ITS GRADUAL INCREASE.

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narrowed or extended by reason of changes occurring in society: but it has always constituted the condition and form of the monarchy. Popular liberty, so to speak, has always maintained a footing in the central power; the nation has never been completely excluded from participation in its own affairs. The progress of Parliament has been the progress of the government itself. In vain was the House of Commons feeble and inactive at its origin: it did exist, and it formed part of the king's council; it was always present to embrace, in some measure, every opportunity of extending its influence, and aggrandising its position and the part it had to perform. In the fourteenth century, its power was very limited, its attributes very restricted, and its intervention in public affairs very infrequent; but it was impossible that it should not daily increase. In effect it did greatly increase from the time of Edward I. to that of Henry VI. During the wars of the Red and White Roses, the great feudal aristocracy destroyed itself by its contentions. When Henry VII. ascended the throne, there no longer existed a body of great barons capable of offering armed resistance to the royal power. The House of Commons, though strengthened, had not yet emerged from its condition of inferiority, and was incapable of taking the place of the great barons in resistance to royalty. Hence the Tudor despotism in the sixteenth century, the only period at which the maxims of absolute power have prevailed in England; but even in that very century, the House of Commons daily penetrated further into the government, until its power was fully revealed by the great Revolution of the seventeenth century.

I have now given you a glimpse of the space between the period of the definitive formation of the British Parliament, and that at which it sought to obtain its entire dominion. In our subsequent lectures we shall examine the principal phases in the development of this great government during those three centuries.

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REIGN OF EDWARD I.

LECTURE XX.

Condition and attributes of the Parliament during the reign of Edward II. (1307-1327).-Empire of favourites.-Struggle of the barons against the favourites.- Aristocratic factions.-Petitions to the king. Forms of deliberations on this subject.-Deposition of Edward II.

In order to explain the manner in which the British Parliament was formed, I have found it necessary, up to this point, to follow history step by step,-to enter into all the details, and to collect all the facts, that might serve as proofs either of its existence, or of its participation in public affairs. I have now another object to attain, and I must therefore pursue another course. The Parliament is now definitively formed; and if I were to continue to narrate all the facts which relate to it, and to keep a register, as it were, of all its acts, I should write the history of the country, and not that of its institutions. What I am seeking to describe, is the development of representative government; and I shall avoid all questions unconnected with this object. The extension which the Parliament received, the revolutions which it underwent, in a word, its personal and internal life, will constitute the subject to which our attention must be directed.

On considering the reign of Edward I. from a political point of view, it is evident that, notwithstanding the agitations by which it was disturbed, there was, during that reign, some wholeness and unity in the exercise of power. Edward was a firm and capable prince, who well knew how to concentrate and direct the various forces of society; in him, the State possessed a centre and a chief. Under Edward II., the English government lost all solidity and unity no intelligent and determined will presided over it;

EMPIRE OF FAVOURITES.

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the nation had no rallying-point; the string of the bundle was broken; all forces and all passions were displayed at hap-hazard, and came into conflict upon the interests of individuals or factions.

In such a state of things, what could the Parliament be? Nothing, or next to nothing, unless it were an instrument of factions. The body of barons was then, and long continued to be, the preponderant portion of the assembly: the Commons, though strong enough sometimes to defend themselves when their own interests were at stake, were not sufficiently powerful to interfere, in a decisive manner, in public affairs, and to become the centre of the government. All matters were, therefore, arranged between the court and the barons, or rather between the different factions into which the body of barons was divided. The Commons appeared in the train of one or other party, to give their alternate triumphs the appearance of a national adhesion, but without ever determining the course of events, or even modifying them in any effectual manner. The supreme power and the country were a prey to the conflicts and schisms of the high aristocracy.

In order clearly to demonstrate that such was the state of institutions and of the central government at this period, it will be sufficient to refer to the three principal events of this reign.

