No More Learning

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.