79 damental laws, and representative assemblies. In the fifteenth century, the government of Castile seems to have been as free as that of our own country. That of Arragon was beyond all question far more so. reign was more absolute. Yet, even in France, the States-general alone could constitutionally In France, the soveimpose taxes; and at the very time when the authority of those assemblies was beginning to languish, the Parliament of Paris received such an accession of strength, as enabled it, in some measure, to perform the functions of a legislative assembly. Sweden and Denmark had constitutions of a similar description. say, without hesitation, that it is impossible to acquit him of having meditated violence, and violence which might probably end in blood. He knew that the legality of his proceedings was denied; he must have known that some of the accused members were not men likely to submit peaceably to an illegal arrest. There was every reason to expect that he would find them in their places, that they would refuse to obey his summons, and that the House would support them in their refusal. What course would then have been left to him? Unless we suppose that he went on this expedition for the sole purpose of making himself ridiculous, we must believe that he would have had recourse to force. There would have been a scuffle; and it might not, under such circumstances, have been in his power, even if it were in his inclination, to prevent a scuffle from ending in a massacre. Fortunately for his fame, unfortunately, perhaps, for what he prized far more, the interests of his hatred and his ambition, the affair ended differently. The birds, as he said, were flown, and his plan was dis-government in their own hands. In France concerted. Posterity is not extreme to mark abortive crimes. And thus his advocates have found it easy to represent a step which, but for a trivial accident, might have filled England with mourning and dismay, as a mere error of judgment, wild and foolish, but perfectly innocent. Such was not, however, at the time, the opinion of any party. The most zealous royalists were so much disgusted and ashamed, that they suspended their opposition to the popular party, and, silently, at least, concurred in measures of precaution so strong as almost to amount to resistance. From that day, whatever of confidence and loyal attachment had survived the misrule of seventeen years, was, in the great body of the people, extinguished, and extinguished forever. As soon as the outrage had failed, the hypocrisy recommenced. Down to the very eve of his flagitious attempt, Charles had been talking of his respect for the privileges of Parliament and the liberties of his people. He began again in the same style on the morrow; but it was too late. To trust him now would have been, not moderation, but insanity. What common security would suffice against a prince who was evidently watching his season with that cold and patient hatred which, in the long run, tires out every other passion? It is certainly from no admiration of Charles that Mr. Hallam disapproves of the conduct of the House in resorting to arms. But he thinks, that any attempt on the part of that prince to establish a despotism would have been as strongly opposed by his adherents as by his enemies; that the constitution might te considered as out of danger; or, at least, that it had more to apprehend from war than from the king. On this subject Mr. Hallam dilates at length; and with conspicuous ability. We will offer a few considerations, which lead us to incline to a different opinion. The constitution of England was only one of a large family. In all the monarchies of western Europe, during the middle ages, there existed restraints on the royal authority, fun and contemplate Europe at the commencement Let us overleap two or three hundred years, of the eighteenth century. Every free constitution, save one, had gone down. That of England had weathered the danger; and was riding in full security. In Denmark and Sweden, the kings had availed themselves of the disputes which raged between the nobles and the commons, to unite all the powers of the institution of the states was only maintained by lawyers, as a part of the ancient theory of their government. It slept a deep sleep-destined to be broken by a tremendous waking. No person remembered the sittings of the three orders, or expected ever to see them renewed. Louis the Fourteenth had imposed on his Parliament a patient silence of sixty years. His grandson, after the war of the Spanish succession, assimilated the constitution of Arragon to that of Castile, and extinguished the last feeble remains of liberty hand, the Parliament was infinitely more pow in the Peninsula. In England, on the other erful than it had ever been. Not only was its legislative authority fully established, but its right to interfere, by advice almost equivalent to command, in every department of the executive government, was recognised. The appointment of ministers, the relations with foreign powers, the conduct of a war or a negotiation, depended less on the pleasure of the prince than on that of the two Houses. that, in that epidemic malady of constitutions, What then made us to differ? Why was it ours escaped the destroying influence; or rather that, at the very crisis of the disease, a favourable turn took place in