The first is the conflict which the English barons maintained against the king, with regard to a favourite, Piers Gaveston, whom, in spite of his father's advice, Edward II. had persisted in retaining in his confidence. The favourite and his creatures absorbed all the power and advantages of the court; and in 1311, the barons, desiring their share of riches and favours, after having attempted all other means for his overthrow, demanded his dismissal with arms in their hands. Their enterprise was evidently intended neither to promote the interests of the people nor those of the king; it was a revolt of courtiers. They fought, not to assert the inviolability of charters or rights, but to obtain the employments and treasures of a favourite. Nevertheless, they attempted to give a national colour to their rebellion. The plans and measures of the great rebel Parliament held at Oxford during the reign of Henry III. were revived; Lords

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REBELLIONS OF THE BARONS.

Ordainers were appointed to reform the State; they bid for public favour by the abolition of a few abuses; they enacted that the possessors of landed property alone should be appointed sheriffs; they limited the right of purveyance, which was held by the crown; and they prohibited all grants of royal letters-patent ordering the suspension of the regular course of justice. But these were merely outward appearances intended to conceal the selfish egotism of the great barons; their only object was to make themselves masters of the royal authority, of the right of appointing to the chief offices of state, and of the revenues of the crown. They put Gaveston to death, and seized upon the whole power. The representatives of counties and boroughs, who were present in the Parliament by which these designs were executed, gave their consent; but they were mere followers of the rebellion, and had no influence upon the government. The great barons, who came to Parliament in arms and accompanied by their troops, had the entire management of everything in their own hands.

son.

Edward escaped from the tutelage imposed upon him by the coalition of the barons, only to fall under the sway of two new favourites, Hugh le Despencer, or Spencer, and his The elevation of these two courtiers raised up against them a storm similar to that which had overthrown Gaveston. The new rebellion which broke out in 1321 is the second remarkable event of this reign. It was first manifested by a sentence passed against the two Spencers by the great barons of the realm. They passed it by their own authority alone, without the concurrence either of the Commons or of the king, and at the same time compelled the king to grant them an amnesty for themselves and their adherents; shortly afterwards, the civil war began, and the confederated barons were overcome. Edward convoked a Parliament at York, in 1322, at which the Commons attended, and which repealed first the sentence against the two Spencers, and afterwards all the ordinances passed by the Lords Ordainers in 1311 and 1312, as being contrary to the rights of the king, and to the laws and usages of the country. Thus, whether the court or the rebels prevailed, a Parliament always sanctioned their triumph, saving only the ever-ready recourse to civil war, the only true means of decision.

DEPOSITION OF EDWARD II.

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Moreover, it is evident that the riches which were amassed by court favours and the exercise of royal power were a constant subject of jealousy and faction. The petition presented to the king in 1322 by Hugh Spencer the elder against the barons who had condemned him, sets forth that they had devastated sixty-three of his manors or domains in fifteen different counties,-that they had carried off 28,000 sheep, 22,000 head of cattle, two harvests, one from his barns and granaries, and one of standing corn, 600 horses, a great quantity of provisions of all kinds, and complete suits of armour to equip 200 men,-and that they had moreover done damage, in his castles and lands, to the amount of more than 30,000l. sterling. Such was then the wealth of a great English baron; and herein resided an inexhaustible source of rebellions.

A third event, the deposition of Edward II., presents a spectacle of the same character as the two preceding occurrences. This was the result of a new confederation of the barons, at whose head the queen, Isabella, had placed herself. A Parliament, convoked at Westminster, on the 7th of January, 1327, declared the incapacity of the king, then a prisoner in Kenilworth Castle. A deputation, composed of four bishops, two earls, four barons, three deputies from each county, and several burgesses of London, of the Cinque Ports, and of other cities, was sent to acquaint him with the resolution of the Parliament, and formally to renounce the oath of fidelity. This deputation received from Edward II. his abdication in favour of his son Edward III., then fourteen years of age, under whose name the dominant faction expected to wield the supreme power to its own advantage.

Notwithstanding the interference of the Commons in this and the preceding acts, it is clear that the whole affair was managed between aristocratic factions influenced by personal interests, and profiting by the king's incapacity to appropriate to themselves the government and all its advantages. There is nothing to indicate any progress of political institutions and triumph of national liberties. The government of the barons, after such scenes, was even more arbitrary and oppressive than that of the king.

It is, nevertheless, a remarkable fact that, in all these