I.

CHAP. mencement, massacred in cold blood; and at length the exasperation of the two parties became so excessive, that quarter was refused by common consent on the field of battle, and thirty-six thousand Britons fell by mutual slaughter in a single engagement. The chasm occasioned by these losses was soon repaired by the lower orders; but to the feudal nobility they proved completely fatal. Eighty princes of the blood, and almost the whole ancient barons, perished in these disastrous wars; and, upon the termination of hostilities, the House of Peers could only muster forty members. The influence of those who remained was immensely weakened. In the different forfeitures which had been inflicted with so unsparing a hand by the factions who alternately prevailed, the estates of almost all the nobility in the kingdom had been included; and the feudal tenants, accustomed to a rapid change of masters in the general confusion, lost great part of their ancient veneration for their superiors. The nobles became divided among each other: the survivors of the Norman conquerors viewed with undisguised jealousy the upstart families who had risen in the midst of the public distress; and these regarded with equal horror the remnant of ferocious barons, ever ready to exterminate them to regain their properties. Weakened in numbers, disunited among themselves, and severed from the affections of the people, the ancient nobility of England were never again formidable to the liberties of their country.1

1 Hallam, iii. 294,

295. Hume,

iii. 203,

212, 215, 237.

32.

feudal liberty.

The ultimate effects of this destruction of the feudal Decline of aristocracy were eminently favourable to public freedom; but its immediate consequence was a great and most perilous augmentation of the power of the monarch. The ancient barrier had been swept away, and the new one was not yet erected. By the forfeited estates which accrued to the victorious monarch, a fifth of the whole lands of the kingdom was annexed to the crown; and notwithstanding the liberal grants to the nobles of his party, the hereditary revenue which Edward left to his successors

I.

was very great. The influence of the nobles being in CHAP. abeyance, and the people having neither acquired nor become capable of exerting any share of power but through the medium of their superiors, nothing remained to resist the power of the sovereign. The inevitable consequence was the destruction of the freedom which had been won by the struggles of the barons. Hence the tyranny of the Tudor princes. Nothing, accordingly, is more remarkable than the pliant servility of parliament, and the slavish submission of the people, during the reigns of the successors of Henry VII. Civil war appears to have worn out their energies, and extinguished their ancient passion for freedom; the Houses of Peers and Commons vied with each other in acts of adulation to the reigning monarch: it seemed as if the Barons of Runnymede had been succeeded by the senate of Tiberius. Even the commons had almost totally lost their former spirit: the most arbitrary taxation, the most repeated violations of their liberties, produced no popular convulsion; mandates issued from court were universally obeyed in the election of members of parliament; and the most violent changes of which history makes mention the destruction of the national religion, the seizure of one-third of the national property, the execution of seventy-two thousand persons in a single reign, -produced no commotions among the people.1

1

Hume, iv. 358, 399.

244, 375,

Hallam, iii.

298.

33.

Reforma

This was the critical period of English liberty; the country had reached that crisis which, in all the great Con- Revived by tinental monarchies, had proved fatal to public freedom. spirit of re ligious freeNotwithstanding her insular situation - notwithstanding dom and the the independent spirit of her Saxon ancestry-notwith- tion. standing the efforts of her feudal nobility—the liberty of England was all but extinct, when the enthusiasm of the REFORMATION fanned the dying spark, and kept alive, in a sect which soon became predominant, the declining flame of liberty. The Puritans were early distinguished by their zeal in the cause of freedom. During the imperious reign of Elizabeth they maintained in silence their inflexible

CHAP. spirit; and so well was her government aware of the danI. gerous tendency of their principles, that they never were

permitted, during the reign of that sagacious princess, to have the smallest share in state affairs. In the time of James I. their number became greater, and their exertions in the cause of freedom more apparent. The first serious attacks on government were made through the pulpit ; and the only persons in this, as in other countries at the same period, who made any exertions in favour of their liberties, were those who were animated with religious zeal. During the reign of Charles I. a universal frenzy seized the nation; an enthusiasm almost as general, and far more lasting than that of the Crusades, pervaded the middle and a considerable proportion of the higher ranks; and, but for the strength of that feeling, the Long Parliament would never have been able to withstand the exertions which, with their characteristic loyalty, the English gentlemen at that period made in defence of their sovereign. "From whatever cause," says Cromwell, "the civil war began, if religion was not the original source of discord, yet God soon brought it to that issue;" and he constantly affirmed that, amidst the strife of battle, and the dangers of war, the reward to which he and his followers looked forward was freedom of conscience. It is of little moment whether the future Protector and his military chieftains were, or were not, sincere in these professions. It is sufficient that such was the temper of the times, that by no other means could they rouse the energies of the great body of the people. The effects of this spirit were not confined to this island, or the period in which it arose1 Hume, v. they extended to another hemisphere and a distant age; 455, 483; and from the emigrants whom religious oppression drove to the forests of America have sprung those powerful states who have tried, amidst Transatlantic plenty, the doubtful experiment of democratic freedom.1