England, and in England alone? It was not surely without a ment, having flourished together so long, lancause that so many kindred systems of governguished and expired at almost the same time. of civilization is favourable to liberty. The In such a state of society as that which ex- very scanty. He had little money, little patronage, no military establishment. His armies resembled juries. They were draughted out of the mass of the people; they soon returned to it again; and the character which was habitual prevailed over that which was occasional. A campaign of forty days was too short, the discipline of a national militia too lax, to efface from their minds the feelings of civil life. As they carried to the camp the sentiments and interests of the farm and the shop, so they carried back to the farm and the shop the military accomplishments which they had acquired in the camp. At home they learned how to value their rights-abroad how to defend them. Such a military force as this was a far stronger restraint on the regal power than the legislative assemblies. Resistance to an established government, in modern times so difficult and perilous an enterprise, was, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the simplest and easiest matter in the world. Indeed, it was far too simple and easy. An insurrection was got up then almost as easily as a petition is got up now. In a popular cause, or even in an unpopular cause favoured by a few great nobles, an army was raised in a week. If the king were, like our Edward the Second and Richard the Second, generally odious, he could not procure a single bow or halbert. He fell at once and without an effort. In such times a sovereign like Louis the Fifteenth, or the Emperor Paul, would have been pulled down before his misgovernment had lasted for a month. We find that all the fame and influence of our Edward the Third could not save his Madame de Pompadour from the effects of the public hatred. jealousy, and resent with prompt indignation, every violation of the laws which the sovereign might commit. They were so strong, that they might safely be careless. He was so feeble, that he might safely be suffered to encroach. If he ventured too far, chastisement and ruin were at hand. In fact, the people suffered more from his weakness than from his authority. The tyranny of wealthy and powerful subjects was the characteristic evil of the times. The royal prerogatives were not even sufficient for the defence of property and the maintenance of police. That The progress of civilization introduced a great change. War became a science; and, as a necessary consequence, a separate trade. The great body of the people grew every day more reluctant to undergo the inconveniences of military service, and better able to pay others for undergoing them. A new class of men, therefore-dependent on the crown alone; natural enemies of those popular rights, which are to them as the dew to the fleece of Gideon; slaves among freemen; freemen among slaves-grew into importance. physical force, which in the dark ages had belonged to the nobles and the commons, and had, far more than any charter or any assem bly, been the safeguard of their privileges, was transferred entire to the king. Monarchy gained in two ways. The sovereign was strengthened, the subjects weakened. The great mass of the population, destitute of all military discipline and organization, ceased to exercise any influence by force on political transactions. There have, indeed, during the last hundred and fifty years, been many popu lar insurrections in Europe: but all have failed, except those in which the regular army has been induced to join the disaffected. Hume, and many other writers, have hastily concluded, that in the fifteenth century the Those legal checks, which had been adeEnglish Parliament was altogether servile, quate to the purpose for which they were because it recognised, without opposition, designed while the sovereign remained deevery successful usurper. That it was not pendent on his subjects, were now found servile, its conduct on many occasions of in- wanting. The dykes, which had been sufficient ferior importance is sufficient to prove. But while the waters were low, were not high surely it was not strange, that the majority of enough to keep out the spring tide. The deluge the nobles, and of the deputies chosen by the passed over them; and, according to the excommons, should approve of revolutions which quisite illustration of Butler, the formal boundthe nobles and commons had effected. The aries which had excluded it now held it in. Parliament did not blindly follow the event of The old constitutions fared like the old shields war; but participated in those changes of pub- and coats of mail. They were the defences of lic sentiment, on which the event of war de-a rude age; and they did well enough against pended. The legal check was secondary and the weapons of a rude age. But new and more auxiliary to that which the nation held in its formidable means of destruction were inventown hands. There have always been monarchies in Asia, in which the royal authority has been tempered by fundamental laws, though no legislative body exists to watch over them. The guarantee is the opinion of a community, of which every individual is a soldier. Thus the king of Caubul, as Mr. Elphinstone informs us, cannot augment