The glorious Reformation in the sixteenth century produced a hidden and powerful change in the aspect of English law. The Papal supremacy fell, and relieved the law of a most intolerable obstruction. The crown became the true head of the government. Man no longer gave a divided allegiance to an English monarch and an Italian monk; and the appointment of the bishops was thenceforth taken from foreign hands, and invested in the sovereign of the realm. Freedom now began to make palpable progress; for although the prerogative was still unabated, and was often tyrannical in the reigns of Henry, Mary, and Elizabeth, there was a growing tendency to its abatement; and its use by Elizabeth was in general so lenient, as to be scarcely perceptible.
A general change in English society also powerfully co-operated with this progress. Peace had brought commerce, and commerce wealth to the merchant: the lower orders, of course, shared in the general prosperity, and their condition became more important in the national eyes, and in their own. The nobles, disdaining commerce, became unable to compete with the new generation of opulence, and dissipated their estates, which fell into the hands of the citizens. On the other hand, the throne, enriched by the confiscation of the monasteries, became hourly more independent of the barons; and the contest for power was evidently to be thenceforth determined between the throne and the people.
The glories of Elizabeth, her services to religion, and her gentle exercise of the sceptre, had reconciled the nation to the prerogative. But the accession of James awoke the nation: his manners were offensive, his habits were unmanly, he wanted the dignity of Elizabeth on the throne, and he wanted the spirit of her government among the people. His death left a legacy of revolution. His son had been intended by nature for private life, but he was marked by misfortune to be a king. Brave without fortitude, and graceful without sincerity, he would have made an incomparable figure in his own court, if he had not been encumbered with the high duties of a throne. Charles was destined to be undone, from the time when he began to revive the obsolete statutes of the forest law, sustain the severities of the Star Chamber and High Commission courts, and raise arbitrary taxes in the shape of tonnage and poundage. The disuse of parliaments alienated from him every lover of liberty. Hampden, a name deserving of all honour in the history of freedom, struck the first blow at the new fabric of tyranny, by his resistance to ship-money. The King himself hurried on his ruin, by concessions as precipitate as his demands had been unjustifiable; and this most melancholy of all struggles ended in the most melancholy of all consummations—a military tyranny.
The restoration of the Stuarts gave us the Habeas Corpus Act—an illustrious memorial of national good sense, and of national security. Magna Charta had gone no further than to forbid imprisonment, contrary to law. The Habeas Corpus gave the man power to release himself, and punish his injurers.
The glorious Revolution of 1688 gave another impulse to the whole system of English liberty. It pronounced the authority of law to be supreme. It gave us the Bill of Rights, the Toleration Act, and the Act of Settlement. It justified the doctrine of necessary resistance; it regulated trials for high treason; it modelled the Civil List; it made the administration of the income accountable to parliament; and constituted the judges independent of the throne.
The constitution was now complete, or if not, all the improvements still necessary to make it such, were prepared in the nature of the noble plan which was thus laid down by the nation. The changes which have since occurred in the general law have been scarcely more than attempts to simplify its proceedings. The changes in parliamentary law have been more perilous, through the Reform Bill of 1831 following the Popish Bill of 1829. The change in international law has been marked by a feature whose peril seems too imminent, yet whose practical effect is still to be ascertained,—the establishment of direct diplomatic intercourse with the Popedom. Protestantism is justly alarmed at this sudden abandonment of one of the fundamental principles of 1688; at the direct encouragement which it must give to all the demands of Popery in England; at the triumph which, for the first time in two centuries, it gives to the factious spirit of Popery; at the aid which it may give to its superstition; and at the national hazards which may be involved in the rash attempt to subdue Irish violence by Papal instrumentality, and even at the political perils which may result from the authorised presence of a Popish Italian at the court of a Protestant sovereign. The palliatives of the measure are certainly trifling. The ambassador is not to be an ecclesiastic, and the Pope is not to be called the “sovereign pontiff.” But a Jesuit may be the same in a plain coat and in a red hat, and the Pope is the master of the Papist, call him by what name we will. Such is statesmanship in the nineteenth century!
The Lord Chancellor Hardwicke was the son of a country attorney, who was probably a respectable man——for he was needy, though the town-clerk, and seems to have had some friends, though in the profession of the law. The biographer labours hard to prove that he had ancestors—a matter which may be conceded to all men—and that, if some of them were poor, some were rich; a point perfectly within the possibilities of human things. He contends further, that a branch of the name of Yorke had held the mayoralty of Calais in the fifteenth century. But as he gives us no knowledge of the distance of that branch from the trunk, and as all have had kings as well as beggars among their progenitors, being the common descendants of Adam, there is not much use in those discoveries, and not the slightest balm to the hurt pride of the Hardwickes; for the whole dwindles down to the distressful but common conclusion, that in the seventeenth century the family were on the decline, and all their honours were diminished into the humility of a provincial solicitor.
But we come to wiser information. The first mention of the future chancellor is in the following document in his personal journal:—
“Philip Yorke, born at Dover the 1st day of December 1690, and baptised on Thursday 9th of December.”
The learned biographer wastes some more of his paragraphs in proving “that poverty is no disgrace;” but it must be acknowledged that it is neither comfort nor credit, and that it would have done no harm whatever to the attorney, if he had been in possession of a clear thousand a-year.