a claim in which it might seem that his subjects
were little interested. But the passion for conquest spread fast from
the prince to the people. The war differed widely from the wars
which the Plantagenets of the twelfth century had waged against the
descendants of Hugh Capet. For the success of Henry the Second, or of
Richard the First, would have made England a province of France. The
effect of the successes of Edward the Third and Henry the Fifth was to
make France, for a time, a province of England. The disdain with which,
in the twelfth century, the conquerors from the Continent had regarded
the islanders, was now retorted by the islanders on the people of the
Continent. Every yeoman from Kent to Northumberland valued himself as
one of a race born for victory and dominion, and looked down with
scorn on the nation before which his ancestors had trembled. Even those
knights of Gascony and Guienne who had fought gallantly under the Black
Prince were regarded by the English as men of an inferior breed, and
were contemptuously excluded from honourable and lucrative commands. In
no long time our ancestors altogether lost sight of the original
ground of quarrel. They began to consider the crown of France as a
mere appendage to the crown of England; and, when in violation of the
ordinary law of succession, they transferred the crown of England to the
House of Lancaster, they seem to have thought that the right of Richard
the Second to the crown of France passed, as of course, to that house.
The zeal and vigour which they displayed present a remarkable contrast
to the torpor of the French, who were far more deeply interested in
the event of the struggle. The most splendid victories recorded in the
history of the middle ages were gained at this time, against great odds,
by the English armies. Victories indeed they were of which a nation may
justly be proud; for they are to be attributed to the moral superiority
of the victors, a superiority which was most striking in the lowest
ranks. The knights of England found worthy rivals in the knights of
France. Chandos encountered an equal foe in Du Guesclin. But France had
no infantry that dared to face the English bows and bills. A French King
was brought prisoner to London. An English King was crowned at Paris.
The banner of St. George was carried far beyond the Pyrenees and the
Alps. On the south of the Ebro the English won a great battle, which for
a time decided the fate of Leon and Castile; and the English Companies
obtained a terrible preeminence among the bands of warriors who let out
their weapons for hire to the princes and commonwealths of Italy.

Nor were the arts of peace neglected by our fathers during that stirring
period. While France was wasted by war, till she at length found in
her own desolation a miserable defence against invaders, the English
gathered in their harvests, adorned their cities, pleaded, traded, and
studied in security. Many of our noblest architectural monuments belong
to that age. Then rose the fair chapels of New College and of Saint
George, the nave of Winchester and the choir of York, the spire of
Salisbury and the majestic towers of Lincoln. A copious and forcible
language, formed by an infusion of French into German, was now the
common property of the aristocracy and of the people. Nor was it long
before genius began to apply that admirable machine to worthy purposes.
While English warriors, leaving behind them the devastated provinces of
France, entered Valladolid in triumph, and spread terror to the gates of
Florence, English poets depicted in vivid tints all the wide variety
of human manners and fortunes, and English thinkers aspired to know, or
dared to doubt, where bigots had been content to wonder and to believe.
The same age which produced the Black Prince and Derby, Chandos and
Hawkwood, produced also Geoffrey Chaucer and John Wycliffe.

In so splendid and imperial a manner did the English people, properly
so called, first take place among the nations of the world. Yet while
we contemplate with pleasure the high and commanding qualities which
our forefathers displayed, we cannot but admit that the end which they
pursued was an end condemned both by humanity and by enlightened policy,
and that the reverses which compelled them, after a long and bloody
struggle, to relinquish the hope of establishing a great continental
empire, were really blessings in the guise of disasters. The spirit of
the French was at last aroused: they began to oppose a vigorous national
resistance to the foreign conquerors; and from that time the skill
of the English captains and the courage of the English soldiers were,
happily for mankind, exerted in vain. After many desperate struggles,
and with many bitter regrets, our ancestors gave up the contest. Since
that age no British government has ever seriously and steadily pursued
the design of making great conquests on the Continent. The people,
indeed, continued to cherish with pride the recollection of Cressy, of
Poitiers, and of Agincourt. Even after the lapse of many years it was
easy to fire their blood and to draw forth their subsidies by promising
them an expedition for the conquest of France. But happily the energies
of our country have been directed to better objects; and she now
occupies in the history of mankind a place far more glorious than if
she had, as at one time seemed not improbable, acquired by the sword
an ascendancy similar to that which formerly belonged to the Roman
republic.

Cooped up once more within the limits of the island, the warlike people
employed in civil strife those arms which had been the terror of Europe.
The means of profuse expenditure had long been drawn by the English
barons from the oppressed provinces of France. That source of supply
was gone: but the ostentatious and luxurious habits which prosperity had
engendered still remained; and the great lords, unable to gratify their
tastes by plundering the French, were eager to plunder each other.
The realm to which they were now confined would not, in the phrase of
Comines, the most judicious observer of that time, suffice for them all.
Two aristocratical factions, headed by two branches of the royal family,
engaged in a long and fierce struggle for supremacy. As the animosity
of those factions did not really arise from the dispute about the
succession it lasted long after all ground of dispute about the
succession was removed. The party of the Red Rose survived the last
prince who claimed the crown in right of Henry the Fourth. The party
of the White Rose survived the marriage of Richmond and Elizabeth.
Left without chiefs who had any decent show of right, the adherents of
Lancaster rallied round a line of bastards, and the adherents of York
set up a succession of impostors. When, at length, many aspiring nobles
had perished on the field of battle or by the hands of the executioner,
when many illustrious houses had disappeared forever from history, when
those great families which remained had been exhausted and sobered by
calamities, it was universally acknowledged that the claims of all the
contending Plantagenets were united in the house of Tudor.

Meanwhile a change was proceeding infinitely more momentous than the
acquisition or loss of any province, than the rise or fall of
any dynasty. Slavery and the evils by which slavery is everywhere
accompanied were fast disappearing.

It is remarkable that the two greatest and most salutary social
revolutions which have taken place in England, that revolution which, in
the thirteenth century, put an end to the tyranny of nation over nation,
and that revolution which, a few generations later, put an end to the
property of man in man, were silently and imperceptibly effected. They
struck contemporary observers with no surprise, and have received from
historians a very scanty measure of attention. They were brought about
neither by legislative regulations nor by physical force. Moral causes
noiselessly effaced first the distinction between Norman and Saxon, and
then the distinction between master and slave. None can venture to fix
the precise moment at which either distinction ceased. Some faint traces
of the old Norman feeling might perhaps have been found late in the
fourteenth century. Some faint traces of the institution of villenage
were detected by the curious so late as the days of the Stuarts; nor has
that institution ever, to this hour, been abolished by statute.

It would be most unjust not to acknowledge that the chief agent in
these two great deliverances was religion; and it may perhaps be doubted
whether a purer religion might not have been found a less efficient
agent. The benevolent spirit of the Christian morality is undoubtedly
adverse to distinctions of caste. But to the Church of Rome such
distinctions are peculiarly odious; for they are incompatible with other
distinctions which are essential to her system. She ascribes to every
priest a mysterious dignity which entitles him to the reverence of every
layman; and she does not consider any man as disqualified, by reason
of his nation or of his family, for the priesthood. Her doctrines
respecting the sacerdotal character, however erroneous they may be, have
repeatedly mitigated some of the worst evils which can afflict society.
That superstition cannot be regarded as unmixedly noxious which, in
regions cursed by the tyranny of race over race, creates an aristocracy
altogether independent of race, inverts the relation between the
oppressor and the oppressed, and compels the hereditary master to kneel
before the spiritual tribunal of the hereditary bondman. To this day,
in some countries where negro slavery exists, Popery appears in
advantageous contrast to other forms of Christianity. It is notorious
that the antipathy between the European and African races is by no
means so strong at Rio Janerio as at Washington. In our own country this
peculiarity of the Roman Catholic system produced, during the middle
ages, many salutary effects. It is true that, shortly after the battle
of Hastings, Saxon prelates and abbots were violently deposed, and that
ecclesiastical adventurers from the Continent were intruded by hundreds
into lucrative benefices. Yet even then pious divines of Norman blood
raised their voices against such a violation of the constitution of the
Church, refused to accept mitres from the hands of William, and charged
him, on the peril of his soul, not to forget that the vanquished
islanders were his fellow Christians. The first protector whom the
English found among the dominant caste was Archbishop Anselm. At a
time when the English name was a reproach, and when all the civil and
military dignities of the kingdom were supposed to belong exclusively
to the countrymen of the Conqueror, the despised race learned, with
transports of delight, that one of themselves, Nicholas Breakspear,
had been elevated to the papal throne, and had held out his foot to be
kissed by ambassadors sprung from the noblest houses of Normandy. It was
a national as well as a religious feeling that drew great multitudes to
the shrine of Becket, whom they regarded as the enemy of their enemies.
Whether he was a Norman or a Saxon may be doubted: but there is no doubt
that he perished by Norman hands, and that the Saxons cherished his
memory with peculiar tenderness and veneration, and, in their popular
poetry, represented him as one of their own race. A successor of Becket
was foremost among the refractory magnates who obtained that charter
which secured the privileges both of the Norman barons and of the Saxon
yeomanry. How great a part the Roman Catholic ecclesiastics subsequently
had in the abolition of villenage we learn from the unexceptionable
testimony of Sir Thomas Smith, one of the ablest Protestant counsellors
of Elizabeth. When the dying slaveholder asked for the last sacraments,
his spiritual attendants regularly adjured him, as he loved his soul,
to emancipate his brethren for whom Christ had died. So successfully had
the Church used her formidable machinery that, before the Reformation
came, she had enfranchised almost all the bondmen in the kingdom
except her own, who, to do her justice, seem to have been very tenderly
treated.

There can be no doubt that, when these two great revolutions had been
effected, our forefathers were by far the best governed people in
Europe. During three hundred years the social system had been in a
constant course of improvement. Under the first Plantagenets there had
been barons able to bid defiance to the sovereign, and peasants degraded
to the level of the swine and oxen which they tended. The exorbitant
power of the baron had been gradually reduced. The condition of the
peasant had been gradually elevated. Between the aristocracy and
the working people had sprung up a middle class, agricultural and
commercial. There was still, it may be, more inequality than is
favourable to the happiness and virtue of our species: but no man was
altogether above the restraints of law; and no man was altogether below
its protection.

That the political institutions of England were, at this early period,
regarded by the English with pride and affection, and by the most
enlightened men of neighbouring nations with admiration and envy,
is proved by the clearest evidence. But touching the nature of these
institutions there has been much dishonest and acrimonious controversy.

The historical literature of England has indeed suffered grievously from
a circumstance which has not a little contributed to her prosperity. The
change, great as it is, which her polity has undergone during the
last six centuries, has been the effect of gradual development, not of
demolition and reconstruction. The present constitution of our country
is, to the constitution under which she flourished five hundred years
ago, what the tree is to the sapling, what the man is to the boy. The
alteration has been great. Yet there never was a moment at which the
chief part of what existed was not old. A polity thus formed must abound
in anomalies. But for the evils arising from mere anomalies we have
ample compensation. Other societies possess written constitutions
more symmetrical. But no other society has yet succeeded in uniting
revolution with prescription, progress with stability, the energy of
youth with the majesty of immemorial antiquity.

This great blessing, however, has its drawbacks: and one of those
drawbacks is that every source of information as to our early history
has been poisoned by party spirit. As there is no country where
statesmen have been so much under the influence of the past, so there is
no country where historians have been so much under the influence of
the present. Between these two things, indeed, there is a natural
connection. Where history is regarded merely as a picture of life and
manners, or as a collection of experiments from which general maxims
of civil wisdom may be drawn, a writer lies under no very pressing
temptation to misrepresent transactions of ancient date. But where
history is regarded as a repository of titledeeds, on which the rights
of governments and nations depend, the motive to falsification becomes
almost irresistible. A Frenchman is not now impelled by any strong
interest either to exaggerate or to underrate the power of the Kings of
the house of Valois. The privileges of the States General, of the States
of Britanny, of the States of Burgundy, are to him matters of as little
practical importance as the constitution of the Jewish Sanhedrim or of
the Amphictyonic Council. The gulph of a great revolution completely
separates the new from the old system. No such chasm divides the
existence of the English nation into two distinct parts. Our laws and
customs have never been lost in general and irreparable ruin. With us
the precedents of the middle ages are still valid precedents, and are
still cited, on the gravest occasions, by the most eminent Statesmen.
For example, when King George the Third was attacked by the malady which
made him incapable of performing his regal functions, and when the most
distinguished lawyers and politicians differed widely as to the course
which ought, in such circumstances, to be pursued, the Houses of
Parliament would not proceed to discuss any plan of regency till all
the precedents which were to be found in our annals, from the earliest
times, had been collected and arranged. Committees were appointed to
examine the ancient records of the realm. The first case reported was
that of the year 1217: much importance was attached to the cases of
1326, of 1377, and of 1422: but the case which was justly considered
as most in point was that of 1455. Thus in our country the dearest
interests of parties have frequently been on the results of the
researches of antiquaries. The inevitable consequence was that our
antiquaries conducted their researches in the spirit of partisans.

It is therefore not surprising that those who have written, concerning
the limits of prerogative and liberty in the old polity of England
should generally have shown the temper, not of judges, but of angry and
uncandid advocates. For they were discussing, not a speculative matter,
but a matter which had a direct and practical connection with the most
momentous and exciting disputes of their own day. From the commencement
of the long contest between the Parliament and the Stuarts down to the
time when the pretensions of the Stuarts ceased to be formidable, few
questions were practically more important than the question whether the
administration of that family had or had not been in accordance with the
ancient constitution of the kingdom. This question could be decided only
by reference to the records of preceding reigns. Bracton and Fleta, the
Mirror of Justice and the Rolls of Parliament, were ransacked to find
pretexts for the excesses of the Star Chamber on one side, and of the
High Court of Justice on the other. During a long course of years every
Whig historian was anxious to prove that the old English government was
all but republican, every Tory historian to prove that it was all but
despotic.

With such feelings, both parties looked into the chronicles of the
middle ages. Both readily found what they sought; and both obstinately
refused to see anything but what they sought. The champions of the
Stuarts could easily point out instances of oppression exercised on
the subject. The defenders of the Roundheads could as easily produce
instances of determined and successful resistance offered to the Crown.
The Tories quoted, from ancient writings, expressions almost as servile
as were heard from the pulpit of Mainwaring. The Whigs discovered
expressions as bold and severe as any that resounded from the judgment
seat of Bradshaw. One set of writers adduced numerous instances in which
Kings had extorted money without the authority of Parliament. Another
set cited cases in which the Parliament had assumed to itself the power
of inflicting punishment on Kings. Those who saw only one half of the
evidence would have concluded that the Plantagenets were as absolute
as the Sultans of Turkey: those who saw only the other half would have
concluded that the Plantagenets had as little real power as the Doges
of Venice; and both conclusions would have been equally remote from the
truth.

