House of Commons, and in her conception the House of Commons had as its leading justification for existing, to enable the Sovereign to readily ascertain the mind of the nation. Now and then the Sovereign might wish to feel the pulse of the nation, as the phrase is, for in those days the wiser of our rulers were keenly alive to the vast importance of carrying the nation with them in their graver enterprises; a Parliament was called for the purpose; through it the pulse of the nation was felt, and that done, it was generally dismissed. At serious conjunctures of affairs, too, Elizabeth was glad to show her enemies that the undivided nation was at her back, and was eager to take its share of the responsibility of such decisive measures as her Ministers were urging her to adopt. In short, Elizabeth was fain to carry out that portion of her will that was also the wish of her subjects-though she was far from being equally prompt to carry out the national will where it was not also hers-and Parliament was the only possible medium of finding out how far her will and the nation's wishes ran parallel. But it never crossed her mind that Parliament had the shadow of a right to interfere in the administration, to control the Executive, to object to her Ministers, or to criticise her actions. She even resented its giving her advice, and sent to prison one or two of the members that persisted in offering it. To inform the governing authority, to prevent its going wrong through ignorance of the humour the nation was in, that was the chief end for which the Parliament existed according to Tudor notions.

This is not the belief either of the multitude or of many thinking men at present; but we cannot be just either to James or to his son if we forget it was the prevalent constitutional ideal when he came to the Throne. It is worth while, too,

to observe that Bacon's theory of the office of Parliament seems to have been somewhat similar, and to remember that the boldest though most paradoxical literary genius now living has in most energetic language announced his belief in a doctrine not essentially different. Bacon was an ardent, though, owing to circumstances, only a speculative reformer; but he saw in the prerogative, and it alone, the power that would enable him to effect his benevolent designs; to him the five hundred country gentlemen, lawyers, and merchants that constituted the House of Commons were the unfittest instruments conceivable for framing measures of reform. Now the Stuarts tried hard to work the Constitution on the lines laid down by the Tudors, but failed signally. The characteristic feature of the first quarter-century of their rule is their effort to perpetuate the system that Elizabeth, notwithstanding occasional hitches and rubs, had carried out with substantial success; just as the dissolution of 1629 marks the beginning of a new Stuart policy, a sustained effort to dispense with Parliament altogether. During that quarter-century they called seven Parliaments, exactly half the number called by the whole dynasty; with each grave misunderstandings arose, and all but one were sent away under a cloud of royal displeasure. There was no lack of loyalty in the Parliament, there was at least the wish to govern well in the King; but the two could never understand each other; there was scarcely a single important question of public policy which they could bring themselves to look at in the same light. James could not lift his thoughts higher than the immediate past, could see no reason why as large a measure of power should not be at his disposal as had been at Elizabeth's; Parliament, vexed in soul at seeing its longings deliberately

ignored at home and abroad, turned its gaze to a more remote past and discovered in later Plantagenet times a condition of the Constitution that would help to vindicate for the Commons the footing in the State they wanted. A return to this order of things James and Charles vehemently resisted as an unwarrantable aggression; the balance of the Constitution, they conceived, would be upset by such a course, the central authority, which existed for the good of the nation, would be enfeebled and discredited by the establishment of a coequal power alongside of it. An expression used by James in the midst of his great quarrel with his third House of Commons lets us into the secret of his dogged opposition to the pretensions of that body. Bring stools for the ambassadors,' he said to those near him when the deputation charged with the petition of the Commons assertory of their right to debate any question that touched the honour, religion, or interests of the nation, entered his presence. The body these men came from was, he thus intimated, claiming nothing less than sovereign power; and he was not to deal with it as a king with a subject, but to treat with it as one sovereign prince with another.2 And the history of the two centuries that follow proves that James was right; honourable gentlemen, little as they knew it, were then making their first move towards political supremacy. 'No so far,' said Cromwell, as the man who does not know where he is going.'

