monial religion and insisting on uniformity. His rigour was not the right kind of rigour to satisfy the Calvinists; in fact, part of his offence in their eyes was that he promoted too much freedom, as when, at the beginning of his archiepiscopal rule, he encouraged the king to reissue his father's Book of Sports, and ordered the clergy to read openly throughout the land the permission of Sunday amusements.

Sharp divisions now reigned in things political and religious, and theory was pitted against theory. Puritanism was undoubtedly anxious to purify the moral atmosphere, but was strangely vehement about things indifferent. Prynne lost his ears for intemperate zeal; but it was the revolt of Scotland against episcopacy that brought on the real crisis. The attempts of Charles to govern without a parliament, and the levying of ship-money, however he may have thought himself within his rights and been countenanced at first by his judges, exasperated public feeling and created sympathy and alliance with the Presbyterian Scots. At length when the Long Parliament met, it began a course of injustice by the attainder of Strafford, which the king, fearing for his consort's safety, felt too weak to oppose; and by giving his assent to the bill he sent his most devoted servant to the block. No wonder the commons grew bolder, and the king's unhappy attempt to arrest the five members made them all the more so. Their demand for the control of the militia naturally brought on the civil war, which was simply bound to end in the way it did, notwithstanding the devotion and self-denial of many fervid royalists.

In the very midst of this struggle the celebrated Assembly of Divines sat at Westminster and framed a constitution for a Presbyterian church; which parliament, having adopted, made a political and religious alliance with the Scots by the Solemn League and Covenant. But a new religious system to be forced on the nation by a house of commons with an army at its command could hardly have higher spiritual credentials than episcopacy and royal supremacy. A national church with an old historic foundation had, in fact, better claims in the way of authority, and the ideal of freedom at which Puritanism aimed found more ardent followers in the growing sect of Independents. Parliament, however, soon found that instead of having the army at its command, it was itself in the power of the army. Indeed, it was just after the Scots had surrendered the king to the parliamentary commissioners because he would not establish Presbyterianism in the place of Episcopacy, that the deputies of the two houses went to Hounslow Heath to seek the protection of the army and put themselves under a bondage that they were never to be able to shake off.

There is no divine right so incontestable as the divine right of force, and when a kingdom gets into complete disorder that is the final arbiter. After the execution of the king there was nothing but organised force to save the country from destruction. And Cromwell did much more than save her. He restored peace and prosperity within her borders, and with the aid of Admiral Blake won for England a supremacy at sea, which gave her a foremost position among all the powers of Europe. He even laid the foundations of a great empire. Yet with how much effort did he strive to maintain himself in a position which was really unsound from the very first. He had to hammer three kingdoms into a kind of necessary unity, and would fain have brought back as far as could be the old traditions of the constitution. But the task was beyond his power. The hammering, indeed, was very efficacious. In England, and even in Scotland, a sense of political and religious order made itself felt. In unhappy Ireland, subdued by merciless

Puritanical force, there was only submission under a sense of deeper and more cruel wrongs than she had suffered before. A religious despot is the cruelest kind of tyrant; for, unhappily, no man's religion is accompanied by perfect clearness of view, and zeal only makes error worse. This in truth was the case with Charles I, though it is absurd to call him a tyrant who was continually coerced by others. His principles of government were mistaken, but he did far more mischief by yielding against his principles than by anything he did to carry them out. Cromwell was a religious despot, too, but of a very different type, and while strongly governed by the feeling that he was accountable only to God in his highest acts, his resolutions were always based on practical considerations. Hence, though raised to power by what was quite as much a religious as a political revolution, he in practice broke through the exclusiveness and intolerance to which the saints of his party would have bound him. Himself an Independent, he would not allow Presbyterianism to have its way in all things; he would tolerate even Jews, Anabaptists, and Quakers. The only religions proscribed were Roman Catholicism and the Church of England. But the change was serious enough, when even the observance of Christmas Day was forcibly put down, and when marriage itself was made a civil ceremony which it was illegal to grace with any religious office.