The old English government was one of a class of limited monarchies
which sprang up in Western Europe during the middle ages, and which,
notwithstanding many diversities, bore to one another a strong family
likeness. That there should have been such a likeness is not strange The
countries in which those monarchies arose had been provinces of the same
great civilised empire, and had been overrun and conquered, about the
same time, by tribes of the same rude and warlike nation. They were
members of the same great coalition against Islam. They were in
communion with the same superb and ambitious Church. Their polity
naturally took the same form. They had institutions derived partly from
imperial Rome, partly from papal Rome, partly from the old Germany.
All had Kings; and in all the kingly office became by degrees strictly
hereditary. All had nobles bearing titles which had originally indicated
military rank. The dignity of knighthood, the rules of heraldry, were
common to all. All had richly endowed ecclesiastical establishments,
municipal corporations enjoying large franchises, and senates whose
consent was necessary to the validity of some public acts.

Of these kindred constitutions the English was, from an early period,
justly reputed the best. The prerogatives of the sovereign were
undoubtedly extensive. The spirit of religion and the spirit of chivalry
concurred to exalt his dignity. The sacred oil had been poured on his
head. It was no disparagement to the bravest and noblest knights to
kneel at his feet. His person was inviolable. He alone was entitled to
convoke the Estates of the realm: he could at his pleasure dismiss them;
and his assent was necessary to all their legislative acts. He was the
chief of the executive administration, the sole organ of communication
with foreign powers, the captain of the military and naval forces of the
state, the fountain of justice, of mercy, and of honour. He had large
powers for the regulation of trade. It was by him that money was
coined, that weights and measures were fixed, that marts and havens
were appointed. His ecclesiastical patronage was immense. His hereditary
revenues, economically administered, sufficed to meet the ordinary
charges of government. His own domains were of vast extent. He was also
feudal lord paramount of the whole soil of his kingdom, and, in that
capacity, possessed many lucrative and many formidable rights, which
enabled him to annoy and depress those who thwarted him, and to enrich
and aggrandise, without any cost to himself, those who enjoyed his
favour.

But his power, though ample, was limited by three great constitutional
principles, so ancient that none can say when they began to exist,
so potent that their natural development, continued through many
generations, has produced the order of things under which we now live.

First, the King could not legislate without the consent of his
Parliament. Secondly, he could impose no tax without the consent of
his Parliament. Thirdly, he was bound to conduct the executive
administration according to the laws of the land, and, if he broke those
laws, his advisers and his agents were responsible.

No candid Tory will deny that these principles had, five hundred years
ago, acquired the authority of fundamental rules. On the other hand,
no candid Whig will affirm that they were, till a later period, cleared
from all ambiguity, or followed out to all their consequences. A
constitution of the middle ages was not, like a constitution of the
eighteenth or nineteenth century, created entire by a single act,
and fully set forth in a single document. It is only in a refined
and speculative age that a polity is constructed on system. In rude
societies the progress of government resembles the progress of language
and of versification. Rude societies have language, and often copious
and energetic language: but they have no scientific grammar, no
definitions of nouns and verbs, no names for declensions, moods, tenses,
and voices. Rude societies have versification, and often versification
of great power and sweetness: but they have no metrical canons; and the
minstrel whose numbers, regulated solely by his ear, are the delight
of his audience, would himself be unable to say of how many dactyls and
trochees each of his lines consists. As eloquence exists before syntax,
and song before prosody, so government may exist in a high degree
of excellence long before the limits of legislative, executive, and
judicial power have been traced with precision.

It was thus in our country. The line which bounded the royal
prerogative, though in general sufficiently clear, had not everywhere
been drawn with accuracy and distinctness. There was, therefore, near
the border some debatable ground on which incursions and reprisals
continued to take place, till, after ages of strife, plain and durable
landmarks were at length set up. It may be instructive to note in what
way, and to what extent, our ancient sovereigns were in the habit of
violating the three great principles by which the liberties of the
nation were protected.

No English King has ever laid claim to the general legislative power.
The most violent and imperious Plantagenet never fancied himself
competent to enact, without the consent of his great council, that a
jury should consist of ten persons instead of twelve, that a widow's
dower should be a fourth part instead of a third, that perjury should
be a felony, or that the custom of gavelkind should be introduced into
Yorkshire. [2] But the King had the power of pardoning offenders; and
there is one point at which the power of pardoning and the power of
legislating seem to fade into each other, and may easily, at least in a
simple age, be confounded. A penal statute is virtually annulled if the
penalties which it imposes are regularly remitted as often as they are
incurred. The sovereign was undoubtedly competent to remit penalties
without limit. He was therefore competent to annul virtually a penal
statute. It might seem that there could be no serious objection to his
doing formally what he might do virtually. Thus, with the help of subtle
and courtly lawyers, grew up, on the doubtful frontier which separates
executive from legislative functions, that great anomaly known as the
dispensing power.

That the King could not impose taxes without the consent of Parliament
is admitted to have been, from time immemorial, a fundamental law of
England. It was among the articles which John was compelled by the
Barons to sign. Edward the First ventured to break through the rule:
but, able, powerful, and popular as he was, he encountered an opposition
to which he found it expedient to yield. He covenanted accordingly in
express terms, for himself and his heirs, that they would never again
levy any aid without the assent and goodwill of the Estates of the
realm. His powerful and victorious grandson attempted to violate this
solemn compact: but the attempt was strenuously withstood. At length the
Plantagenets gave up the point in despair: but, though they ceased to
infringe the law openly, they occasionally contrived, by evading it,
to procure an extraordinary supply for a temporary purpose. They were
interdicted from taxing; but they claimed the right of begging and
borrowing. They therefore sometimes begged in a tone not easily to be
distinguished from that of command, and sometimes borrowed with small
thought of repaying. But the fact that they thought it necessary to
disguise their exactions under the names of benevolences and loans
sufficiently proves that the authority of the great constitutional rule
was universally recognised.

The principle that the King of England was bound to conduct the
administration according to law, and that, if he did anything against
law, his advisers and agents were answerable, was established at a very
early period, as the severe judgments pronounced and executed on many
royal favourites sufficiently prove. It is, however, certain that the
rights of individuals were often violated by the Plantagenets, and that
the injured parties were often unable to obtain redress. According to
law no Englishman could be arrested or detained in confinement merely
by the mandate of the sovereign. In fact, persons obnoxious to the
government were frequently imprisoned without any other authority than
a royal order. According to law, torture, the disgrace of the Roman
jurisprudence, could not, in any circumstances, be inflicted on an
English subject. Nevertheless, during the troubles of the fifteenth
century, a rack was introduced into the Tower, and was occasionally used
under the plea of political necessity. But it would be a great error to
infer from such irregularities that the English monarchs were, either in
theory or in practice, absolute. We live in a highly civilised society,
through which intelligence is so rapidly diffused by means of the press
and of the post office that any gross act of oppression committed in
any part of our island is, in a few hours, discussed by millions. If the
sovereign were now to immure a subject in defiance of the writ of Habeas
Corpus, or to put a conspirator to the torture, the whole nation would
be instantly electrified by the news. In the middle ages the state of
society was widely different. Rarely and with great difficulty did the
wrongs of individuals come to the knowledge of the public. A man might
be illegally confined during many months in the castle of Carlisle or
Norwich; and no whisper of the transaction might reach London. It is
highly probable that the rack had been many years in use before the
great majority of the nation had the least suspicion that it was ever
employed. Nor were our ancestors by any means so much alive as we are to
the importance of maintaining great general rules. We have been taught
by long experience that we cannot without danger suffer any breach of
the constitution to pass unnoticed. It is therefore now universally held
that a government which unnecessarily exceeds its powers ought to be
visited with severe parliamentary censure, and that a government which,
under the pressure of a great exigency, and with pure intentions, has
exceeded its powers, ought without delay to apply to Parliament for an
act of indemnity. But such were not the feelings of the Englishmen of
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They were little disposed to
contend for a principle merely as a principle, or to cry out against an
irregularity which was not also felt to be a grievance. As long as the
general spirit of the administration was mild and popular, they
were willing to allow some latitude to their sovereign. If, for ends
generally acknowledged to be good, he exerted a vigour beyond the
law, they not only forgave, but applauded him, and while they enjoyed
security and prosperity under his rule, were but too ready to believe
that whoever had incurred his displeasure had deserved it. But to this
indulgence there was a limit; nor was that King wise who presumed far on
the forbearance of the English people. They might sometimes allow him to
overstep the constitutional line: but they also claimed the privilege
of overstepping that line themselves, whenever his encroachments were so
serious as to excite alarm. If, not content with occasionally oppressing
individuals, he cared to oppress great masses, his subjects promptly
appealed to the laws, and, that appeal failing, appealed as promptly to
the God of battles.

Our forefathers might indeed safely tolerate a king in a few excesses;
for they had in reserve a check which soon brought the fiercest and
proudest king to reason, the check of physical force. It is difficult
for an Englishman of the nineteenth century to imagine to himself the
facility and rapidity with which, four hundred years ago, this check was
applied. The people have long unlearned the use of arms. The art of
war has been carried to a perfection unknown to former ages; and the
knowledge of that art is confined to a particular class. A hundred
thousand soldiers, well disciplined and commanded, will keep down ten
millions of ploughmen and artisans. A few regiments of household troops
are sufficient to overawe all the discontented spirits of a large
capital. In the meantime the effect of the constant progress of wealth
has been to make insurrection far more terrible to thinking men than
maladministration. Immense sums have been expended on works which, if
a rebellion broke out, might perish in a few hours. The mass of movable
wealth collected in the shops and warehouses of London alone exceeds
five hundredfold that which the whole island contained in the days of
the Plantagenets; and, if the government were subverted by physical
force, all this movable wealth would be exposed to imminent risk of
spoliation and destruction. Still greater would be the risk to public
credit, on which thousands of families directly depend for subsistence,
and with which the credit of the whole commercial world is inseparably
connected. It is no exaggeration to say that a civil war of a week on
English ground would now produce disasters which would be felt from the
Hoang-ho to the Missouri, and of which the traces would be discernible
at the distance of a century. In such a state of society resistance must
be regarded as a cure more desperate than almost any malady which can
afflict the state. In the middle ages, on the contrary, resistance was
an ordinary remedy for political distempers, a remedy which was always
at hand, and which, though doubtless sharp at the moment, produced no
deep or lasting ill effects. If a popular chief raised his standard in
a popular cause, an irregular army could be assembled in a day. Regular
army there was none. Every man had a slight tincture of soldiership,
and scarcely any man more than a slight tincture. The national wealth
consisted chiefly in flocks and herds, in the harvest of the year, and
in the simple buildings inhabited by the people. All the furniture, the
stock of shops, the machinery which could be found in the realm was of
less value than the property which some single parishes now contain.
Manufactures were rude; credit was almost unknown. Society, therefore,
recovered from the shock as soon as the actual conflict was over. The
calamities of civil war were confined to the slaughter on the field of
battle, and to a few subsequent executions and confiscations. In a week
the peasant was driving his team and the esquire flying his hawks over
the field of Towton or of Bosworth, as if no extraordinary event had
interrupted the regular course of human life.

More than a hundred and sixty years have now elapsed since the English
people have by force subverted a government. During the hundred and
sixty years which preceded the union of the Roses, nine Kings reigned in
England. Six of these nine Kings were deposed. Five lost their lives
as well as their crowns. It is evident, therefore, that any comparison
between our ancient and our modern polity must lead to most erroneous
conclusions, unless large allowance be made for the effect of that
restraint which resistance and the fear of resistance constantly
imposed on the Plantagenets. As our ancestors had against tyranny a most
important security which we want, they might safely dispense with some
securities to which we justly attach the highest importance. As we
cannot, without the risk of evils from which the imagination recoils,
employ physical force as a check on misgovernment, it is evidently our
wisdom to keep all the constitutional checks on misgovernment in the
highest state of efficiency, to watch with jealousy the first beginnings
of encroachment, and never to suffer irregularities, even when harmless
in themselves, to pass unchallenged, lest they acquire the force of
precedents. Four hundred years ago such minute vigilance might well seem
unnecessary. A nation of hardy archers and spearmen might, with small
risk to its liberties, connive at some illegal acts on the part of a
prince whose general administration was good, and whose throne was not
defended by a single company of regular soldiers.

Under this system, rude as it may appear when compared with those
elaborate constitutions of which the last seventy years have been
fruitful, the English long enjoyed a large measure of freedom and
happiness. Though, during the feeble reign of Henry the Sixth, the state
was torn, first by factions, and at length by civil war; though Edward
the Fourth was a prince of dissolute and imperious character; though
Richard the Third has generally been represented as a monster of
depravity; though the exactions of Henry the Seventh caused great
repining; it is certain that our ancestors, under those Kings, were far
better governed than the Belgians under Philip, surnamed the Good, or
the French under that Lewis who was styled the Father of his people.
Even while the wars of the Roses were actually raging, our country
appears to have been in a happier condition than the neighbouring realms
during years of profound peace. Comines was one of the most enlightened
statesmen of his time. He had seen all the richest and most highly
civilised parts of the Continent. He had lived in the opulent towns of
Flanders, the Manchesters and Liverpools of the fifteenth century. He
had visited Florence, recently adorned by the magnificence of Lorenzo,
and Venice, not yet bumbled by the Confederates of Cambray. This eminent
man deliberately pronounced England to be the best governed country of
which he had any knowledge. Her constitution he emphatically designated
as a just and holy thing, which, while it protected the people, really
strengthened the hands of a prince who respected it. In no other country
were men so effectually secured from wrong. The calamities produced by
our intestine wars seemed to him to be confined to the nobles and the
fighting men, and to leave no traces such as he had been accustomed to
see elsewhere, no ruined dwellings, no depopulated cities.

It was not only by the efficiency of the restraints imposed on the royal
prerogative that England was advantageously distinguished from most of
the neighbouring countries. A: peculiarity equally important, though
less noticed, was the relation in which the nobility stood here to the
commonalty. There was a strong hereditary aristocracy: but it was of all
hereditary aristocracies the least insolent and exclusive. It had none
of the invidious character of a caste. It was constantly receiving
members from the people, and constantly sending down members to mingle
with the people. Any gentleman might become a peer. The younger son of a
peer was but a gentleman. Grandsons of peers yielded precedence to newly
made knights. The dignity of knighthood was not beyond the reach of
any man who could by diligence and thrift realise a good estate, or
who could attract notice by his valour in a battle or a siege. It was
regarded as no disparagement for the daughter of a Duke, nay of a royal
Duke, to espouse a distinguished commoner. Thus, Sir John Howard married
the daughter of Thomas Mowbray Duke of Norfolk. Sir Richard Pole married
the Countess of Salisbury, daughter of George, Duke of Clarence. Good
blood was indeed held in high respect: but between good blood and the
privileges of peerage there was, most fortunately for our country, no
necessary connection. Pedigrees as long, and scutcheons as old, were to
be found out of the House of Lords as in it. There were new men who bore
the highest titles. There were untitled men well known to be descended
from knights who had broken the Saxon ranks at Hastings, and scaled the
walls of Jerusalem. There were Bohuns, Mowbrays, DeVeres, nay, kinsmen
of the House of Plantagenet, with no higher addition than that of
Esquire, and with no civil privileges beyond those enjoyed by every
farmer and shopkeeper. There was therefore here no line like that which
in some other countries divided the patrician from the plebeian. The
yeoman was not inclined to murmur at dignities to which his own children
might rise. The grandee was not inclined to insult a class into which
his own children must descend.