one goes

to us

A close scrutiny of the first ten years of James's reign will reveal one hardly expected fact -unless indeed I have allowed myself to forget the rules I have laid down above. Parliament had at first no thought of reviving

its former powers for their own sake, but only as a means to an end. The majority of the Commons had set their hearts on getting particular things done, crying grievances redressed, principles deemed vital upheld, a policy of their own carried out; they looked to the King to fulfil their wishes; and it was only when they discovered that the King was bent on pursuing a course of his own which was not theirs, that they bethought them of the weapons their ancestors had wielded in Plantagenet times. And in the earlier stages of the struggle they grasped these weapons only in a half-hearted manner, they seemed to show a willingness to drop them were only the King to fall in with and gratify their aspirations. For instance, in the matter of the vexatious Impositions, though James, following Tudor precedent, had laid these on the country in flat violation of the law, the Commons were willing to acquiesce in their continuance, if the King would agree to the enactment of a law making any addition to them impossible. And the concurrent testimony of unconnected reporters would appear to clearly establish one fact regarding the 'Young Marcellus' of the day, Prince Henry, that he was not the stuff to shape into a Constitutional king, that he was a youth of the Tudor type, self-willed and arbitrary, though generous and high. spirited; but his aims and aspirations were those of the nation, and the nation loved him as no other member of his house was popularly loved, and passionately mourned his early death. Indeed a tone of sadness seems to predominate in the temper of many of those early Stuart Parliaments; in reading of some of their debates we become conscious of a touch of melancholy; few men have lived

ever

less used to the melting mood than Sir Edward Coke, yet Coke was twice seen to shed tears in the midst of debates. Once, as an eye-witness of the scene tells us, 'overcome with passion, seeing the desolation likely to ensue, he was forced to sit down when he began to speak, by the abundance of tears.' And in watching the ways of James's Parliaments one cannot help being struck by the earnestness, the dignified bearing, the comparative absence of intemperate language, the anxiety to avoid extremities, as well as by the firm ness and regulated courage, that distinguished their members. Had only a king like-minded with themselves, or possessing even ordinary tact, been vouchsafed them-but we cannot deal here with 'might-havebeens.' One thing is clear, these were not the men to be overcome by a childish hugging of the prerogative.

Yet we must not be unjust to James; if he failed where Elizabeth succeeded, we ought to remember that one thing made his task much more difficult than Elizabeth's. For the greater part of the Queen's reign England was in a state of virtual or actual war; for some years she was in death-grips with the mightiest nation then on the face of the earth. Experience shows that a great foreign war invariably throws a larger measure of power into the hands of the ruling authority, which may then do without question many a thing that the nation, when delivered from peril, would not suffer to be done, in any case would not allow to pass unquestioned. There must be people still living who remember how many of the most cherished liberties of Englishmen were practically suspended during the Napoleonic war. And so it was in the days of Elizabeth: during her great war the Queen took a decided course with the Com

mons, which she would not have dared to take in her earlier days of power; the more unguarded speakers among them she sent unceremoniously to the Tower, and firmly declined to release as she had done on similar occasions before. But the year after her death a peace very much to the advantage of England was made; James's hatred of war kept this peace unbroken for twenty years, and the minds of men, no longer disposed to submit, through fear for the nation's independence, to the high-handed proceedings of the Crown, turned once more to domestic questions, and pertinaciously insisted on a satisfactory solution of the more pressing among them.

I had hoped to be able to glance at one or two of the most conspicuous of these questions; but I have left myself no room to do so. I would entreat the reader, before he addresses himself to the one group of them that he must study carefully if he wants to understand the time, the religious group, to cleanse his spirit from every stain of prejudice. He may assume it as an absolute truth that no one party, no one school of thought or action, was utterly in the wrong or utterly in the right, that neither the Anglicans nor the Puritans, neither the Cavaliers nor the Roundheads, had a monopoly of sense and goodness; and he may console himself for the possibly disappointing result of his researches by the fact that when his search is over, he will likely have two human beings to admire, honour, perhaps love, where before he had only one.

