those who would ascribe the victory less to the causes I have retraced than to the sudden needs of a faction of the barons. As of right the commonalty took, and they kept, the place to which they were called; and we may dismiss as of the least possible importance the question whether the power was usurped that called them. Their existence once recognised, no man was found to gainsay it; their position and place once found, everything helped to make it more decisively plain. In the reigns of the first and second Edwards, and their successors, we find them in actual efficiency as a branch of the State; and in spite of the weaker princes, as with the help of the wiser and stronger, their power was still to grow.

Edward I had not occupied his father's throne three years when a statute was passed that forasmuch as election ought to be free, no man by force of arms, nor by malice or menacing, should disturb any to make free election. Ten years later, what proved to be one of the heaviest blows to the system it was meant to guard was struck by the arming of all classes: for then was passed the Great Statute of Winchester, by which every man in the kingdom, according to the quantity of his lands and goods, was assessed and sworn to carry weapons. The lesson had now been taught to two estates of the realm, that in the third, as yet unknown to itself, the supreme force lay; and the ability or power most effectively to make common cause with it, was hereafter to be the measure of gain or loss to either. A curious example presents itself in the succeeding reign. Under Edward II, when beyond all question the Commons sat, as well as voted, apart from the temporal and spiritual Barons, numerous boroughs were expressly created with the design of strengthening the regal as opposed to the aristocratic influences; and it was also then that, in a very remarkable statute, equal legislative power with the other estates was claimed for the commonalty, not as a new pretension, but "according as hath been before accustomed," as a fundamental usage of the realm. Both

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the first and the third Edward, in the plenitude of their power and their success, attempted without direct authority from Parliament to impose taxes on the people; and both had to suffer defeat. Edward I struggled long to reverse that decision; and in the end had but to enter into more special covenants that he would never again levy any aid without the assent and good-will of the estates of the realm. The long and remarkable reign of his grandson is the date of the Statute of Treasons, one of the greatest gains to constitutional freedom. It limited the crime, before vague and uncertain, to three principal heads; the conspiring the King's death, the levying war against him, and the adhering to his enemies; and, if any any other cases for question should arise, it prohibited the judges from inflicting the penalty of treason without application to Parliament. Then also were passed those memorable acts against arbitrary conscription and compulsory pressing of soldiers, so repeatedly cited in the struggle against Charles I, which saved to every man, except upon" the sudden coming of strange enemies into "the realm," the obligation to arm himself only within his own shire. But perhaps the highest distinction of Edward III's government was that the poet Chaucer then arose to instruct and charm his countrymen, purifying their native tongue. And it was with much appropriateness, therefore, enacted in the thirty-sixth year of the reign, that the English language, which had been thus ennobled, should in future be used as the language of legislation.

The greatest of the Edwards governed England for fifty years, and called together seventy parliaments. He was succeeded by a prince of qualities in all respects the reverse of his, and whom Parliament deposed. Yet not more certainly in the enforced resignation of the crown which closed the reign, than in the rebellion of the serf-class which signalised its commencement, did Richard II's rule bear testimony to the strength and efficacy of principles promoted equally by the rule of

Edward. Placed even on the inferior ground of a conflict between the higher powers of the State; calling it mere gain to the King when he broke down the exclusive pretensions of the great lords by forcing their House to recognise his writs of summons, and counting it but as a new privilege to the Barons when they led Henry of Lancaster to the vacant throne; the consequences of this reign were momentous. With at least the nominal cooperation of the constituted authorities of his empire, a legitimate King had been deposed; and never was it afterwards disputed, that the solid and single claim of the dynasty which took his place, rested upon the ability of Parliament, or of the power which those Lords and Barons with all England armed behind them represented, so to alter the succession. By the wording of the acts of settlement connected with the change, that most essential principle of popular right was fully admitted; and from them were derived the historical and legal precedents which, down to our own time, have proved most advantageous to the people. Nor did the first prince of the house of Lancaster accept them grudgingly. Wary as he was bold, the policy of Bolingbroke continued to be the policy of Henry IV. The parliamentary authority which had given him power, and the popular sympathies which had confirmed his title, were in every possible way promoted by him during the fourteen years of his great though still disputed rule; and no one who examines the preambles and other wording of the statutes that were passed in his reign, can fail to be struck with the sense of how much the commonest orders of the people must have risen since the date of the reign of John, in all that, with the sense of personal power, brings the sure hankering after political privilege, gradual means to estimate freedom at its value, and strength ultimately to win it. It was this Sovereign whom his House of Commons startled with the proposal that he should seize the temporalities of the Church, and, after general and reasonable endowment of all the clergy, employ them as a