After the wars of York and Lancaster, the links which connected the
nobility and commonalty became closer and more numerous than ever. The
extent of destruction which had fallen on the old aristocracy may be
inferred from a single circumstance. In the year 1451 Henry the Sixth
summoned fifty-three temporal Lords to parliament. The temporal Lords
summoned by Henry the Seventh to the parliament of 1485 were only
twenty-nine, and of these several had recently been elevated to the
peerage. During the following century the ranks of the nobility were
largely recruited from among the gentry. The constitution of the House
of Commons tended greatly to promote the salutary intermixture of
classes. The knight of the shire was the connecting link between
the baron and the shopkeeper. On the same benches on which sate the
goldsmiths, drapers, and grocers, who had been returned to parliament by
the commercial towns, sate also members who, in any other country, would
have been called noblemen, hereditary lords of manors, entitled to hold
courts and to bear coat armour, and able to trace back an honourable
descent through many generations. Some of them were younger sons and
brothers of lords. Others could boast of even royal blood. At length the
eldest son of an Earl of Bedford, called in courtesy by the second title
of his father, offered himself as candidate for a seat in the House of
Commons, and his example was followed by others. Seated in that house,
the heirs of the great peers naturally became as zealous for its
privileges as any of the humble burgesses with whom they were mingled.
Thus our democracy was, from an early period, the most aristocratic, and
our aristocracy the most democratic in the world; a peculiarity
which has lasted down to the present day, and which has produced many
important moral and political effects.

The government of Henry the Seventh, of his son, and of his
grandchildren was, on the whole, more arbitrary than that of the
Plantagenets. Personal character may in some degree explain the
difference; for courage and force of will were common to all the men and
women of the House of Tudor. They exercised their power during a period
of a hundred and twenty years, always with vigour, often with violence,
sometimes with cruelty. They, in imitation of the dynasty which
had preceded them, occasionally invaded the rights of the subject,
occasionally exacted taxes under the name of loans and gifts, and
occasionally dispensed with penal statutes: nay, though they never
presumed to enact any permanent law by their own authority, they
occasionally took upon themselves, when Parliament was not sitting,
to meet temporary exigencies by temporary edicts. It was, however,
impossible for the Tudors to carry oppression beyond a certain point:
for they had no armed force, and they were surrounded by an armed
people. Their palace was guarded by a few domestics, whom the array of
a single shire, or of a single ward of London, could with ease have
overpowered. These haughty princes were therefore under a restraint
stronger than any that mere law can impose, under a restraint which did
not, indeed, prevent them from sometimes treating an individual in an
arbitrary and even in a barbarous manner, but which effectually secured
the nation against general and long continued oppression. They might
safely be tyrants, within the precinct of the court: but it was
necessary for them to watch with constant anxiety the temper of the
country. Henry the Eighth, for example, encountered no opposition when
he wished to send Buckingham and Surrey, Anne Boleyn and Lady Salisbury,
to the scaffold. But when, without the consent of Parliament, he
demanded of his subjects a contribution amounting to one sixth of their
goods, he soon found it necessary to retract. The cry of hundreds of
thousands was that they were English and not French, freemen and not
slaves. In Kent the royal commissioners fled for their lives. In Suffolk
four thousand men appeared in arms. The King's lieutenants in that
county vainly exerted themselves to raise an army. Those who did not
join in the insurrection declared that they would not fight against
their brethren in such a quarrel. Henry, proud and selfwilled as he was,
shrank, not without reason from a conflict with the roused spirit of
the nation. He had before his eyes the fate of his predecessors who
had perished at Berkeley and Pomfret. He not only cancelled his
illegal commissions; he not only granted a general pardon to all the
malecontents; but he publicly and solemnly apologised for his infraction
of the laws.

His conduct, on this occasion, well illustrates the whole policy of his
house. The temper of the princes of that line was hot, and their
spirits high, but they understood the character of the nation that they
governed, and never once, like some of their predecessors, and some of
their successors, carried obstinacy to a fatal point. The discretion of
the Tudors was such, that their power, though it was often resisted,
was never subverted. The reign of every one of them was disturbed by
formidable discontents: but the government was always able either to
soothe the mutineers or to conquer and punish them. Sometimes, by timely
concessions, it succeeded in averting civil hostilities; but in general
it stood firm, and called for help on the nation. The nation obeyed
the call, rallied round the sovereign, and enabled him to quell the
disaffected minority.

Thus, from the age of Henry the Third to the age of Elizabeth, England
grew and flourished under a polity which contained the germ of our
present institutions, and which, though not very exactly defined, or
very exactly observed, was yet effectually prevented from degenerating
into despotism, by the awe in which the governors stood of the spirit
and strength of the governed.

But such a polity is suited only to a particular stage in the progress
of society. The same causes which produce a division of labour in the
peaceful arts must at length make war a distinct science and a distinct
trade. A time arrives when the use of arms begins to occupy the entire
attention of a separate class. It soon appears that peasants and
burghers, however brave, are unable to stand their ground against
veteran soldiers, whose whole life is a preparation for the day of
battle, whose nerves have been braced by long familiarity with danger,
and whose movements have all the precision of clockwork. It is found
that the defence of nations can no longer be safely entrusted to
warriors taken from the plough or the loom for a campaign of forty
days. If any state forms a great regular army, the bordering states
must imitate the example, or must submit to a foreign yoke. But, where
a great regular army exists, limited monarchy, such as it was in the
middle ages, can exist no longer. The sovereign is at once emancipated
from what had been the chief restraint on his power; and he inevitably
becomes absolute, unless he is subjected to checks such as would be
superfluous in a society where all are soldiers occasionally, and none
permanently.

With the danger came also the means of escape. In the monarchies of the
middle ages the power of the sword belonged to the prince; but the power
of the purse belonged to the nation; and the progress of civilisation,
as it made the sword of the prince more and more formidable to the
nation, made the purse of the nation more and more necessary to the
prince. His hereditary revenues would no longer suffice, even for the
expenses of civil government. It was utterly impossible that, without
a regular and extensive system of taxation, he could keep in constant
efficiency a great body of disciplined troops. The policy which the
parliamentary assemblies of Europe ought to have adopted was to take
their stand firmly on their constitutional right to give or withhold
money, and resolutely to refuse funds for the support of armies, till
ample securities had been provided against despotism.

This wise policy was followed in our country alone. In the neighbouring
kingdoms great military establishments were formed; no new safeguards
for public liberty were devised; and the consequence was, that the old
parliamentary institutions everywhere ceased to exist. In France, where
they had always been feeble, they languished, and at length died of
mere weakness. In Spain, where they had been as strong as in any part
of Europe, they struggled fiercely for life, but struggled too late. The
mechanics of Toledo and Valladolid vainly defended the privileges of the
Castilian Cortes against the veteran battalions of Charles the Fifth. As
vainly, in the next generation, did the citizens of Saragossa stand up
against Philip the Second, for the old constitution of Aragon. One after
another, the great national councils of the continental monarchies,
councils once scarcely less proud and powerful than those which sate
at Westminster, sank into utter insignificance. If they met, they met
merely as our Convocation now meets, to go through some venerable forms.

In England events took a different course. This singular felicity she
owed chiefly to her insular situation. Before the end of the fifteenth
century great military establishments were indispensable to the dignity,
and even to the safety, of the French and Castilian monarchies. If
either of those two powers had disarmed, it would soon have been
compelled to submit to the dictation of the other. But England,
protected by the sea against invasion, and rarely engaged in warlike
operations on the Continent, was not, as yet, under the necessity
of employing regular troops. The sixteenth century, the seventeenth
century, found her still without a standing army. At the commencement
of the seventeenth century political science had made considerable
progress. The fate of the Spanish Cortes and of the French States
General had given solemn warning to our Parliaments; and our
Parliaments, fully aware of the nature and magnitude of the danger,
adopted, in good time, a system of tactics which, after a contest
protracted through three generations, was at length successful.

Almost every writer who has treated of that contest has been desirous to
show that his own party was the party which was struggling to preserve
the old constitution unaltered. The truth however is that the old
constitution could not be preserved unaltered. A law, beyond the control
of human wisdom, had decreed that there should no longer be governments
of that peculiar class which, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
had been common throughout Europe. The question, therefore, was not
whether our polity should undergo a change, but what the nature of
the change should be. The introduction of a new and mighty force had
disturbed the old equilibrium, and had turned one limited monarchy after
another into an absolute monarchy. What had happened elsewhere would
assuredly have happened here, unless the balance had been redressed by
a great transfer of power from the crown to the parliament. Our princes
were about to have at their command means of coercion such as no
Plantagenet or Tudor had ever possessed. They must inevitably have
become despots, unless they had been, at the same time, placed under
restraints to which no Plantagenet or Tudor had ever been subject.

It seems certain, therefore, that, had none but political causes been
at work, the seventeenth century would not have passed away without
a fierce conflict between our Kings and their Parliaments. But other
causes of perhaps greater potency contributed to produce the same
effect. While the government of the Tudors was in its highest vigour
an event took place which has coloured the destinies of all Christian
nations, and in an especial manner the destinies of England. Twice
during the middle ages the mind of Europe had risen up against the
domination of Rome. The first insurrection broke out in the south of
France. The energy of Innocent the Third, the zeal of the young orders
of Francis and Dominic, and the ferocity of the Crusaders whom the
priesthood let loose on an unwarlike population, crushed the Albigensian
churches. The second reformation had its origin in England, and spread
to Bohemia. The Council of Constance, by removing some ecclesiastical
disorders which had given scandal to Christendom, and the princes
of Europe, by unsparingly using fire and sword against the heretics,
succeeded in arresting and turning back the movement. Nor is this
much to be lamented. The sympathies of a Protestant, it is true, will
naturally be on the side of the Albigensians and of the Lollards. Yet an
enlightened and temperate Protestant will perhaps be disposed to doubt
whether the success, either of the Albigensians or of the Lollards,
would, on the whole, have promoted the happiness and virtue of mankind.
Corrupt as the Church of Rome was, there is reason to believe that, if
that Church had been overthrown in the twelfth or even in the fourteenth
century, the vacant space would have been occupied by some system more
corrupt still. There was then, through the greater part of Europe, very
little knowledge; and that little was confined to the clergy. Not one
man in five hundred could have spelled his way through a psalm. Books
were few and costly. The art of printing was unknown. Copies of the
Bible, inferior in beauty and clearness to those which every cottager
may now command, sold for prices which many priests could not afford
to give. It was obviously impossible that the laity should search the
Scriptures for themselves. It is probable therefore, that, as soon as
they had put off one spiritual yoke, they would have put on another,
and that the power lately exercised by the clergy of the Church of
Rome would have passed to a far worse class of teachers. The sixteenth
century was comparatively a time of light. Yet even in the sixteenth
century a considerable number of those who quitted the old religion
followed the first confident and plausible guide who offered himself,
and were soon led into errors far more serious than those which they had
renounced. Thus Matthias and Kniperdoling, apostles of lust, robbery,
and murder, were able for a time to rule great cities. In a darker age
such false prophets might have founded empires; and Christianity might
have been distorted into a cruel and licentious superstition, more
noxious, not only than Popery, but even than Islamism.

About a hundred years after the rising of the Council of Constance, that
great change emphatically called the Reformation began. The fulness
of time was now come. The clergy were no longer the sole or the chief
depositories of knowledge The invention of printing had furnished the
assailants of the Church with a mighty weapon which had been wanting
to their predecessors. The study of the ancient writers, the rapid
development of the powers of the modern languages, the unprecedented
activity which was displayed in every department of literature, the
political state of Europe, the vices of the Roman court, the exactions
of the Roman chancery, the jealousy with which the wealth and privileges
of the clergy were naturally regarded by laymen, the jealousy with which
the Italian ascendency was naturally regarded by men born on our side of
the Alps, all these things gave to the teachers of the new theology an
advantage which they perfectly understood how to use.

Those who hold that the influence of the Church of Rome in the dark
ages was, on the whole, beneficial to mankind, may yet with perfect
consistency regard the Reformation as an inestimable blessing. The
leading strings, which preserve and uphold the infant, would impede the
fullgrown man. And so the very means by which the human mind is, in one
stage of its progress, supported and propelled, may, in another stage,
be mere hindrances. There is a season in the life both of an individual
and of a society, at which submission and faith, such as at a later
period would be justly called servility and credulity, are useful
qualities. The child who teachably and undoubtingly listens to the
instructions of his elders is likely to improve rapidly. But the man who
should receive with childlike docility every assertion and dogma uttered
by another man no wiser than himself would become contemptible. It is
the same with communities. The childhood of the European nations
was passed under the tutelage of the clergy. The ascendancy of the
sacerdotal order was long the ascendancy which naturally and properly
belongs to intellectual superiority. The priests, with all their faults,
were by far the wisest portion of society. It was, therefore, on the
whole, good that they should be respected and obeyed. The encroachments
of the ecclesiastical power on the province of the civil power produced
much more happiness than misery, while the ecclesiastical power was in
the hands of the only class that had studied history, philosophy, and
public law, and while the civil power was in the hands of savage chiefs,
who could not read their own grants and edicts. But a change took place.
Knowledge gradually spread among laymen. At the commencement of the
sixteenth century many of them were in every intellectual attainment
fully equal to the most enlightened of their spiritual pastors.
Thenceforward that dominion, which, during the dark ages, had been, in
spite of many abuses, a legitimate and salutary guardianship, became an
unjust and noxious tyranny.

From the time when the barbarians overran the Western Empire to the time
of the revival of letters, the influence of the Church of Rome had been
generally favourable to science to civilisation, and to good government.
But, during the last three centuries, to stunt the growth of the human
mind has been her chief object. Throughout Christendom, whatever advance
has been made in knowledge, in freedom, in wealth, and in the arts of
life, has been made in spite of her, and has everywhere been in inverse
proportion to her power. The loveliest and most fertile provinces
of Europe have, under her rule, been sunk in poverty, in political
servitude, and in intellectual torpor, while Protestant countries, once
proverbial for sterility and barbarism, have been turned by skill
and industry into gardens, and can boast of a long list of heroes and
statesmen, philosophers and poets. Whoever, knowing what Italy and
Scotland naturally are, and what, four hundred years ago, they actually
were, shall now compare the country round Rome with the country round
Edinburgh, will be able to form some judgment as to the tendency of
Papal domination. The descent of Spain, once the first among monarchies,
to the lowest depths of degradation, the elevation of Holland, in spite
of many natural disadvantages, to a position such as no commonwealth so
small has ever reached, teach the same lesson. Whoever passes in Germany
from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant principality, in Switzerland
from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant canton, in Ireland from a Roman
Catholic to a Protestant county, finds that he has passed from a lower
to a higher grade of civilisation. On the other side of the Atlantic the
same law prevails. The Protestants of the United States have left far
behind them the Roman Catholics of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. The Roman
Catholics of Lower Canada remain inert, while the whole continent round
them is in a ferment with Protestant activity and enterprise. The French
have doubtless shown an energy and an intelligence which, even when
misdirected, have justly entitled them to be called a great people. But
this apparent exception, when examined, will be found to confirm the
rule; for in no country that is called Roman Catholic, has the Roman
Catholic Church, during several generations, possessed so little
authority as in France. The literature of France is justly held in high
esteem throughout the world. But if we deduct from that literature all
that belongs to four parties which have been, on different grounds,
in rebellion against the Papal domination, all that belongs to
the Protestants, all that belongs to the assertors of the Gallican
liberties, all that belongs to the Jansenists, and all that belongs to
the philosophers, how much will be left?