vi. 48, 100, 117, 337, 345. Ling. xi. 360.

But while the current of popular feeling was thus violent in favour of republican principles, the effect of

I.

34.

Modified by

to ancient

ancient and fondly cherished national institutions strongly CHAP. appeared, and the English reaped the benefit of the long struggle maintained through the feudal ages by their ancestors in the cause of freedom. Though the substance of the regard liberty had fled during the arbitrary reigns of the Tudor rights in princes, her shadow still remained: the popular attachment England. to ancient rights was still undecayed; the venerable forms of the constitution were yet unchanged-and on that foundation the new and broader liberties of the country were reared. But for this happy circumstance, the spirit of freedom which the Reformation awakened might have wasted itself, as in Scotland, in visionary and impracticable schemes, until the nation, worn out with speculations from which no real benefit could accrue, willingly returned to its pristine servitude. Whereas, by the course of events which had preceded it, the stream of liberty naturally returned, when strengthened, into its wonted, though now almost neglected channels; and, without breaking its former bounds, or overwhelming the ancient landmarks, extended its fertilising influence over a wider surface.

35.

the result of

"It is remarkable," says Turgot, "that while England is the country in the world where public freedom has Which is longest subsisted, and political institutions are most the long-estab lished popusubject of discussion, it is at the same time the one in lar instituwhich innovations are with most difficulty introduced, and tions. where the most obstinate resistance is made to undoubted improvements. You might alter the whole political frame of government in France with more facility, than you could introduce the most insignificant change into the customs or fashions of England." 1 The principle here alluded to is 1 Turgot, ii. at once the consequence and the reward of free institu- 32. tions. Universally it will be found, that the attachment of men to the customs and usages of their forefathers is greatest, where they have had a considerable share in the establishment or enjoyment of them; and that the danger of innovation is most to be feared where the exercise of rights has been longest unknown to the people. The

I.

CHAP. dynasties of the East are of ephemeral duration, the monarchies of Europe are modified or changed by the progress of society; but the customs of the Swiss democracies seem as immovable as the mountains in which they were cradled.* The same principles have, in every age, formed the distinguishing characteristic of the English people. During the severities and oppression of the Norman rule, it was to the equal laws of the Saxon reigns that they looked back with a fond affection, which neither the uncertainty of oral tradition, nor the intensity of present suffering, had been able to destroy. When the barons assembled in open rebellion at Runnymede, it was not any imaginary system of government which they established, but the old and consuetudinary laws of Edward the Confessor, which they moulded into a new form, and established on a firmer basis in the great charter; tempering, even in a moment of revolutionary triumph, the ardour of liberty and the pride of descent by their hereditary attachment to old institutions. The memorable reply of the barons to the proposal of the prelates at Mertoun, Nolumus leges Angliæ mutare, has passed into a fixed maxim, to which the preservation of the constitution through all the convulsions of later times is mainly to be ascribed. In the petition of right drawn by Selden, and the greatest lawyers of his day, the parliament said to the king, "Your subjects have inherited this freedom ;" and in the preamble of the Declaration of Rights, the states do not pretend any right to frame a government for themselves, but strive only to secure the religion, laws, and liberties, long possessed,

* The French Directory, in the ardour of their innovations, proposed to the peasants of Uri and Underwalden a change in their constitution, and made the offer of fraternisation, which had seduced the allegiance of so many other states. But these sturdy mountaineers replied,-" Words cannot express, citizen directors, the profound grief which the proposal to accede to the new Helvetic league has occasioned in these valleys. Other people may have different inclinations; but we, the descendants of William Tell, who have preserved without the slightest alteration the constitution which he has left us, have but one unanimous wish-that of living under the government which Providence and the courage of our ancestors have left us."-LACRETELLE, Rév. Franç. iii. 162.