of his usurpation. But he could not depress the people for his pleasure, when already he had raised them for his gain. They are edged tools, these popular compacts and concessions; and not so safe to play the game of dissimulation with, as a friendly nod or greeting to the friend you purpose to betray. "Does he smile and "speak well of me?" said one of the chief justiciaries of this King." Then I am undone. I never knew him "praise a man whom he did not intend to ruin." It was truly said, as the speaker soon had occasion to know; but it is more difficult so to deal with a people. A charter of relief from onerous and unreasonable burdens, once granted, is never more to be resumed as a mere waste piece of parchment. The provisions of which men have lost the memory, and are thought to have lost the record, reappear at the time of vital need; and the prince into whose violent keeping a people's liberties have fallen, is made subject to a sharp responsibility. For the most part, unhappily, history is read as imperfectly as it is written. Beneath the surface to which the obscurity of imperfect records too commonly and contentedly restricts us, there lies material to be yet brought to light, less by laborious research than by patient thought and careful induction. Conceding to the early chroniclers their particular cases of oppression, subjection, and acquiescence, let us well assure ourselves that these will not prevail for any length of time against an entire and numerous people. If ever rulers might have hoped to measure their immunities and rights by the temper and strength of their swords, it should have been these early Norman princes; yet at every turn in their story, at every slight casualty in their chequered fortunes, they owe their safety to the fact of flinging down their spoil. A something which, under various names, represents the People, is still upon their track; and thus, over our rudest history, there lies at least the shadow of that substance which fills our later and nobler annals.

Contemporaneous with Henry's charter were the first

great victories of the Crusades, which led to the sacrifice of many millions of lives, and had the effect not only greatly to increase the temporal power and ecclesiastical domination of the Popedom, but to begin the terrible story of religious wars. Yet they had also good results, to which the existing condition of the world gave a preponderating influence. What there was of merit in the feudal institutions had here taken a higher and more spiritual character, largely abating their ferocity and somewhat lessening their injustice. The union of different countries in a common object had a tendency to dissipate many narrow hindrances to a common civilisation; and the intercourse of eastern and western nations by degrees introduced into religion, as well as into government, larger and more humane views. The pecuniary obligations, too, incurred by the feudal chiefs, led to a wider circulation of money, and made further gradual but sure encroachment on the stricter domains of feudalism. Finally, we owe it mainly to the Crusades, that the enrichment of the ports of Italy, by such sudden avenues to trade, became an important element in the advance to a higher and more refined system of society; and that, scattered through the wandering paths of Troubadour or Dominican, the seeds of eloquence and song sprang up in later days, and in many countries, into harvests of national literature.

Some of these advantages began to be felt even so early as under the first and greatest of the Plantagenet kings. It was in Henry II's reign that personal services of the feudal vassals were exchanged for pecuniary aids; that, by the issue of a new coinage of standard weight and purity, confidence was given to towns and cities, then struggling into importance by the help of charters and fiscal exemptions; that the most oppressive baronial tyrannies received a check from the Crown; and that settled guarantees for internal tranquillity were given by a more orderly, equal, and certain administration of the laws. Yet even such services to civilisation yield in importance to that which was rendered by this great