It is difficult to say whether England owes more to the Roman Catholic
religion or to the Reformation. For the amalgamation of races and for
the abolition of villenage, she is chiefly indebted to the influence
which the priesthood in the middle ages exercised over the laity. For
political and intellectual freedom, and for all the blessings which
political and intellectual freedom have brought in their train, she
is chiefly indebted to the great rebellion of the laity against the
priesthood.

The struggle between the old and the new theology in our country was
long, and the event sometimes seemed doubtful. There were two extreme
parties, prepared to act with violence or to suffer with stubborn
resolution. Between them lay, during a considerable time, a middle
party, which blended, very illogically, but by no means unnaturally,
lessons learned in the nursery with the sermons of the modern
evangelists, and, while clinging with fondness to all observances, yet
detested abuses with which those observances were closely connected. Men
in such a frame of mind were willing to obey, almost with thankfulness,
the dictation of an able ruler who spared them the trouble of judging
for themselves, and, raising a firm and commanding voice above the
uproar of controversy, told them how to worship and what to believe.
It is not strange, therefore, that the Tudors should have been able to
exercise a great influence on ecclesiastical affairs; nor is it strange
that their influence should, for the most part, have been exercised with
a view to their own interest.

Henry the Eighth attempted to constitute an Anglican Church differing
from the Roman Catholic Church on the point of the supremacy, and on
that point alone. His success in this attempt was extraordinary. The
force of his character, the singularly favourable situation in which
he stood with respect to foreign powers, the immense wealth which the
spoliation of the abbeys placed at his disposal, and the support of
that class which still halted between two Opinions, enabled him to bid
defiance to both the extreme parties, to burn as heretics those who
avowed the tenets of the Reformers, and to hang as traitors those who
owned the authority of the Pope. But Henry's system died with him. Had
his life been prolonged, he would have found it difficult to maintain a
position assailed with equal fury by all who were zealous either for
the new or for the old opinions. The ministers who held the royal
prerogatives in trust for his infant son could not venture to persist in
so hazardous a policy; nor could Elizabeth venture to return to it. It
was necessary to make a choice. The government must either submit to
Rome, or must obtain the aid of the Protestants. The government and the
Protestants had only one thing in common, hatred of the Papal power.
The English Reformers were eager to go as far as their brethren on the
Continent. They unanimously condemned as Antichristian numerous dogmas
and practices to which Henry had stubbornly adhered, and which Elizabeth
reluctantly abandoned. Many felt a strong repugnance even to things
indifferent which had formed part of the polity or ritual of the
mystical Babylon. Thus Bishop Hooper, who died manfully at Gloucester
for his religion, long refused to wear the episcopal vestments. Bishop
Ridley, a martyr of still greater renown, pulled down the ancient altars
of his diocese, and ordered the Eucharist to be administered in the
middle of churches, at tables which the Papists irreverently termed
oyster boards. Bishop Jewel pronounced the clerical garb to be a stage
dress, a fool's coat, a relique of the Amorites, and promised that
he would spare no labour to extirpate such degrading absurdities.
Archbishop Grindal long hesitated about accepting a mitre from dislike
of what he regarded as the mummery of consecration. Bishop Parkhurst
uttered a fervent prayer that the Church of England would propose to
herself the Church of Zurich as the absolute pattern of a Christian
community. Bishop Ponet was of opinion that the word Bishop should be
abandoned to the Papists, and that the chief officers of the purified
church should be called Superintendents. When it is considered that
none of these prelates belonged to the extreme section of the Protestant
party, it cannot be doubted that, if the general sense of that party
had been followed, the work of reform would have been carried on as
unsparingly in England as in Scotland.

But, as the government needed the support of the protestants, so the
Protestants needed the protection of the government. Much was therefore
given up on both sides: an union was effected; and the fruit of that
union was the Church of England.

To the peculiarities of this great institution, and to the strong
passions which it has called forth in the minds both of friends and of
enemies, are to be attributed many of the most important events which
have, since the Reformation, taken place in our country; nor can the
secular history of England be at all understood by us, unless we study
it in constant connection with the history of her ecclesiastical polity.

The man who took the chief part in settling the condition, of the
alliance which produced the Anglican Church was Archbishop Cranmer. He
was the representative of both the parties which, at that time, needed
each other's assistance. He was at once a divine and a courtier. In his
character of divine he was perfectly ready to go as far in the way of
change as any Swiss or Scottish Reformer. In his character of courtier
he was desirous to preserve that organisation which had, during many
ages, admirably served the purposes of the Bishops of Rome, and might be
expected now to serve equally well the purposes of the English Kings and
of their ministers. His temper and his understanding, eminently fitted
him to act as mediator. Saintly in his professions, unscrupulous in
his dealings, zealous for nothing, bold in speculation, a coward and a
timeserver in action, a placable enemy and a lukewarm friend, he was in
every way qualified to arrange the terms of the coalition between the
religious and the worldly enemies of Popery.

To this day the constitution, the doctrines, and the services of the
Church, retain the visible marks of the compromise from which she
sprang. She occupies a middle position between the Churches of Rome
and Geneva. Her doctrinal confessions and discourses, composed by
Protestants, set forth principles of theology in which Calvin or
Knox would have found scarcely a word to disapprove. Her prayers and
thanksgivings, derived from the ancient Breviaries, are very generally
such that Cardinal Fisher or Cardinal Pole might have heartily joined in
them. A controversialist who puts an Arminian sense on her Articles and
Homilies will be pronounced by candid men to be as unreasonable as a
controversialist who denies that the doctrine of baptismal regeneration
can be discovered in her Liturgy.

The Church of Rome held that episcopacy was of divine institution, and
that certain supernatural graces of a high order had been transmitted by
the imposition of hands through fifty generations, from the Eleven who
received their commission on the Galilean mount, to the bishops who
met at Trent. A large body of Protestants, on the other hand, regarded
prelacy as positively unlawful, and persuaded themselves that they
found a very different form of ecclesiastical government prescribed in
Scripture. The founders of the Anglican Church took a middle course.
They retained episcopacy; but they did not declare it to be an
institution essential to the welfare of a Christian society, or to the
efficacy of the sacraments. Cranmer, indeed, on one important occasion,
plainly avowed his conviction that, in the primitive times, there was no
distinction between bishops and priests, and that the laying on of hands
was altogether superfluous.

Among the Presbyterians the conduct of public worship is, to a great
extent, left to the minister. Their prayers, therefore, are not exactly
the same in any two assemblies on the same day, or on any two days in
the same assembly. In one parish they are fervent, eloquent, and full of
meaning. In the next parish they may be languid or absurd. The priests
of the Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, have, during many
generations, daily chanted the same ancient confessions, supplications,
and thanksgivings, in India and Lithuania, in Ireland and Peru. The
service, being in a dead language, is intelligible only to the learned;
and the great majority of the congregation may be said to assist as
spectators rather than as auditors. Here, again, the Church of England
took a middle course. She copied the Roman Catholic forms of prayer,
but translated them into the vulgar tongue, and invited the illiterate
multitude to join its voice to that of the minister.

In every part of her system the same policy may be traced. Utterly
rejecting the doctrine of transubstantiation, and condemning as
idolatrous all adoration paid to the sacramental bread and wine, she
yet, to the disgust of the Puritan, required her children to receive the
memorials of divine love, meekly kneeling upon their knees. Discarding
many rich vestments which surrounded the altars of the ancient faith,
she yet retained, to the horror of weak minds, a robe of white linen,
typical of the purity which belonged to her as the mystical spouse of
Christ. Discarding a crowd of pantomimic gestures which, in the Roman
Catholic worship, are substituted for intelligible words, she yet
shocked many rigid Protestants by marking the infant just sprinkled from
the font with the sign of the cross. The Roman Catholic addressed his
prayers to a multitude of Saints, among whom were numbered many men
of doubtful, and some of hateful, character. The Puritan refused the
addition of Saint even to the apostle of the Gentiles, and to the
disciple whom Jesus loved. The Church of England, though she asked
for the intercession of no created being, still set apart days for the
commemoration of some who had done and suffered great things for the
faith. She retained confirmation and ordination as edifying rites; but
she degraded them from the rank of sacraments. Shrift was no part of her
system. Yet she gently invited the dying penitent to confess his sins to
a divine, and empowered her ministers to soothe the departing soul by
an absolution which breathes the very spirit of the old religion. In
general it may be said that she appeals more to the understanding, and
less to the senses and the imagination, than the Church of Rome, and
that she appeals less to the understanding, and more to the senses
and imagination, than the Protestant Churches of Scotland, France, and
Switzerland.

Nothing, however, so strongly distinguished the Church of England from
other Churches as the relation in which she stood to the monarchy. The
King was her head. The limits of the authority which he possessed,
as such, were not traced, and indeed have never yet been traced with
precision. The laws which declared him supreme in ecclesiastical
matters were drawn rudely and in general terms. If, for the purpose of
ascertaining the sense of those laws, we examine the books and lives of
those who founded the English Church, our perplexity will be increased.
For the founders of the English Church wrote and acted in an age of
violent intellectual fermentation, and of constant action and reaction.
They therefore often contradicted each other and sometimes contradicted
themselves. That the King was, under Christ, sole head of the Church was
a doctrine which they all with one voice affirmed: but those words had
very different significations in different mouths, and in the same
mouth at different conjunctures. Sometimes an authority which would have
satisfied Hildebrand was ascribed to the sovereign: then it dwindled
down to an authority little more than that which had been claimed by
many ancient English princes who had been in constant communion with the
Church of Rome. What Henry and his favourite counsellors meant, at one
time, by the supremacy, was certainly nothing less than the whole power
of the keys. The King was to be the Pope of his kingdom, the vicar
of God, the expositor of Catholic verity, the channel of sacramental
graces. He arrogated to himself the right of deciding dogmatically what
was orthodox doctrine and what was heresy, of drawing up and imposing
confessions of faith, and of giving religious instruction to his people.
He proclaimed that all jurisdiction, spiritual as well as temporal, was
derived from him alone, and that it was in his power to confer episcopal
authority, and to take it away. He actually ordered his seal to be put
to commissions by which bishops were appointed, who were to exercise
their functions as his deputies, and during his pleasure. According to
this system, as expounded by Cranmer, the King was the spiritual as well
as the temporal chief of the nation. In both capacities His Highness
must have lieutenants. As he appointed civil officers to keep his seal,
to collect his revenues, and to dispense justice in his name, so
he appointed divines of various ranks to preach the gospel, and to
administer the sacraments. It was unnecessary that there should be any
imposition of hands. The King,--such was the opinion of Cranmer given in
the plainest words,--might in virtue of authority derived from God, make
a priest; and the priest so made needed no ordination whatever. These
opinions the Archbishop, in spite of the opposition of less courtly
divines, followed out to every legitimate consequence. He held that his
own spiritual functions, like the secular functions of the Chancellor
and Treasurer, were at once determined by a demise of the crown. When
Henry died, therefore, the Primate and his suffragans took out fresh
commissions, empowering them to ordain and to govern the Church till the
new sovereign should think fit to order otherwise. When it was objected
that a power to bind and to loose, altogether distinct from temporal
power, had been given by our Lord to his apostles, some theologians of
this school replied that the power to bind and to loose had descended,
not to the clergy, but to the whole body of Christian men, and ought
to be exercised by the chief magistrate as the representative of the
society. When it was objected that Saint Paul had spoken of certain
persons whom the Holy Ghost had made overseers and shepherds of the
faithful, it was answered that King Henry was the very overseer,
the very shepherd whom the Holy Ghost had appointed, and to whom the
expressions of Saint Paul applied. [3]

These high pretensions gave scandal to Protestants as well as to
Catholics; and the scandal was greatly increased when the supremacy,
which Mary had resigned back to the Pope, was again annexed to the
crown, on the accession of Elizabeth. It seemed monstrous that a woman
should be the chief bishop of a Church in which an apostle had forbidden
her even to let her voice be heard. The Queen, therefore, found it
necessary expressly to disclaim that sacerdotal character which
her father had assumed, and which, according to Cranmer, had been
inseparably joined, by divine ordinance, to the regal function. When the
Anglican confession of faith was revised in her reign, the supremacy
was explained in a manner somewhat different from that which had been
fashionable at the court of Henry. Cranmer had declared, in emphatic
terms, that God had immediately committed to Christian princes the whole
cure of all their subjects, as well concerning the administration of
God's word for the cure of souls, as concerning the administration of
things political. [4] The thirty-seventh article of religion, framed
under Elizabeth, declares, in terms as emphatic, that the ministering
of God's word does not belong to princes. The Queen, however, still had
over the Church a visitatorial power of vast and undefined extent. She
was entrusted by Parliament with the office of restraining and punishing
heresy and every sort of ecclesiastical abuse, and was permitted to
delegate her authority to commissioners. The Bishops were little more
than her ministers. Rather than grant to the civil magistrate the
absolute power of nominating spiritual pastors, the Church of Rome, in
the eleventh century, set all Europe on fire. Rather than grant to the
civil magistrate the absolute power of nominating spiritual pastors, the
ministers of the Church of Scotland, in our time, resigned their livings
by hundreds. The Church of England had no such scruples. By the royal
authority alone her prelates were appointed. By the royal authority
alone her Convocations were summoned, regulated, prorogued, and
dissolved. Without the royal sanction her canons had no force. One
of the articles of her faith was that without the royal consent no
ecclesiastical council could lawfully assemble. From all her judicatures
an appeal lay, in the last resort, to the sovereign, even when the
question was whether an opinion ought to be accounted heretical, or
whether the administration of a sacrament had been valid. Nor did the
Church grudge this extensive power to our princes. By them she had been
called into existence, nursed through a feeble infancy, guarded from
Papists on one side and from Puritans on the other, protected against
Parliaments which bore her no good will, and avenged on literary
assailants whom she found it hard to answer. Thus gratitude, hope, fear,
common attachments, common enmities, bound her to the throne. All her
traditions, all her tastes, were monarchical. Loyalty became a point
of professional honour among her clergy, the peculiar badge which
distinguished them at once from Calvinists and from Papists. Both the
Calvinists and the Papists, widely as they differed in other respects,
regarded with extreme jealousy all encroachments of the temporal power
on the domain of the spiritual power. Both Calvinists and Papists
maintained that subjects might justifiably draw the sword against
ungodly rulers. In France Calvinists resisted Charles the Ninth: Papists
resisted Henry the Fourth: both Papists and Calvinists resisted Henry
the Third. In Scotland Calvinists led Mary captive. On the north of
the Trent Papists took arms against the English throne. The Church
of England meantime condemned both Calvinists and Papists, and loudly
boasted that no duty was more constantly or earnestly inculcated by her
than that of submission to princes.