the land revenue, or interfere with the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals. In the European kingdoms of this descripton, there were representative assemblies. But it was not necessary that those assemblies should meet very frequently, that they should interfere with all the operations of the execufive government, that they should watch with ed. The ancient panoply became useless; and it was thrown aside to rust in lumberrooms, or exhibited only as part of an idle pageant. Thus absolute monarchy was established on the Continent. England escaped; but she escaped very narrowly. Happily, our insular situation and the pacific policy of James rendered standing armies unnecessary here, till they had been for some time kept up in the neighbouring kingdoms. Our public men had therefore an opportunity of watching the effects produced by this momentous change, in forms of government which bore a close analogy to that established in England. Everywhere they saw the power of the monarch increasing, the resistance of assemblies, which were no longer supported by a national force, gradually becoming more and more feeble, and at length altogether ceasing. The friends and the enemies of liberty perceived with equal clearness the causes of this general decay. It is the favourite theme of Strafford. He advises the king to procure from the judges a recognition of his right to raise an army at his pleasure. "This piece, well fortified," says he, "forever vindicates the monarchy at home from under the conditions and restraints of subjects." We firmly believe that he was in the right. Nay; we believe that, even if no deliberate scheme of arbitrary government had been formed by the sovereign and his ministers, there was great reason to apprehend à natural extinction of the constitution. If, for example, Charles had played the part of Gustavus Adolphus; if he had carried on a popular war for the defence of the Protestant cause in Germany; if he had gratified the national pride by a series of victories; if he had formed an army of forty or fifty thousand devoted soldiers, we do not see what chance the nation would have had of escaping from despotism. The judges would have given as strong a decision in favour of camp-money as they gave in favour of ship-money. If they had scrupled, it would have made little difference. An individual who resisted would have been treated as Charles treated Eliot, and as Strafford wished to treat Hampden. The Parliament might have been summoned once in twenty years, to congramlate a king on his accession, or to give solemnity to some great measure of state. Such had been the fate of legislative assemblies as powerful, as much respected, as highspirited, as the English Lords and Commons. always going backward and forward; but it should be remembered to his honour, that it was always from the stronger to the weaker side that he deserted. While Charles was oppressing the people, Falkland was a resolute champion of liberty. He attacked Strafford. He even concurred in strong measures against Episcopacy. But the violence of his party annoyed him, and drove him to the other party, to be equally annoyed there. Dreading the success of the cause which he had espoused, sickened by the courtiers of Oxford, as he had been sickened by the patriots of Westminster, yet bound by honour not to abandon them, he pined away, neglected his person, went about moaning for peace, and at last rushed despe rately on death as the best refuge in such miserable times. If he had lived through the scenes that followed, we have little doubt that he would have condemned himself to share the exile and beggary of the royal family; that he would then have returned to oppose all their measures; that he would have been sent to the Tower by the Commons as a disbeliever in the Popish Plot, and by the king as an accomplice in the Rye-House Plot; and that, if he had escaped being hanged, first by Scroggs, and then by Jeffries, he would, after manfully opposing James the Second through his whole reign, have been seized with a fit of compassion at the very moment of the Revolution, have voted for a regency, and died a nonjuror. We do not dispute that the royal party contained many excellent men and excellent citizens. But this we say-that they did not discern those times. The peculiar glory of the Houses of Parliament is, that, in the great plague and mortality of constitutions, they took their stand between the living and the The two Houses, surrounded by the ruins of dead. At the very crisis of our destiny, at the so many free constitutions, overthrown or very moment when the fate which had passed sapped by the new military system, were re-on every other nation was about to pass on quired to intrust the command of an army, and the conduct of the Irish war, to a king who had proposed to himself the destruction of liberty as the great end of his policy. We are decidedly of opinion that it would have been fatal to comply. Many of those who took the side of the king on this question would have cursed their own loyalty if they had seen him return from war at the head of twenty thousand troops, accustomed to carnage and free quarters in Ireland. England, they arrested the danger. Those who conceive that the parliamentary leaders were desirous merely to maintain the old constitution, and those who represent them as conspiring to