from legislative functions, that great anomaly known as the CHAP. 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

I.

CHAP.

I.

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 intelli-
gence 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 con-
stitution to pass unnoticed. It is therefore now universally
held that a government which unnecessarily exceeds its
powers ought to be visited with severe parliamentary cen-
sure, 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 gene-
rally 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 some-
times 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 dared to oppress great masses, his subjects promptly appealed to the laws, and, that appeal failing, appealed as promptly to the God of battles.

CHAP.

I.

an ordi

nary check

middle

ages.

Our forefathers might indeed safely tolerate a king in a Resistance few excesses; for they had in reserve a check which soon brought the fiercest and proudest king to reason, the check on tyranny of physical force. It is difficult for an Englishman of the in 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 Hoangho 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.

CHAP.

I.

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 soldier-
ship, 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 in-
habited 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 pa-
rishes now contain. Manufactures were rude; credit was
almost unknown. Society, therefore, recovered from the
shock as soon as the actual conflict was over.
The ca-
lamities 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 admin

istration was good, and whose throne was not defended by a single company of regular soldiers.

CHAP.

I.

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 humbled 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, he said, 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 im- Peculiar posed on the royal prerogative that England was advan- character tageously distinguished from most of the neighbouring English countries. A peculiarity equally important, though less aristonoticed, 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 cha

of the

cracy.