The advantages which the crown derived from this close alliance with
the Established Church were great; but they were not without serious
drawbacks. The compromise arranged by Cranmer had from the first been
considered by a large body of Protestants as a scheme for serving two
masters, as an attempt to unite the worship of the Lord with the worship
of Baal. In the days of Edward the Sixth the scruples of this party had
repeatedly thrown great difficulties in the way of the government. When
Elizabeth came to the throne, those difficulties were much increased.
Violence naturally engenders violence. The spirit of Protestantism was
therefore far fiercer and more intolerant after the cruelties of Mary
than before them. Many persons who were warmly attached to the new
opinions had, during the evil days, taken refuge in Switzerland and
Germany. They had been hospitably received by their brethren in the
faith, had sate at the feet of the great doctors of Strasburg, Zurich,
and Geneva, and had been, during some years, accustomed to a more simple
worship, and to a more democratical form of church government, than
England had yet seen. These men returned to their country convinced that
the reform which had been effected under King Edward had been far less
searching and extensive than the interests of pure religion required.
But it was in vain that they attempted to obtain any concession from
Elizabeth. Indeed her system, wherever it differed from her brother's,
seemed to them to differ for the worse. They were little disposed to
submit, in matters of faith, to any human authority. They had recently,
in reliance on their own interpretation of Scripture, risen up against a
Church strong in immemorial antiquity and catholic consent. It was by no
common exertion of intellectual energy that they had thrown off the yoke
of that gorgeous and imperial superstition; and it was vain to expect
that, immediately after such an emancipation, they would patiently
submit to a new spiritual tyranny. Long accustomed, when the priest
lifted up the host, to bow down with their faces to the earth, as before
a present God, they had learned to treat the mass as an idolatrous
mummery. Long accustomed to regard the Pope as the successor of the
chief of the apostles, as the bearer of the keys of earth and heaven,
they had learned to regard him as the Beast, the Antichrist, the Man of
Sin. It was not to be expected that they would immediately transfer
to an upstart authority the homage which they had withdrawn from the
Vatican; that they would submit their private judgment to the authority
of a Church founded on private judgment alone; that they would be afraid
to dissent from teachers who themselves dissented from what had lately
been the universal faith of western Christendom. It is easy to conceive
the indignation which must have been felt by bold and inquisitive
spirits, glorying in newly acquired freedom, when an institution younger
by many years than themselves, an institution which had, under their own
eyes, gradually received its form from the passions and interest of a
court, began to mimic the lofty style of Rome.

Since these men could not be convinced, it was determined that they
should be persecuted. Persecution produced its natural effect on them.
It found them a sect: it made them a faction. To their hatred of the
Church was now added hatred of the Crown. The two sentiments were
intermingled; and each embittered the other. The opinions of the Puritan
concerning the relation of ruler and subject were widely different from
those which were inculcated in the Homilies. His favourite divines had,
both by precept and by example, encouraged resistance to tyrants
and persecutors. His fellow Calvinists in France, in Holland, and
in Scotland, were in arms against idolatrous and cruel princes. His
notions, too, respecting, the government of the state took a tinge
from his notions respecting the government of the Church. Some of the
sarcasms which were popularly thrown on episcopacy might, without much
difficulty, be turned against royalty; and many of the arguments which
were used to prove that spiritual power was best lodged in a synod
seemed to lead to the conclusion that temporal power was best lodged in
a parliament.

Thus, as the priest of the Established Church was, from interest, from
principle, and from passion, zealous for the royal prerogatives, the
Puritan was, from interest, from principle, and from passion, hostile to
them. The power of the discontented sectaries was great. They were found
in every rank; but they were strongest among the mercantile classes in
the towns, and among the small proprietors in the country. Early in
the reign of Elizabeth they began to return a majority of the House of
Commons. And doubtless had our ancestors been then at liberty to fix
their attention entirely on domestic questions, the strife between the
Crown and the Parliament would instantly have commenced. But that was
no season for internal dissensions. It might, indeed, well be doubted
whether the firmest union among all the orders of the state could avert
the common danger by which all were threatened. Roman Catholic Europe
and reformed Europe were struggling for death or life. France divided
against herself, had, for a time, ceased to be of any account in
Christendom. The English Government was at the head of the Protestant
interest, and, while persecuting Presbyterians at home, extended a
powerful protection to Presbyterian Churches abroad. At the head of the
opposite party was the mightiest prince of the age, a prince who ruled
Spain, Portugal, Italy, the East and the West Indies, whose armies
repeatedly marched to Paris, and whose fleets kept the coasts of
Devonshire and Sussex in alarm. It long seemed probable that Englishmen
would have to fight desperately on English ground for their religion and
independence. Nor were they ever for a moment free from apprehensions
of some great treason at home. For in that age it had become a point of
conscience and of honour with many men of generous natures to sacrifice
their country to their religion. A succession of dark plots, formed by
Roman Catholics against the life of the Queen and the existence of the
nation, kept society in constant alarm. Whatever might be the faults of
Elizabeth, it was plain that, to speak humanly, the fate of the realm
and of all reformed Churches was staked on the security of her person
and on the success of her administration. To strengthen her hands was,
therefore, the first duty of a patriot and a Protestant; and that duty
was well performed. The Puritans, even in the depths of the prisons to
which she had sent them, prayed, and with no simulated fervour, that she
might be kept from the dagger of the assassin, that rebellion might be
put down under her feet, and that her arms might be victorious by sea
and land. One of the most stubborn of the stubborn sect, immediately
after his hand had been lopped off for an offence into which he had been
hurried by his intemperate zeal, waved his hat with the hand which was
still left him, and shouted "God save the Queen!" The sentiment with
which these men regarded her has descended to their posterity. The
Nonconformists, rigorously as she treated them, have, as a body, always
venerated her memory. [5]

During the greater part of her reign, therefore, the Puritans in the
House of Commons, though sometimes mutinous, felt no disposition to
array themselves in systematic opposition to the government. But,
when the defeat of the Armada, the successful resistance of the United
Provinces to the Spanish power, the firm establishment of Henry the
Fourth on the throne of France, and the death of Philip the Second,
had secured the State and the Church against all danger from abroad,
an obstinate struggle, destined to last during several generations,
instantly began at home.

It was in the Parliament of 1601 that the opposition which had, during
forty years, been silently gathering and husbanding strength, fought
its first great battle and won its first victory. The ground was well
chosen. The English Sovereigns had always been entrusted with the
supreme direction of commercial police. It was their undoubted
prerogative to regulate coin, weights, and measures, and to appoint
fairs, markets, and ports. The line which bounded their authority over
trade had, as usual, been but loosely drawn. They therefore, as usual,
encroached on the province which rightfully belonged to the legislature.
The encroachment was, as usual, patiently borne, till it became serious.
But at length the Queen took upon herself to grant patents of monopoly
by scores. There was scarcely a family in the realm which did not
feel itself aggrieved by the oppression and extortion which this abuse
naturally caused. Iron, oil, vinegar, coal, saltpetre, lead, starch,
yarn, skins, leather, glass, could be bought only at exorbitant prices.
The House of Commons met in an angry and determined mood. It was in vain
that a courtly minority blamed the Speaker for suffering the acts of
the Queen's Highness to be called in question. The language of the
discontented party was high and menacing, and was echoed by the voice
of the whole nation. The coach of the chief minister of the crown was
surrounded by an indignant populace, who cursed the monopolies, and
exclaimed that the prerogative should not be suffered to touch the old
liberties of England. There seemed for a moment to be some danger that
the long and glorious reign of Elizabeth would have a shameful and
disastrous end. She, however, with admirable judgment and temper,
declined the contest, put herself at the head of the reforming party,
redressed the grievance, thanked the Commons, in touching and dignified
language, for their tender care of the general weal, brought back to
herself the hearts of the people, and left to her successors a memorable
example of the way in which it behoves a ruler to deal with public
movements which he has not the means of resisting.

In the year 1603 the great Queen died. That year is, on many accounts,
one of the most important epochs in our history. It was then that both
Scotland and Ireland became parts of the same empire with England. Both
Scotland and Ireland, indeed, had been subjugated by the Plantagenets;
but neither country had been patient under the yoke. Scotland had, with
heroic energy, vindicated her independence, had, from the time of Robert
Bruce, been a separate kingdom, and was now joined to the southern
part of the island in a manner which rather gratified than wounded her
national pride. Ireland had never, since the days of Henry the Second,
been able to expel the foreign invaders; but she had struggled against
them long and fiercely. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
the English power in that island was constantly declining, and in the
days of Henry the Seventh, sank to the lowest point. The Irish dominions
of that prince consisted only of the counties of Dublin and Louth, of
some parts of Meath and Kildare, and of a few seaports scattered along
the coast. A large portion even of Leinster was not yet divided into
counties. Munster, Ulster, and Connaught were ruled by petty sovereigns,
partly Celts, and partly degenerate Normans, who had forgotten their
origin and had adopted the Celtic language and manners. But during the
sixteenth century, the English power had made great progress. The half
savage chieftains who reigned beyond the pale had submitted one after
another to the lieutenants of the Tudors. At length, a few weeks before
the death of Elizabeth, the conquest, which had been begun more than
four hundred years before by Strongbow, was completed by Mountjoy.
Scarcely had James the First mounted the English throne when the last
O'Donnel and O'Neil who have held the rank of independent princes kissed
his hand at Whitehall. Thenceforward his writs ran and his judges held
assizes in every part of Ireland; and the English law superseded the
customs which had prevailed among the aboriginal tribes.

In extent Scotland and Ireland were nearly equal to each other, and were
together nearly equal to England, but were much less thickly
peopled than England, and were very far behind England in wealth and
civilisation. Scotland had been kept back by the sterility of her soil;
and, in the midst of light, the thick darkness of the middle ages still
rested on Ireland.

The population of Scotland, with the exception of the Celtic tribes
which were thinly scattered over the Hebrides and over the mountainous
parts of the northern shires, was of the same blood with the population
of England, and spoke a tongue which did not differ from the purest
English more than the dialects of Somersetshire and Lancashire differed
from each other. In Ireland, on the contrary, the population, with the
exception of the small English colony near the coast, was Celtic, and
still kept the Celtic speech and manners.

In natural courage and intelligence both the nations which now became
connected with England ranked high. In perseverance, in selfcommand, in
forethought, in all the virtues which conduce to success in life, the
Scots have never been surpassed. The Irish, on the other hand, were
distinguished by qualities which tend to make men interesting rather
than prosperous. They were an ardent and impetuous race, easily moved
to tears or to laughter, to fury or to love. Alone among the nations of
northern Europe they had the susceptibility, the vivacity, the natural
turn for acting and rhetoric, which are indigenous on the shores of the
Mediterranean Sea. In mental cultivation Scotland had an indisputable
superiority. Though that kingdom was then the poorest in Christendom,
it already vied in every branch of learning with the most favoured
countries. Scotsmen, whose dwellings and whose food were as wretched as
those of the Icelanders of our time, wrote Latin verse with more than
the delicacy of Vida, and made discoveries in science which would have
added to the renown of Galileo. Ireland could boast of no Buchanan or
Napier. The genius, with which her aboriginal inhabitants were largely
endowed' showed itself as yet only in ballads which wild and rugged as
they were, seemed to the judging eye of Spenser to contain a portion of
the pure gold of poetry.

Scotland, in becoming part of the British monarchy, preserved her
dignity. Having, during many generations, courageously withstood the
English arms, she was now joined to her stronger neighbour on the most
honourable terms. She gave a King instead of receiving one. She retained
her own constitution and laws. Her tribunals and parliaments remained
entirely independent of the tribunals and parliaments which sate at
Westminster. The administration of Scotland was in Scottish hands; for
no Englishman had any motive to emigrate northward, and to contend with
the shrewdest and most pertinacious of all races for what was to be
scraped together in the poorest of all treasuries. Nevertheless Scotland
by no means escaped the fate ordained for every country which is
connected, but not incorporated, with another country of greater
resources. Though in name an independent kingdom, she was, during more
than a century, really treated, in many respects, as a subject province.

Ireland was undisguisedly governed as a dependency won by the sword. Her
rude national institutions had perished. The English colonists submitted
to the dictation of the mother country, without whose support they could
not exist, and indemnified themselves by trampling on the people among
whom they had settled. The parliaments which met at Dublin could pass no
law which had not been previously approved by the English Privy Council.
The authority of the English legislature extended over Ireland. The
executive administration was entrusted to men taken either from England
or from the English pale, and, in either case, regarded as foreigners,
and even as enemies, by the Celtic population.

But the circumstance which, more than any other, has made Ireland to
differ from Scotland remains to be noticed. Scotland was Protestant. In
no part of Europe had the movement of the popular mind against the Roman
Catholic Church been so rapid and violent. The Reformers had vanquished,
deposed, and imprisoned their idolatrous sovereign. They would not
endure even such a compromise as had been effected in England. They had
established the Calvinistic doctrine, discipline, and worship; and they
made little distinction between Popery and Prelacy, between the Mass and
the Book of Common Prayer. Unfortunately for Scotland, the prince whom
she sent to govern a fairer inheritance had been so much annoyed by
the pertinacity with which her theologians had asserted against him the
privileges of the synod and the pulpit that he hated the ecclesiastical
polity to which she was fondly attached as much as it was in his
effeminate nature to hate anything, and had no sooner mounted the
English throne than he began to show an intolerant zeal for the
government and ritual of the English Church.

The Irish were the only people of northern Europe who had remained true
to the old religion. This is to be partly ascribed to the circumstance
that they were some centuries behind their neighbours in knowledge. But
other causes had cooperated. The Reformation had been a national as well
as a moral revolt. It had been, not only an insurrection of the laity
against the clergy, but also an insurrection of all the branches of the
great German race against an alien domination. It is a most significant
circumstance that no large society of which the tongue is not Teutonic
has ever turned Protestant, and that, wherever a language derived from
that of ancient Rome is spoken, the religion of modern Rome to this day
prevails. The patriotism of the Irish had taken a peculiar direction.
The object of their animosity was not Rome, but England; and they had
especial reason to abhor those English sovereigns who had been the
chiefs of the great schism, Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth. During
the vain struggle which two generations of Milesian princes maintained
against the Tudors, religious enthusiasm and national enthusiasm became
inseparably blended in the minds of the vanquished race. The new feud
of Protestant and Papist inflamed the old feud of Saxon and Celt.
The English conquerors meanwhile, neglected all legitimate means of
conversion. No care was taken to provide the vanquished nation with
instructors capable of making themselves understood. No translation of
the Bible was put forth in the Irish language. The government contented
itself with setting up a vast hierarchy of Protestant archbishops,
bishops, and rectors, who did nothing, and who, for doing nothing, were
paid out of the spoils of a Church loved and revered by the great body
of the people.