I may, however, be allowed to say a word or two about the third great disadvantage that stood in the way of the success of the Stuarts in England, their foreign birth or foreign extraction. One would hardly have expected this accident of alien origin to be of much con

sequence in a king of this nation. It is a singular fact, and worthy of more thought than has hitherto been given to it, that no powerful Christian State has had so many foreign rulers as England; and yet most of us flatter ourselves that England has been, all things considered, the grandest political success of Christendom. There may not of course be any connection between the two things-though I am strongly of opinion that there is-but the first fact is indisputable. Five English dynasties have been founded by men not of English blood; among the kings that sat on the English throne during the two hundred years that separated Edmund Ironside from Henry III. but one Englishman, and he a foreignhearted one, is found; and our last purely native sovereign has been Oliver Cromwell. Here again we have an example of the ill-luck that dogged the steps of the Stuarts. In the days of the Dane, of the Norman, and of the Angevin, the ruler was everything, the mass of the ruled nothing or very little; in the days of the first Hanoverians the ruledor rather Parliament which was supposed to represent the ruledwas almost everything, the man that sat in the ruler's seat very little. But the destiny of the Stuarts assigned them to an order of things which had travelled a good way on the road that was leading the nation from the earlier Statesystem to the later, and contained a mixture of the elements of both. In the seventeenth century, though the ruler was still of the last importance, the ruled counted a great deal, and their weight was ever steadily on the increase; it was not competent for any king to go his self-chosen way indifferent to the feelings and wishes of the people; that a large amount of mutual sympathy should bind king and people together, that some kind of consensus of aims and desires should give them a lively

interest in each other, was essential to the harmonious working of the different parts of the Constitution. But no mutual sympathy ever formed, for any length of time, a tie between the Stuarts and their subjects; at no moment in their joint history was there between them any real consensus of aims and desires; in the Stuarts we cannot detect a trace of that sensitiveness to the soul of the nation which was a kind of instinct in Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, who, with all their faults, were English to the core; they felt, or seemed to feel, a stain on the nation's honour like a wound; you cannot fancy either of them dissolving Parliament at the dictation of a foreign ambassador, as James I. did in 1622, or selling himself to a foreign Power, as Charles II. did in 1670, or making an appeal to a brother king for an increase of pension, as James II. did in 1685. That the earlier James should even have thought of mating the heir to his throne with a daughter of Spain stands against him as a damning record of his double-quilted insensibility to the temper of the people. In the words of Carlyle-and there is hardly more than a scruple of exaggeration in them-'the soul of England (then) abhorred to have any concern with Spain or things Spanish. Spain was a black Domdaniel, which, had the floors of it been paved with diamonds, had the Infanta of it come riding in such a gig of respectability as was never driven since Phaeton's sun-chariot took the road, no honest English soul could wish to have concern with. . . . The articulate tendency of this Solomon king had unfortunately parted company with the inarticulate but ineradicable tendency of the country he presided over. The Solomon king struggled one way, and the English nation with its very life-fibres was compelled to struggle another way.'

And on the only occasion when James betrayed any inclination to show himself the real leader of the nation, he was dragged into the position by the man to whose will he had surrendered his own, Buckingham. The only king of the line who seemed to have anything like a fellow-feeling with any considerable section of the people was that crowned Bohemian, the graceless yet not ungracious Charles II.; and in him it was only a semblance. The virtues and defects of the Stuarts were not the virtues and defects of the nation; where the nation was broad-minded, they were narrow; where the nation was narrow-minded, they were broad. The rock on which the Stuarts got shipwrecked was simply this: in the seventeenth century it was above all things essential that the kings of England should be English, and the Stuarts were not English in any sense of the word.

Here I must end. A consideration of a few other topics was included in the original plan of this essay; but I must content myself with a simple indication of the two principal ones. Much has been written of the way in which our forefathers in their political strivings leaned upon mere legality: 1789

asked of a thing, is it national? 1642 asked of a thing, is it legal?' says the frankest of our eminent critics; and his statement is in the main true. It was my intention to draw the more striking illustrations of this fact from the reign of James I., to show the active, and on the whole honourable, part some lawyers played in the contests of that reign, how they rendered more than one valuable service to the imperilled liberties of their countrymen. I wished also to make some attempt to show how that much-talked-of movement now known as the Renascence, on passing into the reign of James, got divorced from the heroic activities that had given manliness and dignity to it under Elizabeth, and degenerated into a shameless scramble after the socalled good things of this life, giving birth to almost universal corruption in the State and to a brood of the vilest scandals in the Court and aristocracy; and how most of what was still sound at heart in English life was almost constrained 'to enter the prison of Puritanism '-which step, so deplorable in the eyes of some, proved, to my mind, the moral salvation of the country. I hope, however, to return to these topics some other day.