The nation was soon tired of the severities of Puritanism, and even the political system depended for its maintenance too much upon one man. Within two years of Cromwell's death the commonwealth collapsed. The army under Monk resuscitated for a brief time the remains of the Long Parliament, restored Charles II, and disbanded itself "without one bloody nose, as Baxter observed at the time. The king and the Church of England came by their own again. But the English monarchy was no longer what it had been, nor the church either. The church, indeed, purified by trial and no longer made oppressive by objectionable tribunals, was in some sense stronger than before; but it had ceased to be a religion to which all must conform. After one great effort at comprehension it was obliged to let seceders go their ways. As for monarchy, it was impossible that it could rest secure after such convulsions as the country had passed through. But the new king's experience had taught him to understand men thoroughly, and he knew how to keep his seat. His father's fate was a warning against being too much in earnest, and no king was more cautious to avoid the least appearance of personal interference in affairs of state. Inglorious as his reign was and profligate as was his life, we cannot wonder at such results from the lessons of the past.

His brother, James II, took a more serious view of things, and by his extraordinary indiscretions played into the hands of enemies who had long caballed against him. A new revolution was only the natural consequence. Its strength, of course, lay in opposition to a king who not only was an avowed convert to Rome, but who seemed utterly heedless of the danger of straining the prerogative as his father had done before him.

NEVER was king so thoroughly disciplined by adversity before he came to the throne as was King Henry VII. Without a father even from his birth, driven abroad in his childhood owing to the attainder of his family, more than once nearly delivered up to his enemies, and owing life and liberty to his own and his friends' astuteness, his ultimate conquest of the crown was scarcely so much a triumph of ambition as the achievement of personal safety. He might, indeed, for anything we know to the contrary, have remained an exile and a refugee to the end of his days, had not the tyranny of Richard III drawn towards him the sympathies of Englishmen in a way they were not drawn towards him during Edward's reign.-JAMES GAIRDNER.b

"WE are apt to look on Henry VII as the founder of a dynasty, and on his reign as marking the beginning of a new era," says Freeman. "Both views are true; but they must not be allowed to put out of sight the fact that, till quite the end of his reign, his throne was as insecure as that of any of his predecessors. The civil wars were not yet ended; in foreign lands Henry was looked on as a mere adventurer, who had won the crown by the chances of one battle, and who was likely to lose what he had won by the chances of another. Hence he was, like Edward IV in the same case, specially anxious to establish his position among foreign princes. To obtain, as he did at last, an infanta for his son, even to give his daughter to the king of Scots, were in his view important objects of policy. But those objects were not attained till after he had strengthened his position at home by successfully withstanding more than one enemy."c

The long quarrel between the two houses of York and Lancaster had deluged England with blood; by a fortunate concurrence of circumstances, it was given

[1485 A.D.] to Henry of Richmond, an exile and an adventurer, without means and without title, to unite the interests of the "two roses," and to bequeath to posterity the benefit of an undisputed succession. From the field of Bosworth he proceeded to Leicester. Victory had placed the crown on his temples, and the absence of a rival secured to him the present possession of the sovereignty. But a perplexing question occurred: on what title was he to ground his claim? On that of hereditary descent? The right of hereditary descent, even supposing it to be in the family of Lancaster, and not of York, could not be propagated through an illegitimate branch, which to prevent dispute had been originally cut off from the succession by an act of parliament. Should he then depend on his stipulated marriage with the princess Elizabeth? But his pride disdained to owe the sceptre to a wife, the representative of a rival and hated family. That would be to justify the dethronement of Henry VI, to acknowledge himself a king only by courtesy, and to exclude his issue by any succeeding marriage from all claim to the throne. There remained the right of conquest; but, though he might appeal to his late victory as an argument that Heaven approved of his pretensions, he dared not mention the name of conquest, or he would have united his friends with his foes in a common league against him, [because it was taught that a conqueror might dispossess all men of their lands, since they held them of a prince that had been conquered.] The question became the subject of long and anxious deliberation; and it was at last resolved to follow a line of proceeding which, while it settled the crown on the king and his heirs general, should not bring either his right, or that of the princess, into discussion.