subvert it, are equally in error. The old constitution, as we have attempted to show, could not be maintained. The progress of time, the increase of wealth, the diffusion of knowledge, the great change in the European system of war, rendered it impossible that any of the monarchies of the middle ages We think with Mr. Hallam, that many of the should continue to exist on the old footing. royalist nobility and gentry were true friends The prerogative of the crown was constantly to the constitution; and that, but for the solemn advancing. If the privileges of the people protestations by which the king bound himself were to remain absolutely stationary, they to govern according to the law for the future, would relatively retrograde. The monarchical they never would have joined his standard. and democratical parts of the government were But surely they underrated the public danger. placed in a situation not unlike that of the two Falkland is commonly selected as the most re- brothers in the Fairy Queen, one of whom saw spectable specimen of this class. He was the soil of his inheritance daily washed away indeed a man of great talents, and of great by the tide, and joined to that of his rival. virtues; but, we apprehend, infinitely too fas- The portions had at first been fairly meted out: tidicus for public life. He did not perceive by a natural and constant transfer, the one had that in such times as those on which his lot been extended; the other had dwindled to no. had fallen, the duty of a statesman is to choose thing. A new partition or a compensation the better cause, and to stand by it, in spite of was necessary to restore the original equality. those excesses by which every cause, however It was now absolutely necessary to violate good in itself, will be disgraced. The present the formal part of the constitution, in order to evil always seemed to him the worst. He was preserve its spirit. This might have deen VOL. L-11 very scanty. He had little money, little patronage, no military establishment. His armies resembled juries. They were draughted out of the mass of the people; they soon returned to it again; and the character which was habitual prevailed over that which was occasional. A campaign of forty days was too short, the discipline of a national militia too lax, to efface from their minds the feelings of civil life. As they carried to the camp the sentiments and interests of the farm and the shop, so they carried back to the farm and the shop the military accomplishments which they had acquired in the camp. At home they learned how to value their rights-abroad how to defend them. Such a military force as this was a far stronger restraint on the regal power than the legislative assemblies. Resistance to an established government, in modern times so difficult and perilous an enterprise, was, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. the simplest and easiest matter in the world. Indeed, it was far too simple and easy. An insurrection was got up then almost as easily as a petition is got up now. In a popular cause, or even in an unpopular cause favoured by a few great nobles, an army was raised in a week. If the king were, like our Edward the Second and Richard the Second, generally odious, he could not procure a single bow or halbert. He fell at once and without an effort. In such times a sovereign like Louis the Fifteenth, or the Emperor Paul, would have been pulled down before his misgovernment had lasted for a month. We find that all the fame and influence of our Edward the Third could not save his Madame de Pompadour from the effects of the public hatred. jealousy, and resent with prompt indignation, every violation of the laws which the sovereign might commit. They were so strong, that they might safely be careless. He was so feeble, that he might safely be suffered to encroach. If he ventured too far, chastisement and ruin were at hand. In fact, the people suffered more from his weakness than from his authority. The tyranny of wealthy and powerful subjects was the characteristic evil of the times. The royal prerogatives were not even sufficient for the defence of property and the maintenance of police. The progress of civilization introduced a great change. War became a science; and, as a necessary consequence, a separate trade. The great body of the people grew every day more reluctant to undergo the inconveniences of military service, and better able to pay others for undergoing them. A new class of men, therefore-dependent on the crown alone; natural enemies of those popular rights, which are to them as the dew to the fleece of Gideon; slaves among freemen; freemen among slaves-grew into importance. That physical force, which in the dark ages had be longed to the nobles and the commons, and had, far more than any charter or any assem bly, been the safeguard of their privileges, was transferred entire to the king. Monarchy gained in two ways. The sovereign was strengthened, the subjects weakened. The great mass of the population, destitute of all military discipline and organization, ceased to exercise any influence by force on political transactions. There have, indeed, during the last hundred and fifty years, been many popu lar insurrections in Europe : but all have failed, except those in which the regular army has been induced to join the disaffected. now found Hume, and many