prince in resisting the usurpations of the Church. His dispute with his Primate involved essentially little less than the ultimate question of the entire arrangement of human society. Not seventy years had passed since the voice of Hildebrand had declared the papal throne to be but the temporal emblem of a universal spiritual authority, holding absolute feudal jurisdiction over the lesser authority of kings and nobles; and Becket stood upon the claim so put forth by Hildebrand. Like him he would have made a theocracy of human government, and placed the Church at its head, unquestioned and supreme. He would have drawn together the whole of Christian Europe under one sole Suzerain authority, and, through all the wide and various extent of civilised nations, would have made the spiritual tyranny of Rome the centre and metropolis of dominion. To Henry Plantagenet, on the other hand, it seemed that any such centralisation of ecclesiastical power would be fatal to the peace, the happiness, and the liberty of the world. He had laboured hard, with his Chancellor Becket, to reduce all autocracies and tyrannies within his kingdom; and against his Primate Becket, he now resolutely declared that this work should still go on. Not necessarily was the question implied, whether spiritual interests were, or were not, of higher importance than temporal interests; any more than whether a firm belief in Christianity should involve a total subjection of the understanding, of the heart and the will, of the active and the intellectual powers, to ecclesiastical domination. Not so, happily for the people whom he governed, was this resolute prince disposed to renounce his social and civil duties. In events that arose as the contest went on, he was rude, passionate, and overbearing; and perhaps much of the work he was called to do, by more delicate ways could hardly have been done; but, though what he had nobly gained was thus at times in danger of being ignobly lost, there seldom fails to be visible, throughout all the reckless impulses of that really majestic though illregulated nature, a strong comprehension of the vital truth

which was afterwards wrought out with such breadth and potency in England. And on the whole it was certainly well that his triumph should not have been on all points complete. Notwithstanding the spiritual despotism which the Church would fain have established, we cannot forget what the Church in those rude times represented and embodied; and for the utter discomfiture and overthrow of which, any absolute supremacy of the State and the sword would have been but a poor compensation. What it was well that the King should retain, he did not lose; and, though neither did Becket entirely forfeit what his arrogance too rashly put in peril, substantially the victory remained with Henry. Asserting the necessary rights of temporal princes, and upholding the independent vigour of civil government, he defended and maintained, in effect, religious liberty and equal laws; and happily the soil was not unprepared to receive that wholesome seed, even so early as the reign of the first Plantagenet.

The reign of the second of that family supplies to our constitutional historian, in the sentence passed on the Chancellor of the absent King by the convention of barons, the earliest authority on record for the responsibility of Ministers to Parliament. The incident, however, important as it is, seems rather to take its place with others in the same reign, which mark the springing up of a new condition of relations between the baronage and the throne. In the obstinate absence of Coeur-deLion on his hair-brained enterprizes, the inaptitude and imbecility of his brother had thrown all the real duties of government into the hands of a council of barons; these again were opposed by men of their own class, as well for self-interest, as on general and independent grounds; and the result of a series of quarrels thus conducted between equals, as it were, in station, between forces to a great degree independent of each other—the Crown striving to maintain itself on the one hand, but no longer with the prestige of power it had received from the stronger kings; the Aristocracy advancing claims on the

other, no longer overborne or overawed by the present pressure of the throne-led to what, in modern phrase, might be called a system of unscrupulous party struggle, in which royalty lost the exclusive position it had been the great aim of the Conqueror's family to secure to it, and became an unguarded object of attack, thereafter, to whatever hostile confederacy might be formed against it.

What there was of evil as well as of good in the contest became strongly manifest in the two succeeding reigns.

In the strict order of hereditary succession the crown, which on Richard's death was conferred on John, would have fallen to Arthur, the orphan of John's elder brother. But though the subsequent misfortunes and sorrowful death of this young prince largely excited sympathy in England, there was never any formidable stand attempted, here, on the ground of his right to the throne. The battle was fought in the foreign provinces. In England, while some might have thought his hereditary claim superior to his uncle's, there was hardly a man of influence who would at this period have drawn the sword for him, on any such principle as that the crown of England was heritable property. The genius of the country had been repugnant to any such notion. The Anglo-Saxon sovereignty was elective; that people never sanctioning a custom by which the then personal and most arduous duties of sovereignty, both in peace and war, might pass of right to an infant or imbecile prince; and to the strength of this feeling in the country of their conquest, the Normans heretofore had been obliged to defer. At each successive coronation following the defeat of Harold, including that of the Conqueror, the form of deferring to the people's choice had been religiously adhered to; nay, of the five Norman kings on whom the English crown had now descended, four had been constrained to rest their strongest title on that popular choice or recognition : but its most decisive confirmation was reserved for the coronation of John. Till after the ceremony, his right