Review Of The State Of Europe.
How came it that institutions, already so strong and active, at least in appearance, decayed so rapidly? How came it that parliamentary government, which seemed in possession of all its essential rights and principles, paused in its progress, and yielded for more than a century to the rule of an almost absolute monarchy? Now that I have reached the conclusion of this course of lectures, I cannot investigate with you the causes of this apparently singular fact; but they may be discerned in another very remarkable fact in the analogy which prevails between the history of England and the history of France at this period. In France, also, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we discern the appearances of attempts at representative government; these incoherent and superficial essays were succeeded by the wars of religion, the League, and the great disorders of the sixteenth century; and order was not restored, France did not regain repose and vigour, until the establishment of absolute power by Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV., and by the annihilation, as a political power, of that ancient feudal aristocracy who had been able neither to procure for the country, nor to assume for themselves, in the government of France, their legitimate and lasting position.
In England, as you have just seen, representative government, originating in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, did not confine itself to incoherent and feeble essays; but established itself upon its essential foundations, and speedily obtained considerable development. The sanguinary conflicts for the succession to the throne, the protracted dissensions of the Red and White Roses, abruptly arrested its progress. Just as in France, from the reign of Louis XI., we hear nothing of attempts at the establishment of free institutions, so in England, during the reigns of Edward IV. and Richard III., the Parliament has no history. In the intervals of the civil war, it appears only as the instrument of the vengeance of the victorious party, and to pass bills of attainder against the leaders of the vanquished faction. It voted a few taxes, but this was the only one of its rights which, it still maintained, and even this was eluded by the practice of Benevolences, or gifts in appearance voluntary, but in reality compulsory, of which we meet with a few examples in antecedent times, but which received great extension under Edward IV. Finally, more than once several years elapsed without a Parliament being convoked, especially from 1477 to 1482; such a suspension had been unprecedented since 1327.
The civil wars of the fifteenth century, however, are only the superficial, and as it were, external cause of this sudden decadence of representative government in England; in order to discover its true cause, we must penetrate deeper into the state of society.
Until this period, the three great forces in English society —the royal power, the aristocracy, and the Commons—had maintained intimate and continual relations amongst themselves, and had served each other by turns, either as an obstacle or as a means of success. It was by the aid of the great barons that the Commons had been enabled to win their liberties. The royal power, though strong in itself, had nevertheless been obliged to resort sometimes to the barons, and sometimes to the Commons. From the political concurrence of these three great social forces, and from the vicissitudes of their alliances and fortunes, the progress of representative government had resulted. Liberty can be established only where there does not exist in the State any constituted power sufficiently preponderant to usurp absolute authority.
In the latter half of the fifteenth century, the equipoise of these three forces ceased. The royal power disappeared in some sort, in consequence of the imbecility of Henry VI. and afterwards by the uncertainty of the right of succession to the crown. The government fell into the hands of the high aristocracy, who were divided and distracted by their intestine quarrels. The Commons were not in a condition to act the part of mediators between these terrible factions, and to impose upon them respect for public order. The knights of the shire took part in the train of the great barons with whom they were still dependently connected by a multitude of ties: and the towns, thus left alone, could do nothing, but were carried away in the general stream. In this state of disorder and violence, the Commons disappeared, or if they were not materially annihilated, their political power vanished. The high aristocracy worked its own dissolution; many great families were destroyed, and many more were ruined. Henry VII., at his accession, found only the wreck of that nobility which had made his predecessors tremble. The great barons, wearied with their own excesses, and stripped of a great part of their resources, were no longer inclined or able to continue that struggle against the royal power, which had been headed by their ancestors ever since the days of king John. On this side therefore, the royal power no longer had any powerful antagonists. On the other side, the Commons, wasted and enervated by civil war, were not in a condition to take the place of the high aristocracy in the struggle against the royal authority. They had taken part in the government as followers of the nobles; and when they found themselves standing almost alone in presence of the crown, it did not even occur to them that this interference was their right: they, therefore, contented themselves with defending a few special rights, particularly that of consenting to large subsidies; and, in other respects, they allowed themselves to be governed. Hence arose the government of Henry VIII., and at a later period, that of Elizabeth.
More than a century was requisite to enable the English Commons—re-invigorated and strengthened, in a material point of view, by long years of order and prosperity, and in a moral point of view, by the reformation of religion—to acquire sufficient social importance and intellectual elevation to place themselves, in their turn, at the head of the resistance against despotism, and to draw the ancient aristocracy in their train. This great revolution in the state of society broke out in the reign of Charles I., and determined that political revolution, which, after fifty years of conflict, finally established representative government in England.