The reader has seen that Richard before his fall had named his nephew, John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, to be his successor. Him and his pretensions Henry treated with contempt; but there was another prince, Edward Plantagenet, son of the late duke of Clarence, whom he viewed with peculiar jealousy. Even Richard, when his own son was dead, had at first assigned to him the honours of the heir-apparent; but afterwards, fearing that he might become a dangerous competitor, had confined him in the castle of Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire. The first act of the new king at Leicester was to transfer the young prince, who had only reached his fifteenth year, from his prison in the north to a place of greater security, the Tower. The public commiserated the lot of the innocent victim, who thus, to satisfy the ambition of others, was condemned to perpetual imprisonment from his childhood; and the spot chosen for his confinement, a spot so lately stained with the blood of princes, was considered an omen of his subsequent destiny. The princess Elizabeth had been his fellow captive at Sheriff Hutton. Richard had sent her there as soon as he heard of the invasion; Henry ordered her to be conducted by several noblemen to the house of her mother in London.

The fall of the usurper excited little regret. No man could pity his death who had pitied the fate of his unoffending nephews. When the conqueror entered the capital, August 28th, 1485, he was received with unequivocal demon

[Many historians have denied the legitimacy of Henry's succession. His grandfather, the Welshman Owen Tudor, had married Catharine, the widow of Henry V. This gave the descendants no royal claim, but Owen's son Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, married a descendant of John of Gaunt by his third wife Catharine Swynford. It was said that Richard II legitimised this irregular union only on condition that the issue should make no pretensions to the succession, and in proof a printed patent was shown. But it is now known that the original document in the Rolls of Parliament has no such limitation, and while a duplicate among the Patent Rolls shows it, it is plainly the interpolation of a later hand-probably of the time of Henry IV, who objected to the legitimisation of his half-brothers. Von Ranke, d adducing these facts, believes Henry VII's claims fully legal.]

[1485 A.D.]

strations of joy. As he passed through the streets the crowd obstructed his way, that they might behold and greet the deliverer of his country.1 Before him were borne the ensigns of his triumph, the three standards which had led his small army to victory, and these he devoutly offered on the high altar of St. Paul's. But his coronation was delayed, and the joy of the public was damped, by the sudden spread of a disease which acquired from its predominant symptoms the appellation of the sweating sickness. It generally extinguished life within the course of twenty-four hours; and some idea may be formed of its ravages, when it is known that within eight days it proved fatal to two successive lord mayors and six of the aldermen of London. At the end of the month, whether it were owing to the greater experience of the physicians, or the coldness of the season, its violence began to abate, and on October 30th the new king received the rite of coronation from the hands of the cardinal archbishop of Canterbury.

On that occasion twelve knights bannerets were created, and the king's uncle, the earl of Pembroke, was raised to the dignity of duke of Bedford, the lord Stanley to that of earl of Derby, and Sir Edward Courtenay to that of earl of Devon. At the same time he appointed a body of select archers, amounting to fifty men, to attend on him, under the appellation of "yeomen of the guard." The institution excited surprise; but Henry justified it on the ground that by foreign princes a guard was considered a necessary appendage to the regal dignity.h

THE KING AND PARLIAMENT

As a new historical era had commenced with the new dynasty, it will be sufficient in this place to point out the principal circumstances in the polity of England at the accession of Henry VII.

The essential checks upon the royal authority were five in number: 1. The king could levy no sort of new tax on his people, except by the grant of his parliament, consisting as well of bishops and mitred abbots or lords spiritual, and of hereditary peers or temporal lords, who sat and voted promiscuously in the same chamber, as of representatives from the freeholders of each county, and from the burgesses of many towns and less considerable places, forming the lower or commons' house. 2. The previous assent and authority of the same assembly was necessary for every new law, whether of a general or temporary nature. 3. No man could be committed to prison but by a legal warrant specifying his offence; and by an usage nearly tantamount to constitutional right, he must be speedily brought to trial, by means of regular sessions of jail delivery. 4. The fact of guilt or innocence on a criminal charge was determined in a public court, and in the county where the offence was alleged to have occurred, by a jury of twelve men, from whose unanimous verdict no appeal could be made. Civil rights, so far as they depended on matters of fact, were subject to the same decision. 5. The officers and servants of the crown, violating the personal liberty or other right of the subject, might be sued in an action for damages, to be assessed by a jury, or, in some cases, were liable to a criminal process; nor could they plead any warrant or command in their justification, not even the direct order of the king.

['Gairdner has pointed out a curious error in all the histories. They state that Richard entered London "in a close carriage." The error was due to Speed, who, misreading the words of André f-lætanter (joyfully) as latenter (secretly)-hazarded the guess "belike in a horse litter or close chariot," a guess soberly accepted by Bacon and accepted since without question.]