There was much in the state both of Scotland and of Ireland which might
well excite the painful apprehensions of a farsighted statesman. As yet,
however, there was the appearance of tranquillity. For the first time
all the British isles were peaceably united under one sceptre.

It should seem that the weight of England among European nations ought,
from this epoch, to have greatly increased. The territory which her new
King governed was, in extent, nearly double that which Elizabeth had
inherited. His empire was the most complete within itself and the most
secure from attack that was to be found in the world. The Plantagenets
and Tudors had been repeatedly under the necessity of defending
themselves against Scotland while they were engaged in continental war.
The long conflict in Ireland had been a severe and perpetual drain on
their resources. Yet even under such disadvantages those sovereigns had
been highly considered throughout Christendom. It might, therefore, not
unreasonably be expected that England, Scotland, and Ireland combined
would form a state second to none that then existed.

All such expectations were strangely disappointed. On the day of the
accession of James the First, England descended from the rank which she
had hitherto held, and began to be regarded as a power hardly of the
second order. During many years the great British monarchy, under four
successive princes of the House of Stuart, was scarcely a more important
member of the European system than the little kingdom of Scotland had
previously been. This, however, is little to be regretted. Of James the
First, as of John, it may be said that, if his administration had been
able and splendid, it would probably have been fatal to our country,
and that we owe more to his weakness and meanness than to the wisdom and
courage of much better sovereigns. He came to the throne at a critical
moment. The time was fast approaching when either the King must
become absolute, or the parliament must control the whole executive
administration. Had James been, like Henry the Fourth, like Maurice of
Nassau, or like Gustavus Adolphus, a valiant, active, and politic ruler,
had he put himself at the head of the Protestants of Europe, had
he gained great victories over Tilly and Spinola, had he adorned
Westminster with the spoils of Bavarian monasteries and Flemish
cathedrals, had he hung Austrian and Castilian banners in Saint Paul's,
and had he found himself, after great achievements, at the head of fifty
thousand troops, brave, well disciplined, and devotedly attached to his
person, the English Parliament would soon have been nothing more than
a name. Happily he was not a man to play such a part. He began his
administration by putting an end to the war which had raged during
many years between England and Spain; and from that time he shunned
hostilities with a caution which was proof against the insults of his
neighbours and the clamours of his subjects. Not till the last year of
his life could the influence of his son, his favourite, his Parliament,
and his people combined, induce him to strike one feeble blow in
defence of his family and of his religion. It was well for those whom he
governed that he in this matter disregarded their wishes. The effect of
his pacific policy was that, in his time, no regular troops were needed,
and that, while France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Germany swarmed with
mercenary soldiers, the defence of our island was still confided to the
militia.

As the King had no standing army, and did not even attempt to form one,
it would have been wise in him to avoid any conflict with his people.
But such was his indiscretion that, while he altogether neglected the
means which alone could make him really absolute, he constantly put
forward, in the most offensive form, claims of which none of his
predecessors had ever dreamed. It was at this time that those strange
theories which Filmer afterwards formed into a system and which became
the badge of the most violent class of Tories and high churchmen, first
emerged into notice. It was gravely maintained that the Supreme Being
regarded hereditary monarchy, as opposed to other forms of government,
with peculiar favour; that the rule of succession in order of
primogeniture was a divine institution, anterior to the Christian, and
even to the Mosaic dispensation; that no human power, not even that
of the whole legislature, no length of adverse possession, though it
extended to ten centuries, could deprive a legitimate prince of his
rights, that the authority of such a prince was necessarily always
despotic; that the laws, by which, in England and in other countries,
the prerogative was limited, were to be regarded merely as concessions
which the sovereign had freely made and might at his pleasure resume;
and that any treaty which a king might conclude with his people was
merely a declaration of his present intentions, and not a contract of
which the performance could be demanded. It is evident that this theory,
though intended to strengthen the foundations of government, altogether
unsettles them. Does the divine and immutable law of primogeniture admit
females, or exclude them? On either supposition half the sovereigns of
Europe must be usurpers, reigning in defiance of the law of God, and
liable to be dispossessed by the rightful heirs. The doctrine that
kingly government is peculiarly favoured by Heaven receives no
countenance from the Old Testament; for in the Old Testament we read
that the chosen people were blamed and punished for desiring a king, and
that they were afterwards commanded to withdraw their allegiance
from him. Their whole history, far from countenancing the notion that
succession in order of primogeniture is of divine institution, would
rather seem to indicate that younger brothers are under the especial
protection of heaven. Isaac was not the eldest son of Abraham, nor Jacob
of Isaac, nor Judah of Jacob, nor David of Jesse nor Solomon of David
Nor does the system of Filmer receive any countenance from those
passages of the New Testament which describe government as an ordinance
of God: for the government under which the writers of the New Testament
lived was not a hereditary monarchy. The Roman Emperors were republican
magistrates, named by the senate. None of them pretended to rule by
right of birth; and, in fact, both Tiberius, to whom Christ commanded
that tribute should be given, and Nero, whom Paul directed the Romans to
obey, were, according to the patriarchal theory of government, usurpers.
In the middle ages the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right would
have been regarded as heretical: for it was altogether incompatible with
the high pretensions of the Church of Rome. It was a doctrine unknown
to the founders of the Church of England. The Homily on Wilful Rebellion
had strongly, and indeed too strongly, inculcated submission to
constituted authority, but had made no distinction between hereditary
end elective monarchies, or between monarchies and republics. Indeed
most of the predecessors of James would, from personal motives, have
regarded the patriarchal theory of government with aversion. William
Rufus, Henry the First, Stephen, John, Henry the Fourth, Henry the
Fifth, Henry the Sixth, Richard the Third, and Henry the Seventh, had
all reigned in defiance of the strict rule of descent. A grave
doubt hung over the legitimacy both of Mary and of Elizabeth. It was
impossible that both Catharine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn could have been
lawfully married to Henry the Eighth; and the highest authority in
the realm had pronounced that neither was so. The Tudors, far from
considering the law of succession as a divine and unchangeable
institution, were constantly tampering with it. Henry the Eighth
obtained an act of parliament, giving him power to leave the crown by
will, and actually made a will to the prejudice of the royal family
of Scotland. Edward the Sixth, unauthorised by Parliament, assumed a
similar power, with the full approbation of the most eminent Reformers.
Elizabeth, conscious that her own title was open to grave objection, and
unwilling to admit even a reversionary right in her rival and enemy
the Queen of Scots, induced the Parliament to pass a law, enacting that
whoever should deny the competency of the reigning sovereign, with the
assent of the Estates of the realm, to alter the succession, should
suffer death as a traitor: But the situation of James was widely
different from that of Elizabeth. Far inferior to her in abilities and
in popularity, regarded by the English as an alien, and excluded from
the throne by the testament of Henry the Eighth, the King of Scots was
yet the undoubted heir of William the Conqueror and of Egbert. He had,
therefore, an obvious interest in inculcating the superstitions notion
that birth confers rights anterior to law, and unalterable by law. It
was a notion, moreover, well suited to his intellect and temper. It soon
found many advocates among those who aspired to his favour, and made
rapid progress among the clergy of the Established Church.

Thus, at the very moment at which a republican spirit began to manifest
itself strongly in the Parliament and in the country, the claims of the
monarch took a monstrous form which would have disgusted the proudest
and most arbitrary of those who had preceded him on the throne.

James was always boasting of his skill in what he called kingcraft; and
yet it is hardly possible even to imagine a course more directly opposed
to all the rules of kingcraft, than that which he followed. The policy
of wise rulers has always been to disguise strong acts under popular
forms. It was thus that Augustus and Napoleon established absolute
monarchies, while the public regarded them merely as eminent citizens
invested with temporary magistracies. The policy of James was the direct
reverse of theirs. He enraged and alarmed his Parliament by constantly
telling them that they held their privileges merely during his pleasure
and that they had no more business to inquire what he might lawfully
do than what the Deity might lawfully do. Yet he quailed before them,
abandoned minister after minister to their vengeance, and suffered them
to tease him into acts directly opposed to his strongest inclinations.
Thus the indignation excited by his claims and the scorn excited by
his concessions went on growing together. By his fondness for worthless
minions, and by the sanction which he gave to their tyranny and
rapacity, he kept discontent constantly alive. His cowardice, his
childishness, his pedantry, his ungainly person, his provincial accent,
made him an object of derision. Even in his virtues and accomplishments
there was something eminently unkingly. Throughout the whole course of
his reign, all the venerable associations by which the throng had long
been fenced were gradually losing their strength. During two hundred
years all the sovereigns who had ruled England, with the exception of
Henry the Sixth, had been strongminded, highspirited, courageous, and of
princely bearing. Almost all had possessed abilities above the ordinary
level. It was no light thing that on the very eve of the decisive
struggle between our Kings and their Parliaments, royalty should be
exhibited to the world stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears,
trembling at a drawn sword, and talking in the style alternately of a
buffoon and of a pedagogue.

In the meantime the religious dissensions, by which, from the days of
Edward the Sixth, the Protestant body had been distracted, had become
more formidable than ever. The interval which had separated the first
generation of Puritans from Cranmer and Jewel was small indeed when
compared with the interval which separated the third generation of
Puritans from Laud and Hammond. While the recollection of Mary's
cruelties was still fresh, while the powers of the Roman Catholic party
still inspired apprehension, while Spain still retained ascendency and
aspired to universal dominion, all the reformed sects knew that they had
a strong common interest and a deadly common enemy. The animosity
which they felt towards each other was languid when compared with
the animosity which they all felt towards Rome. Conformists and
Nonconformists had heartily joined in enacting penal laws of extreme
severity against the Papists. But when more than half a century of
undisturbed possession had given confidence to the Established Church,
when nine tenths of the nation had become heartily Protestant, when
England was at peace with all the world, when there was no danger that
Popery would be forced by foreign arms on the nation, when the last
confessors who had stood before Bonner had passed away, a change took
place in the feeling of the Anglican clergy. Their hostility to the
Roman Catholic doctrine and discipline was considerably mitigated.
Their dislike of the Puritans, on the other hand, increased daily. The
controversies which had from the beginning divided the Protestant party
took such a form as made reconciliation hopeless; and new controversies
of still greater importance were added to the old subjects of dispute.

The founders of the Anglican Church had retained episcopacy as an
ancient, a decent, and a convenient ecclesiastical polity, but had not
declared that form of church government to be of divine institution. We
have already seen how low an estimate Cranmer had formed of the office
of a Bishop. In the reign of Elizabeth, Jewel, Cooper, Whitgift, and
other eminent doctors defended prelacy, as innocent, as useful, as what
the state might lawfully establish, as what, when established by the
state, was entitled to the respect of every citizen. But they never
denied that a Christian community without a Bishop might be a pure
Church. [6] On the contrary, they regarded the Protestants of the
Continent as of the same household of faith with themselves. Englishmen
in England were indeed bound to acknowledge the authority of the Bishop,
as they were bound to acknowledge the authority of the Sheriff and of
the Coroner: but the obligation was purely local. An English churchman,
nay even an English prelate, if he went to Holland, conformed without
scruple to the established religion of Holland. Abroad the ambassadors
of Elizabeth and James went in state to the very worship which Elizabeth
and James persecuted at home, and carefully abstained from decorating
their private chapels after the Anglican fashion, lest scandal should
be given to weaker brethren. An instrument is still extant by which the
Primate of all England, in the year 1582, authorised a Scotch minister,
ordained, according to the laudable forms of the Scotch Church, by the
Synod of East Lothian, to preach and administer the sacraments in
any part of the province of Canterbury. [7] In the year 1603, the
Convocation solemnly recognised the Church of Scotland, a Church in
which episcopal control and episcopal ordination were then unknown, as a
branch of the Holy Catholic Church of Christ. [8] It was even held that
Presbyterian ministers were entitled to place and voice in oecumenical
councils. When the States General of the United Provinces convoked at
Dort a synod of doctors not episcopally ordained, an English Bishop and
an English Dean, commissioned by the head of the English Church, sate
with those doctors, preached to them, and voted with them on the gravest
questions of theology. [9] Nay, many English benefices were held by
divines who had been admitted to the ministry in the Calvinistic form
used on the Continent; nor was reordination by a Bishop in such cases
then thought necessary, or even lawful. [10]

But a new race of divines was already rising in the Church of England.
In their view the episcopal office was essential to the welfare of a
Christian society and to the efficacy of the most solemn ordinances of
religion. To that office belonged certain high and sacred privileges,
which no human power could give or take away. A church might as well be
without the doctrine of the Trinity, or the doctrine of the Incarnation,
as without the apostolical orders; and the Church of Rome, which, in the
midst of all her corruptions, had retained the apostolical orders,
was nearer to primitive purity than those reformed societies which had
rashly set up, in opposition to the divine model, a system invented by
men.

In the days of Edward the Sixth and of Elizabeth, the defenders of the
Anglican ritual had generally contented themselves with saying that it
might be used without sin, and that, therefore, none but a perverse and
undutiful subject would refuse to use it when enjoined to do so by the
magistrate. Now, however, that rising party which claimed for the polity
of the Church a celestial origin began to ascribe to her services a new
dignity and importance. It was hinted that, if the established worship
had any fault, that fault was extreme simplicity, and that the Reformers
had, in the heat of their quarrel with Rome, abolished many ancient
ceremonies which might with advantage have been retained. Days and
places were again held in mysterious veneration. Some practices which
had long been disused, and which were commonly regarded as superstitious
mummeries, were revived. Paintings and carvings, which had escaped the
fury of the first generation of Protestants, became the objects of a
respect such as to many seemed idolatrous.

No part of the system of the old Church had been more detested by the
Reformers than the honour paid to celibacy. They held that the doctrine
of Rome on this subject had been prophetically condemned by the apostle
Paul, as a doctrine of devils; and they dwelt much on the crimes and
scandals which seemed to prove the justice of this awful denunciation.
Luther had evinced his own opinion in the clearest manner, by espousing
a nun. Some of the most illustrious bishops and priests who had died by
fire during the reign of Mary had left wives and children. Now, however,
it began to be rumoured that the old monastic spirit had reappeared
in the Church of England; that there was in high quarters a prejudice
against married priests; that even laymen, who called themselves
Protestants, had made resolutions of celibacy which almost amounted
to vows; nay, that a minister of the established religion had set up a
nunnery, in which the psalms were chaunted at midnight, by a company of
virgins dedicated to God. [11]

Nor was this all. A class of questions, as to which the founders of the
Anglican Church and the first generation of Puritans had differed
little or not at all, began to furnish matter for fierce disputes. The
controversies which had divided the Protestant body in its infancy had
related almost exclusively to Church government and to ceremonies. There
had been no serious quarrel between the contending parties on points of
metaphysical theology. The doctrines held by the chiefs of the hierarchy
touching original sin, faith, grace, predestination, and election,
were those which are popularly called Calvinistic. Towards the close of
Elizabeth's reign her favourite prelate, Archbishop Whitgift, drew
up, in concert with the Bishop of London and other theologians, the
celebrated instrument known by the name of the Lambeth Articles. In that
instrument the most startling of the Calvinistic doctrines are affirmed
with a distinctness which would shock many who, in our age, are reputed
Calvinists. One clergyman, who took the opposite side, and spoke harshly
of Calvin, was arraigned for his presumption by the University of
Cambridge, and escaped punishment only by expressing his firm belief in
the tenets of reprobation and final perseverance, and his sorrow for
the offence which he had given to pious men by reflecting on the great
French reformer. The school of divinity of which Hooker was the chief
occupies a middle place between the school of Cranmer and the school of
Laud; and Hooker has, in modern times, been claimed by the Arminians
as an ally. Yet Hooker pronounced Calvin to have been a man superior
in wisdom to any other divine that France had produced, a man to whom
thousands were indebted for the knowledge of divine truth, but who was
himself indebted to God alone. When the Arminian controversy arose
in Holland, the English government and the English Church lent strong
support to the Calvinistic party; nor is the English name altogether
free from the stain which has been left on that party by the
imprisonment of Grocius and the judicial murder of Barneveldt.