fund reserved for the exigencies of the State. The proposal failed, unluckily for the Church itself, but it led to some important checks on clerical privilege; and the thirty articles which, two years later, were not only proposed but conceded, for the regulation of the King's household and government, have been declared by Mr. Hallam, an authority well entitled to respect, to form a noble fabric of constitutional liberty, hardly inferior to the petition of right. The Sovereign was required to govern by the advice of a permanent council; and this council, together with all the judges and the officers of the royal household, were bound by solemn oath to parliament to observe and defend the amended institutions. It established in effect the principle of ministerial responsibility.

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To this, then, had been brought, at the opening of the fifteenth century, that claim of a Sovereign Authority which in the older time had certainly been conceded to the Norman King. For it would be as idle to doubt in what division of the State the conquest temporarily vested such authority, as to deny that many forms of it still were retained long after its substance and vitality had departed. Still, for example, the course of legislative procedure retained vestige of exclusive kingly rule. Petitions were still presented by the Commons, considered by the Lords, and replied to by the King; which, being entered on the liament roll, formed the basis of legislation by the monarch himself. Even as late as Henry V, indeed, on the authority of a somewhat remarkable remonstrance found on the roll, it has been alleged as a not unusual practice for the King, taking advantage of the custom which had so arisen of leaving statutes to be drawn up by the judges from the Petition and Answer during the parliamentary recess, to misrepresent and falsify the intentions of parliament, by producing statutes to which it had not given assent. But how strikingly it proves that the sovereign authority, as a real working power, had declined, when such artifices were thought worth resorting to; and how significant the fact that in the very next reign even the form disappeared alto

gether, and, in place of the old Petitions, the introduction of complete statutes under the name of Bills was effected. What the sword had won the sword should keep, said Henry V on his accession; but what was meant by the saying has its comment in the fact that in the year which witnessed his victory at Agincourt, he yielded to the House of Commons the most liberal measure of legislative power which until then it had obtained. The dazzling splendour of his conquests in France had for the time cast into shade every doubt or question of his title, but the very extent of those gains upon the French soil established only more decisively the worse than uselessness of such acquisitions to the English throne. The distinction of Henry's reign in constitutional history will always be, that from it dates that power, indispensable to a free and limited monarchy, called Privilege of Parliament; the shield and buckler under which all the battles of liberty and good government were fought in the after time. Not only were its leading safeguards now obtained, but at once so firmly established, that against the shock of incessant resistance in later years they stood perfectly unmoved. Of the awful right of impeachment, too, the same is to be said. It was won in the same reign, and was never afterwards lost.

For let it not be thought that all the fruits of the hardfought liberal victories were at once gathered in and stored for peaceful and uninterrupted enjoyment. What most impresses the careful student of early English history, is the singular and marked distinction he finds it necessary to keep before him, between a generally existing substantial recognition of the securities of civil freedom, and their frequent and flagrant violation. Still the violation, when it occurred, was seen to be such. "So when the Lion "preyeth" as brave old Sir Edwin Sandys told the House of Commons early in James I's reign, "no cause to think "it his right." Of a mingled character in this respect were the results of the long and bloody contest, now about to begin, between the rival branches of the Plantagenet