laws, by virtue of which their masters were considered as vassals, had no relation to those by which they were bound as subjects; the resistance, of which they were made the instruments, never produced any advantageous 17 consequence in their favour, nor did it establish any principle of freedom that was applicable to them.

The inferior nobles, who shared in the independence of the superior nobility, added the effects of their own insolence to the despotism of so many sovereigns; and the people, wearied out by sufferings, and rendered desperate by oppression, at times attempted to revolt. But being parcelled out into so many different states, they could never perfectly agree either in the nature or the times of their complaints. The insurrections, which ought to have been general, were only successive and particular. In the meantime the lords, ever uniting to avenge their common cause as masters, fell with irresistible advantage on men who were divided; the people were thus separately, and by force, brought back to their former yoke; and liberty, that precious offspring, which requires so many favourable circumstances to foster it, was every where stifled in its birth (i).

At length, when by conquests, by escheats, or by 18 treaties, the several provinces came to be reunited (k) to the extensive and continually increasing dominions of

(i) It may be seen in Mezeray, how the Flemings, at the time of the great revolt, which was caused, as he says, "by the inveterate hatred of the nobles (les gentils hommes) against the people of Ghent" were crushed by the union of almost all the nobility of France. (See Mezeray, Reign of Charles V1.)

1

(k) The word re-union expresses, in the French law or history, the reduction of a province to an immediate dependence on the

crown

the monarch, they became subject to their new master, already trained to obedience. The few privileges which 19 the cities had been able to preserve were little respected by a sovereign who had himself entered into no engagements for that purpose; and, as the reunions were made at different times, the King was always in a condition to overwhelm every new province that accrued to him, with the weight of all those he already possessed.

20

As a farther consequence of these differences, between the times of the reunions, the several parts of the kingdom entertained no views of assisting each other. When some reclaimed their privileges, the others, long since reduced to subjection, had already forgotten theirs. Besides, these privileges, by reason of the differences of the governments under which the provinces had formerly been held, were also almost every where different: the circumstances which happened in one place thus bore little affinity to those which fell out in another; the spirit of union was lost, or rather had never existed; each province, restrained within its particular bounds, only served to ensure the general submission; and the same causes which had reduced that spirited nation to a yoke of subjection, concurred also to keep them under it.

Thus liberty perished in France, because it wanted a favourable culture and proper situation. Planted, if I may so express myself, but just beneath the surface, it presently expanded, and sent forth some large shoots; but, having taken no root, it was soon plucked up. In England, on the contrary, the seed, lying at a great depth, and being covered with an enormous weight, seemed at first to be smothered; but it vegetated with the greater force; it imbibed a more rich and abundant nourishment; its sap and juice became better assimi

lated, and it penetrated and filled up with its roots the whole body of the soil. It was the excessive power of the King which made England free, because it was this very excess that gave rise to the spirit of union, and of concerted resistance. Possessed of extensive demesnes, the King found himself independent; invested with the most formidable prerogatives, he crushed at pleasure the most formidable barons in the realm. It was only by close and numerous confederacies, therefore, that these could resist his tyranny; they even were compelled to associate the people in them, and make them partners of public liberty.

Assembled with their vassals in their great halls, where they dispensed their hospitality, deprived of the amusement of more polished nations, naturally inclined, besides, freely to expatiate on objects of which their hearts were full, their conversation, as a consequence, turned on the injustice of the public impositions, on the tyranny of the judicial proceedings, and, above all, on the detested forest laws.

Destitute of an opportunity of cavilling about the 22 meaning of laws, the terms of which were precise, or rather disdaining the resource of sophistry, they were naturally led to examine the first principles of society; they inquired into the foundations of human authority, and became convinced that power, when its object is not the good of those who are subject to it, is nothing more than the right of the strongest, and may be repressed by the exertion of a similar right.

The different orders of the feudal government, as established in England, being connected by tenures exactly similar, the same maxims which were laid down as true against the lord paramount, in behalf of the lord of an

upper fief, were likewise to be admitted against the latter in behalf of the owner of an inferior fief; the same maxims were also to be applied to the possessors of a still lower fief; they further descended to the freeman, and to the peasant; and the spirit of liberty, after having circulated through the different branches of the feudal subordination, thus continued to flow through successive homogeneous channels; it forced a passage into the remotest ramifications; and the principle of 23 primeval equality became every where diffused and established: a sacred principle, which neither injustice nor ambition can erase, which exists in every breast, and, to exert itself, requires only to be awakened among the numerous and oppressed classes of mankind.

But when the barons whom their personal consequence had at first caused to be treated with caution and regard by the sovereign, began to be no longer so; when the tyrannical laws of the conqueror became still more tyrannically executed, the confederacy, for which the general oppression had paved the way, instantly took place. The lord, the vassal, the inferior vassal, all united; they even implored the assistance of the peasants and cottagers; and the haughty aversion with which, on the Continent, the nobility repaid the industrious hands who fed them (7), was in England compelled to yield to the pressing necessity of setting bounds to the royal authority.

The people, on the other hand, knew that the cause they were called upon to defend was a cause common to all; and they were sensible, besides, that they were

(7) The nobles of Europe considered their family disgraced by marriage with a plebeian.-EDITor.

Instructed by the ex

necessary supporters of it. ample of their leaders, they stipulated conditions for 24 themselves; they insisted that, for the future, every individual should be entitled to the protection of the laws; and thus did those rights with which the lords had strengthened themselves, in order to oppose the tyranny of the crown, become a bulwark which was in time to restrain their own (8).

(8) It is maintained in this chapter, that the Conquest was the real era of the formation of the present English government; and as this position is at variance with many writers, who consider that William legally acceded to the throne, the present writer offers the following further observations upon this subject, which the reader will find very fully treated upon in Dr. Russell's History of Modern Europe, Part i., Letters 19 & 23.

After the English had shaken off the Danish yoke, which they did upon the death of Hardicanute, they recalled from Normandy Edward, son of Ethelred, surnamed the Confessor, who had been educated in Normandy by his uncle Richard, Duke of Normandy; and having contracted many intimacies with the natives of that country, as well as an affection for their manners, the court of England was soon filled with Normans, who were distinguished by the royal favour, and had great influence in the national councils.

Harold, the son of Earl Godwin, the most powerful nobleman in the kingdom, by his political and fortunate conduct found himself in a condition to aspire to the crown. His competitors for the succession were, Edgar Atheling, the sole surviving heir to the crown, and William, Duke of Normandy, the king's cousin; but the first was a youth, whose inability was thought sufficient to set aside his claim, and the second a foreigner. Edward's prepossessions hindered him from supporting the pretensions of Harold, and his irresolution from securing the crown to the Duke of Normandy, whom he secretly favoured; he therefore died without a successor, and Harold immediately stepped in to the vacant throne.

William of Normandy founded his claim to the English crown on a pretended will of Edward the Confessor in his favour, which he fortified with an oath, extorted from Harold when shipwrecked on the coast of France, that he would never aspire to the succession,