But, even before the meeting of the Dutch synod, that part of the
Anglican clergy which was peculiarly hostile to the Calvinistic Church
government and to the Calvinistic worship had begun to regard with
dislike the Calvinistic metaphysics; and this feeling was very naturally
strengthened by the gross injustice, insolence, and cruelty of the party
which was prevalent at Dort. The Arminian doctrine, a doctrine less
austerely logical than that of the early Reformers, but more agreeable
to the popular notions of the divine justice and benevolence, spread
fast and wide. The infection soon reached the court. Opinions which
at the time of the accession of James, no clergyman could have avowed
without imminent risk of being stripped of his gown, were now the best
title to preferment. A divine of that age, who was asked by a simple
country gentleman what the Arminians held, answered, with as much truth
as wit, that they held all the best bishoprics and deaneries in England.

While the majority of the Anglican clergy quitted, in one direction, the
position which they had originally occupied, the majority of the
Puritan body departed, in a direction diametrically opposite, from the
principles and practices of their fathers. The persecution which the
separatists had undergone had been severe enough to irritate, but not
severe enough to destroy. They had been, not tamed into submission, but
baited into savageness and stubborness. After the fashion of oppressed
sects, they mistook their own vindictive feelings for emotions of piety,
encouraged in themselves by reading and meditation, a disposition to
brood over their wrongs, and, when they had worked themselves up into
hating their enemies, imagined that they were only hating the enemies
of heaven. In the New Testament there was little indeed which, even when
perverted by the most disingenuous exposition, could seem to countenance
the indulgence of malevolent passions. But the Old Testament contained
the history of a race selected by God to be witnesses of his unity and
ministers of his vengeance, and specially commanded by him to do many
things which, if done without his special command, would have been
atrocious crimes. In such a history it was not difficult for fierce
and gloomy spirits to find much that might be distorted to suit their
wishes. The extreme Puritans therefore began to feel for the Old
Testament a preference, which, perhaps, they did not distinctly avow
even to themselves; but which showed itself in all their sentiments and
habits. They paid to the Hebrew language a respect which they refused
to that tongue in which the discourses of Jesus and the epistles of Paul
have come down to us. They baptized their children by the names, not of
Christian saints, but of Hebrew patriarchs and warriors. In defiance
of the express and reiterated declarations of Luther and Calvin, they
turned the weekly festival by which the Church had, from the primitive
times, commemorated the resurrection of her Lord, into a Jewish Sabbath.
They sought for principles of jurisprudence in the Mosaic law, and for
precedents to guide their ordinary conduct in the books of Judges
and Kings. Their thoughts and discourse ran much on acts which were
assuredly not recorded as examples for our imitation. The prophet who
hewed in pieces a captive king, the rebel general who gave the blood of
a queen to the dogs, the matron who, in defiance of plighted faith, and
of the laws of eastern hospitality, drove the nail into the brain of the
fugitive ally who had just fed at her board, and who was sleeping under
the shadow of her tent, were proposed as models to Christians suffering
under the tyranny of princes and prelates. Morals and manners were
subjected to a code resembling that of the synagogue, when the synagogue
was in its worst state. The dress, the deportment, the language, the
studies, the amusements of the rigid sect were regulated on principles
not unlike those of the Pharisees who, proud of their washed hands and
broad phylacteries, taunted the Redeemer as a sabbath-breaker and a
winebibber. It was a sin to hang garlands on a Maypole, to drink a
friend's health, to fly a hawk, to hunt a stag, to play at chess, to
wear love-locks, to put starch into a ruff, to touch the virginals,
to read the Fairy Queen. Rules such as these, rules which would have
appeared insupportable to the free and joyous spirit of Luther, and
contemptible to the serene and philosophical intellect of Zwingle, threw
over all life a more than monastic gloom. The learning and eloquence by
which the great Reformers had been eminently distinguished, and to which
they had been, in no small measure, indebted for their success, were
regarded by the new school of Protestants with suspicion, if not with
aversion. Some precisians had scruples about teaching the Latin grammar,
because the names of Mars, Bacchus, and Apollo occurred in it. The
fine arts were all but proscribed. The solemn peal of the organ was
superstitious. The light music of Ben Jonson's masques was dissolute.
Half the fine paintings in England were idolatrous, and the other half
indecent. The extreme Puritan was at once known from other men by his
gait, his garb, his lank hair, the sour solemnity of his face, the
upturned white of his eyes, the nasal twang with which he spoke, and
above all, by his peculiar dialect. He employed, on every occasion, the
imagery and style of Scripture. Hebraisms violently introduced into the
English language, and metaphors borrowed from the boldest lyric poetry
of a remote age and country, and applied to the common concerns of
English life, were the most striking peculiarities of this cant,
which moved, not without cause, the derision both of Prelatists and
libertines.

Thus the political and religious schism which had originated in the
sixteenth century was, during the first quarter of the seventeenth
century, constantly widening. Theories tending to Turkish despotism
were in fashion at Whitehall. Theories tending to republicanism were
in favour with a large portion of the House of Commons. The violent
Prelatists who were, to a man, zealous for prerogative, and the violent
Puritans who were, to a man, zealous for the privileges of Parliament,
regarded each other with animosity more intense than that which, in the
preceding generation, had existed between Catholics and Protestants.

While the minds of men were in this state, the country, after a peace
of many years, at length engaged in a war which required strenuous
exertions. This war hastened the approach of the great constitutional
crisis. It was necessary that the King should have a large military
force. He could not have such a force without money. He could not
legally raise money without the consent of Parliament. It followed,
therefore, that he either must administer the government in conformity
with the sense of the House of Commons, or must venture on such a
violation of the fundamental laws of the land as had been unknown during
several centuries. The Plantagenets and the Tudors had, it is true,
occasionally supplied a deficiency in their revenue by a benevolence or
a forced loan: but these expedients were always of a temporary nature.
To meet the regular charge of a long war by regular taxation, imposed
without the consent of the Estates of the realm, was a course which
Henry the Eighth himself would not have dared to take. It seemed,
therefore, that the decisive hour was approaching, and that the English
Parliament would soon either share the fate of the senates of the
Continent, or obtain supreme ascendency in the state.

Just at this conjuncture James died. Charles the First succeeded to the
throne. He had received from nature a far better understanding, a far
stronger will, and a far keener and firmer temper than his father's.
He had inherited his father's political theories, and was much more
disposed than his father to carry them into practice. He was, like his
father, a zealous Episcopalian. He was, moreover, what his father had
never been, a zealous Arminian, and, though no Papist, liked a Papist
much better than a Puritan. It would be unjust to deny that Charles had
some of the qualities of a good, and even of a great prince. He wrote
and spoke, not, like his father, with the exactness of a professor, but
after the fashion of intelligent and well educated gentlemen. His taste
in literature and art was excellent, his manner dignified, though not
gracious, his domestic life without blemish. Faithlessness was the chief
cause of his disasters, and is the chief stain on his memory. He was, in
truth, impelled by an incurable propensity to dark and crooked ways.
It may seem strange that his conscience, which, on occasions of little
moment, was sufficiently sensitive, should never have reproached
him with this great vice. But there is reason to believe that he was
perfidious, not only from constitution and from habit, but also on
principle. He seems to have learned from the theologians whom he most
esteemed that between him and his subjects there could be nothing of the
nature of mutual contract; that he could not, even if he would, divest
himself of his despotic authority; and that, in every promise which he
made, there was an implied reservation that such promise might be broken
in case of necessity, and that of the necessity he was the sole judge.

And now began that hazardous game on which were staked the destinies of
the English people. It was played on the side of the House of Commons
with keenness, but with admirable dexterity, coolness, and perseverance.
Great statesmen who looked far behind them and far before them were at
the head of that assembly. They were resolved to place the King in such
a situation that he must either conduct the administration in conformity
with the wishes of his Parliament, or make outrageous attacks on the
most sacred principles of the constitution. They accordingly doled out
supplies to him very sparingly. He found that he must govern either in
harmony with the House of Commons or in defiance of all law. His choice
was soon made. He dissolved his first Parliament, and levied taxes by
his own authority. He convoked a second Parliament, and found it more
intractable than the first. He again resorted to the expedient of
dissolution, raised fresh taxes without any show of legal right, and
threw the chiefs of the opposition into prison At the same time a new
grievance, which the peculiar feelings and habits of the English nation
made insupportably painful, and which seemed to all discerning men to
be of fearful augury, excited general discontent and alarm. Companies
of soldiers were billeted on the people; and martial law was, in some
places, substituted for the ancient jurisprudence of the realm.

The King called a third Parliament, and soon perceived that the
opposition was stronger and fiercer than ever. He now determined on a
change of tactics. Instead of opposing an inflexible resistance to the
demands of the Commons, he, after much altercation and many evasions,
agreed to a compromise which, if he had faithfully adhered to it, would
have averted a long series of calamities. The Parliament granted
an ample supply. The King ratified, in the most solemn manner, that
celebrated law, which is known by the name of the Petition of Right,
and which is the second Great Charter of the liberties of England. By
ratifying that law he bound himself never again to raise money without
the consent of the Houses, never again to imprison any person, except
in due course of law, and never again to subject his people to the
jurisdiction of courts martial.

The day on which the royal sanction was, after many delays, solemnly
given to this great Act, was a day of joy and hope. The Commons,
who crowded the bar of the House of Lords, broke forth into loud
acclamations as soon as the clerk had pronounced the ancient form of
words by which our princes have, during many ages, signified their
assent to the wishes of the Estates of the realm. Those acclamations
were reechoed by the voice of the capital and of the nation; but
within three weeks it became manifest that Charles had no intention of
observing the compact into which he had entered. The supply given by the
representatives of the nation was collected. The promise by which that
supply had been obtained was broken. A violent contest followed. The
Parliament was dissolved with every mark of royal displeasure. Some of
the most distinguished members were imprisoned; and one of them, Sir
John Eliot, after years of suffering, died in confinement.

Charles, however, could not venture to raise, by his own authority,
taxes sufficient for carrying on war. He accordingly hastened to make
peace with his neighbours, and thenceforth gave his whole mind to
British politics.

Now commenced a new era. Many English Kings had occasionally committed
unconstitutional acts: but none had ever systematically attempted to
make himself a despot, and to reduce the Parliament to a nullity. Such
was the end which Charles distinctly proposed to himself. From March
1629 to April 1640, the Houses were not convoked. Never in our history
had there been an interval of eleven years between Parliament and
Parliament. Only once had there been an interval of even half that
length. This fact alone is sufficient to refute those who represent
Charles as having merely trodden in the footsteps of the Plantagenets
and Tudors.

It is proved, by the testimony of the King's most strenuous supporters,
that, during this part of his reign, the provisions of the Petition of
Right were violated by him, not occasionally, but constantly, and on
system; that a large part of the revenue was raised without any legal
authority; and that persons obnoxious to the government languished for
years in prison, without being ever called upon to plead before any
tribunal.

For these things history must hold the King himself chiefly responsible.
From the time of his third Parliament he was his own prime minister.
Several persons, however, whose temper and talents were suited to
his purposes, were at the head of different departments of the
administration.

Thomas Wentworth, successively created Lord Wentworth and Earl of
Strafford, a man of great abilities, eloquence, and courage, but of a
cruel and imperious nature, was the counsellor most trusted in political
and military affairs. He had been one of the most distinguished members
of the opposition, and felt towards those whom he had deserted that
peculiar malignity which has, in all ages, been characteristic of
apostates. He perfectly understood the feelings, the resources, and the
policy of the party to which he had lately belonged, and had formed a
vast and deeply meditated scheme which very nearly confounded even the
able tactics of the statesmen by whom the House of Commons had been
directed. To this scheme, in his confidential correspondence, he gave
the expressive name of Thorough. His object was to do in England all,
and more than all, that Richelieu was doing in France; to make Charles a
monarch as absolute as any on the Continent; to put the estates and the
personal liberty of the whole people at the disposal of the crown; to
deprive the courts of law of all independent authority, even in ordinary
questions of civil right between man and man; and to punish with
merciless rigour all who murmured at the acts of the government, or who
applied, even in the most decent and regular manner, to any tribunal for
relief against those acts. [12]

This was his end; and he distinctly saw in what manner alone this
end could be attained. There was, in truth, about all his notions a
clearness, a coherence, a precision, which, if he had not been pursuing
an object pernicious to his country and to his kind, would have justly
entitled him to high admiration. He saw that there was one instrument,
and only one, by which his vast and daring projects could be carried
into execution. That instrument was a standing army. To the forming of
such an army, therefore, he directed all the energy of his strong mind.
In Ireland, where he was viceroy, he actually succeeded in establishing
a military despotism, not only over the aboriginal population, but also
over the English colonists, and was able to boast that, in that island,
the King was as absolute as any prince in the whole world could be. [13]

The ecclesiastical administration was, in the meantime, principally
directed by William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. Of all the prelates
of the Anglican Church, Laud had departed farthest from the principles
of the Reformation, and had drawn nearest to Rome. His theology was more
remote than even that of the Dutch Arminians from the theology of the
Calvinists. His passion for ceremonies, his reverence for holidays,
vigils, and sacred places, his ill concealed dislike of the marriage
of ecclesiastics, the ardent and not altogether disinterested zeal
with which he asserted the claims of the clergy to the reverence of the
laity, would have made him an object of aversion to the Puritans, even
if he had used only legal and gentle means for the attainment of his
ends. But his understanding was narrow; and his commerce with the world
had been small. He was by nature rash, irritable, quick to feel for his
own dignity, slow to sympathise with the sufferings of others, and prone
to the error, common in superstitious men, of mistaking his own peevish
and malignant moods for emotions of pious zeal. Under his direction
every corner of the realm was subjected to a constant and minute
inspection. Every little congregation of separatists was tracked out and
broken up. Even the devotions of private families could not escape the
vigilance of his spies. Such fear did his rigour inspire that the
deadly hatred of the Church, which festered in innumerable bosoms, was
generally disguised under an outward show of conformity. On the very eve
of troubles, fatal to himself and to his order, the Bishops of several
extensive dioceses were able to report to him that not a single
dissenter was to be found within their jurisdiction. [14]

The tribunals afforded no protection to the subject against the civil
and ecclesiastical tyranny of that period. The judges of the common
law, holding their situations during the pleasure of the King, were
scandalously obsequious. Yet, obsequious as they were, they were less
ready and less efficient instruments of arbitrary power than a class of
courts, the memory of which is still, after the lapse of more than two
centuries, held in deep abhorrence by the nation. Foremost among
these courts in power and in infamy were the Star Chamber and the High
Commission, the former a political, the latter a religious inquisition.
Neither was a part of the old constitution of England. The Star Chamber
had been remodelled, and the High Commission created, by the Tudors. The
power which these boards had possessed before the accession of Charles
had been extensive and formidable, but had been small indeed when
compared with that which they now usurped. Guided chiefly by the violent
spirit of the primate, and free from the control of Parliament, they
displayed a rapacity, a violence, a malignant energy, which had been
unknown to any former age. The government was able through their
instrumentality, to fine, imprison, pillory, and mutilate without
restraint. A separate council which sate at York, under the presidency
of Wentworth, was armed, in defiance of law, by a pure act of
prerogative, with almost boundless power over the northern counties. All
these tribunals insulted and defied the authority of Westminster Hall,
and daily committed excesses which the most distinguished Royalists have
warmly condemned. We are informed by Clarendon that there was hardly
a man of note in the realm who had not personal experience of the
harshness and greediness of the Star Chamber, that the High Commission
had so conducted itself that it had scarce a friend left in the kingdom,
and that the tyranny of the Council of York had made the Great Charter a
dead letter on the north of the Trent.

