No More Learning

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.