other writers, have hastily concluded, that in the fifteenth century the Those legal checks, which had been adeEnglish Parliament was altogether servile, quate to the purpose for which they were because it recognised, without opposition, designed while the sovereign remained de every successful usurper. That it was not pendent on his subjects, were servile, its conduct on many occasions of in- wanting. The dykes, which had been sufficient ferior importance is sufficient to prove. But while the waters were low, were not high surely it was not strange, that the majority of enough to keep out the spring tide. The deluge the nobles, and of the deputies chosen by the passed over them; and, according to the ex commons, should approve of revolutions which quisite illustration of Butler, the formal boundthe nobles and commons had effected. The aries which had excluded it now held it in. Parliament did not blindly follow the event of The old constitutions fared like the old shields war; but participated in those changes of pub- and coats of mail. They were the defences of lic sentiment, on which the event of war de-a rude age; and they did well enough against pended. The legal check was secondary and the weapons of a rude age. But new and more auxiliary to that which the nation held in its formidable means of destruction were invent own hands. There have always been mo- ed. The ancient panoply became useless; narchies in Asia, in which the royal authority and it was thrown aside to rust in lumber has been tempered by fundamental laws, rooms, or exhibited only as part of an idle though no legislative body exists to watch over pageant. them. The guarantee is the opinion of a community, of which every individual is a soldier. Thus the king of Caubul, as Mr. Elphinstone informs us, cannot augment the land revenue, or interfere with the jurisdiction of the ordinary Thus absolute monarchy was established on the Continent. England escaped; but she es caped very narrowly. Happily, our insular situation and the pacific policy of James rendered standing armies unnecessary here, till they had been for some time kept up in the neighbouring kingdoms. Our public men had therefore an opportunity of watching the effects produced by this momentous change, in forms of government which bore a close analogy to that established in England. Everywhere they saw the power of the monarch increasing, always going backward and forward; but it the resistance of assemblies, which were no The two Houses, surrounded by the ruins of 30 many free constitutions, overthrown or sapped by the new military system, were required to intrust the command of an army, and the conduct of the Irish war, to a king who had proposed to himself the destruction of liberty as the great end of his policy. We are decidedly of opinion that it would have been fatal to comply. Many of those who took the side of the king on this question would have cursed their own loyalty if they had seen him return from war at the head of twenty thousand troops, accustomed to carnage and free quarters in Ireland. We think with Mr. Hallam, that many of the royalist nobility and gentry were true friends to the constitution; and that, but for the solemn protestations by which the king bound himself to govern according to the law for the future, they never would have joined his standard. But surely they underrated the public danger. Falkland is commonly selected as the most respectable specimen of this class. He was indeed a man of great talents, and of great virtues; but, we apprehend, infinitely too fastidicus for public life. He did not perceive that in such times as those on which his lot had fallen, the duty of a statesman is to choose the better cause, and to stand by it, in spite of those excesses by which every cause, however good in itself, will be disgraced. The present evil always seemed to him the worst. He was VOL. I.-11 took their stand between the living and the dead. At the very crisis of our destiny, at the very moment when the fate which had passed on every other nation was about to pass on England, they arrested the danger. Those who conceive that the parliamentary leaders were desirous merely to maintain the old constitution, and those who represent them as conspiring to subvert it, are equally in error. The old constitution, as we have attempted to show, could not be maintained. The progress of time, the increase of wealth, the diffusion of knowledge, the great change in the European system of war, rendered it impossible that any of the monarchies of the middle ages should continue to exist on the old footing. The prerogative of the crown was constantly advancing. If the privileges of the people were to remain absolutely stationary, they would relatively retrograde. The monarchical and democratical parts of the government were placed in a situation not unlike that of the two brothers in the Fairy Queen, one of whom saw the soil of his inheritance daily washed away by the tide, and joined to that of his rival. The portions had at first been fairly meted out: by a natural and constant transfer, the one had been extended; the other had dwindled to no. thing. A new partition or a compensation was necessary to restore the original equality. It was now absolutely necessary to violate the formal part of the constitution, in order to preserve its spirit. This might have seen |