The government of England was now, in all points but one, as despotic as
that of France. But that one point was all important. There was still no
standing army. There was therefore, no security that the whole fabric
of tyranny might not be subverted in a single day; and, if taxes were
imposed by the royal authority for the support of an army, it was
probable that there would be an immediate and irresistible explosion.
This was the difficulty which more than any other perplexed Wentworth.
The Lord Keeper Finch, in concert with other lawyers who were employed
by the government, recommended an expedient which was eagerly adopted.
The ancient princes of England, as they called on the inhabitants of the
counties near Scotland to arm and array themselves for the defence of
the border, had sometimes called on the maritime counties to furnish
ships for the defence of the coast. In the room of ships money had
sometimes been accepted. This old practice it was now determined, after
a long interval, not only to revive but to extend. Former princes had
raised shipmoney only in time of war: it was now exacted in a time of
profound peace. Former princes, even in the most perilous wars, had
raised shipmoney only along the coasts: it was now exacted from the
inland shires. Former princes had raised shipmoney only for the maritime
defence of the country: It was now exacted, by the admission of the
Royalists themselves. With the object, not of maintaining a navy, but
of furnishing the King with supplies which might be increased at
his discretion to any amount, and expended at his discretion for any
purpose.

The whole nation was alarmed and incensed. John Hampden, an opulent and
well born gentleman of Buckinghamshire, highly considered in his own
neighbourhood, but as yet little known to the kingdom generally, had the
courage to step forward, to confront the whole power of the government,
and take on himself the cost and the risk of disputing the prerogative
to which the King laid claim. The case was argued before the judges
in the Exchequer Chamber. So strong were the arguments against the
pretensions of the crown that, dependent and servile as the judges were,
the majority against Hampden was the smallest possible. Still there was
a majority. The interpreters of the law had pronounced that one great
and productive tax might be imposed by the royal authority. Wentworth
justly observed that it was impossible to vindicate their judgment
except by reasons directly leading to a conclusion which they had not
ventured to draw. If money might legally be raised without the consent
of Parliament for the support of a fleet, it was not easy to deny that
money might, without consent of Parliament, be legally raised for the
support of an army.

The decision of the judges increased the irritation of the people. A
century earlier, irritation less serious would have produced a general
rising. But discontent did not now so readily as in an earlier age take
the form of rebellion. The nation had been long steadily advancing in
wealth and in civilisation. Since the great northern Earls took up arms
against Elizabeth seventy years had elapsed; and during those seventy
years there had been no civil war. Never, during the whole existence
of the English nation, had so long a period passed without intestine
hostilities. Men had become accustomed to the pursuits of peaceful
industry, and, exasperated as they were, hesitated long before they drew
the sword.

This was the conjuncture at which the liberties of the nation were in
the greatest peril. The opponents of the government began to despair of
the destiny of their country; and many looked to the American wilderness
as the only asylum in which they could enjoy civil and spiritual
freedom. There a few resolute Puritans, who, in the cause of their
religion, feared neither the rage of the ocean nor the hardships of
uncivilised life, neither the fangs of savage beasts nor the tomahawks
of more savage men, had built, amidst the primeval forests, villages
which are now great and opulent cities, but which have, through
every change, retained some trace of the character derived from their
founders. The government regarded these infant colonies with aversion,
and attempted violently to stop the stream of emigration, but could not
prevent the population of New England from being largely recruited by
stouthearted and Godfearing men from every part of the old England.
And now Wentworth exulted in the near prospect of Thorough. A few years
might probably suffice for the execution of his great design. If
strict economy were observed, if all collision with foreign powers were
carefully avoided, the debts of the crown would be cleared off: there
would be funds available for the support of a large military force; and
that force would soon break the refractory spirit of the nation.

At this crisis an act of insane bigotry suddenly changed the whole
face of public affairs. Had the King been wise, he would have pursued a
cautious and soothing policy towards Scotland till he was master in the
South. For Scotland was of all his kingdoms that in which there was the
greatest risk that a spark might produce a flame, and that a flame might
become a conflagration. Constitutional opposition, indeed, such as he
had encountered at Westminster, he had not to apprehend at Edinburgh.
The Parliament of his northern kingdom was a very different body from
that which bore the same name in England. It was ill constituted: it was
little considered; and it had never imposed any serious restraint on
any of his predecessors. The three Estates sate in one house. The
commissioners of the burghs were considered merely as retainers of the
great nobles. No act could be introduced till it had been approved by
the Lords of Articles, a committee which was really, though not in
form, nominated by the crown. But, though the Scottish Parliament was
obsequious, the Scottish people had always been singularly turbulent and
ungovernable. They had butchered their first James in his bedchamber:
they had repeatedly arrayed themselves in arms against James the
Second; they had slain James the Third on the field of battle: their
disobedience had broken the heart of James the Fifth: they had deposed
and imprisoned Mary: they had led her son captive; and their temper was
still as intractable as ever. Their habits were rude and martial. All
along the southern border, and all along the line between the highlands
and the lowlands, raged an incessant predatory war. In every part of the
country men were accustomed to redress their wrongs by the strong hand.
Whatever loyalty the nation had anciently felt to the Stuarts had cooled
during their long absence. The supreme influence over the public mind
was divided between two classes of malecontents, the lords of the soil
and the preachers; lords animated by the same spirit which had often
impelled the old Douglasses to withstand the royal house, and preachers
who had inherited the republican opinions and the unconquerable spirit
of Knox. Both the national and religious feelings of the population
had been wounded. All orders of men complained that their country, that
country which had, with so much glory, defended her independence against
the ablest and bravest Plantagenets, had, through the instrumentality of
her native princes, become in effect, though not in name, a province
of England. In no part of Europe had the Calvinistic doctrine and
discipline taken so strong a hold on the public mind. The Church of Rome
was regarded by the great body of the people with a hatred which might
justly be called ferocious; and the Church of England, which seemed
to be every day becoming more and more like the Church of Rome, was an
object of scarcely less aversion.

The government had long wished to extend the Anglican system over the
whole island, and had already, with this view, made several changes
highly distasteful to every Presbyterian. One innovation, however, the
most hazardous of all, because it was directly cognisable by the senses
of the common people, had not yet been attempted. The public worship
of God was still conducted in the manner acceptable to the nation. Now,
however, Charles and Laud determined to force on the Scots the English
liturgy, or rather a liturgy which, wherever it differed from that of
England, differed, in the judgment of all rigid Protestants, for the
worse.

To this step, taken in the mere wantonness of tyranny, and in criminal
ignorance or more criminal contempt of public feeling, our country owes
her freedom. The first performance of the foreign ceremonies produced
a riot. The riot rapidly became a revolution. Ambition, patriotism,
fanaticism, were mingled in one headlong torrent. The whole nation was
in arms. The power of England was indeed, as appeared some years later,
sufficient to coerce Scotland: but a large part of the English people
sympathised with the religious feelings of the insurgents; and many
Englishmen who had no scruple about antiphonies and genuflexions, altars
and surplices, saw with pleasure the progress of a rebellion which
seemed likely to confound the arbitrary projects of the court, and to
make the calling of a Parliament necessary.

For the senseless freak which had produced these effects Wentworth
is not responsible. [15] It had, in fact, thrown all his plans into
confusion. To counsel submission, however, was not in his nature. An
attempt was made to put down the insurrection by the sword: but the
King's military means and military talents were unequal to the task.
To impose fresh taxes on England in defiance of law, would, at this
conjuncture, have been madness. No resource was left but a Parliament;
and in the spring of 1640 a Parliament was convoked.

The nation had been put into good humour by the prospect of seeing
constitutional government restored, and grievances redressed. The new
House of Commons was more temperate and more respectful to the throne
than any which had sate since the death of Elizabeth. The moderation
of this assembly has been highly extolled by the most distinguished
Royalists and seems to have caused no small vexation and disappointment
to the chiefs of the opposition: but it was the uniform practice of
Charles, a practice equally impolitic and ungenerous, to refuse all
compliance with the desires of his people, till those desires
were expressed in a menacing tone. As soon as the Commons showed a
disposition to take into consideration the grievances under which
the country had suffered during eleven years, the King dissolved the
Parliament with every mark of displeasure.

Between the dissolution of this shortlived assembly and the meeting
of that ever memorable body known by the name of the Long Parliament,
intervened a few months, during which the yoke was pressed down more
severely than ever on the nation, while the spirit of the nation rose up
more angrily than ever against the yoke. Members of the House of Commons
were questioned by the Privy Council touching their parliamentary
conduct, and thrown into prison for refusing to reply. Shipmoney was
levied with increased rigour. The Lord Mayor and the Sheriffs of London
were threatened with imprisonment for remissness in collecting the
payments. Soldiers were enlisted by force. Money for their support was
exacted from their counties. Torture, which had always been illegal, and
which had recently been declared illegal even by the servile judges of
that age, was inflicted for the last time in England in the month of
May, 1610.

Everything now depended on the event of the King's military operations
against the Scots. Among his troops there was little of that feeling
which separates professional soldiers from the mass of a nation, and
attaches them to their leaders. His army, composed for the most part of
recruits, who regretted the plough from which they had been violently
taken, and who were imbued with the religious and political sentiments
then prevalent throughout the country, was more formidable to himself
than to the enemy. The Scots, encouraged by the heads of the English
opposition, and feebly resisted by the English forces, marched across
the Tweed and the Tyne, and encamped on the borders of Yorkshire.
And now the murmurs of discontent swelled into an uproar by which all
spirits save one were overawed.

But the voice of Strafford was still for Thorough; and he even, in this
extremity, showed a nature so cruel and despotic, that his own pikemen
were ready to tear him in pieces.

There was yet one last expedient which, as the King flattered himself,
might save him from the misery of facing another House of Commons. To
the House of Lords he was less averse. The Bishops were devoted to
him; and though the temporal peers were generally dissatisfied with
his administration, they were, as a class, so deeply interested in the
maintenance of order, and in the stability of ancient institutions, that
they were not likely to call for extensive reforms. Departing from
the uninterrupted practice of centuries, he called a Great Council
consisting of Lords alone. But the Lords were too prudent to assume the
unconstitutional functions with which he wished to invest them. Without
money, without credit, without authority even in his own camp, he
yielded to the pressure of necessity. The Houses were convoked; and the
elections proved that, since the spring, the distrust and hatred with
which the government was regarded had made fearful progress.

In November, 1640, met that renowned Parliament which, in spite of many
errors and disasters, is justly entitled to the reverence and
gratitude of all who, in any part of the world enjoy the blessings of
constitutional government.

During the year which followed, no very important division of opinion
appeared in the Houses. The civil and ecclesiastical administration
had, through a period of nearly twelve years, been so oppressive and so
unconstitutional that even those classes of which the inclinations
are generally on the side of order and authority were eager to promote
popular reforms and to bring the instruments of tyranny to justice. It
was enacted that no interval of more than three years should ever elapse
between Parliament and Parliament, and that, if writs under the Great
Seal were not issued at the proper time, the returning officers should,
without such writs, call the constituent bodies together for the choice
of representatives. The Star Chamber, the High Commission, the Council
of York were swept away. Men who, after suffering cruel mutilations, had
been confined in remote dungeons, regained their liberty. On the chief
ministers of the crown the vengeance of the nation was unsparingly
wreaked. The Lord Keeper, the Primate, the Lord Lieutenant were
impeached. Finch saved himself by flight. Laud was flung into the Tower.
Strafford was put to death by act of attainder. On the day on which this
act passed, the King gave his assent to a law by which he bound himself
not to adjourn, prorogue, or dissolve the existing Parliament without
its own consent.

After ten months of assiduous toil, the Houses, in September 1641,
adjourned for a short vacation; and the King visited Scotland. He with
difficulty pacified that kingdom by consenting, not only to relinquish
his plans of ecclesiastical reform, but even to pass, with a very bad
grace, an act declaring that episcopacy was contrary to the word of God.

The recess of the English Parliament lasted six weeks. The day on
which the Houses met again is one of the most remarkable epochs in our
history. From that day dates the corporate existence of the two great
parties which have ever since alternately governed the country. In one
sense, indeed, the distinction which then became obvious had always
existed, and always must exist. For it has its origin in diversities
of temper, of understanding, and of interest, which are found in all
societies, and which will be found till the human mind ceases to be
drawn in opposite directions by the charm of habit and by the charm of
novelty. Not only in politics but in literature, in art, in science,
in surgery and mechanics, in navigation and agriculture, nay, even in
mathematics, we find this distinction. Everywhere there is a class of
men who cling with fondness to whatever is ancient, and who, even when
convinced by overpowering reasons that innovation would be beneficial,
consent to it with many misgivings and forebodings. We find also
everywhere another class of men, sanguine in hope, bold in speculation,
always pressing forward, quick to discern the imperfections of whatever
exists, disposed to think lightly of the risks and inconveniences which
attend improvements and disposed to give every change credit for being
an improvement. In the sentiments of both classes there is something to
approve. But of both the best specimens will be found not far from the
common frontier. The extreme section of one class consists of bigoted
dotards: the extreme section of the other consists of shallow and
reckless empirics.

There can be no doubt that in our very first Parliaments might have been
discerned a body of members anxious to preserve, and a body eager to
reform. But, while the sessions of the legislature were short, these
bodies did not take definite and permanent forms, array themselves under
recognis

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