on to his son a powerful and well-organised monarchy, in which the feeling of national unity had made great advances. His system proved strong enough to support the continued absence of Richard in the Crusades and in his French dominions; national life even acquired increased strength by the self-government which was thus forced on the administration. In the hands of Richard's successor the evil effects of the enormous power concentrated in the crown became obvious. Boastful, tyrannical, and weak, John excited the anger of all classes. The disgrace he brought upon England, the shock thus given to the rising feeling of national pride, afforded an opportunity for the exhibition of the discontent he had roused. He allowed himself to be stripped of all his French possessions; he plunged into a struggle with the Papal See, was excommunicated and deposed, and formally surrendered his crown into the hands of the pope. The nobility, freed from connection with the Continent and supported by all parties smarting alike from the evils of misgovernment and the shame of disaster, appeared as the true leaders of the nation, and wrung from the humbled king that great charter which secured, in the form of a solemn treaty, the foundations of the future liberties of England. To make the charter a reality, and to secure the orderly development of these liberties, was the work of the great king Edward I. John's compact with the people proved insufficient to restrain the personal and capricious exercise of the royal power in the hands of his son, Henry III. The surrender of the crown proved more of a reality than was expected; the Papal See, unable to establish a temporal suzerainty, mercilessly fleeced the people and the church, and the country was filled as of old with foreigners, on whom wealth and high places were lavished. The finances fell into utter decay. At length a demand for money to support, in the interest of Rome, the claims of the king's son to the throne of Sicily brought matters to a crisis, and in 1258 the barons passed the Provisions of Oxford, drove Henry's foreign friends from the kingdom, and virtually superseded the crown by a committee of government. Henry's attempts to break from the restrictions laid on him produced an armed insurrection, and Simon de Montfort, at the head of the barons and the commonalty of the towns, defeating the royal forces at Lewes, established a revolutionary government of which he was practically the master. But the jealousy with which the nobility regarded the rise of Montfort allowed Edward the Prince of Wales to come forward as the leader of a party at once conservative and reforming. His accession to the throne gave him an opportunity of carrying out his views. In the parliament of 1295, a complete assembly of all estates, he gathered into a national centre all the scattered elements of representation and self-government which had long existed in the county courts. The principle that where all were concerned all should have a voice was acknowledged, and the national liberties were placed in the charge of an assembly in which all orders were included. At the same time the position of the crown was maintained and rendered effective by the large powers still left in the hands of the king's council. For many years the struggle between parliament and prerogative remained undecided; but armed with the power of taxation, and taking advantage of the wants or weaknesses of the Sovereign, the parliament continued to make good its position as the national council. At the close of Edward III.'s reign it was able to attack and impeach the ministry. The success of Richard II. in ridding himself of the influence of his uncles by | which his youth had been surrounded, and his vehement assertion of the powers of the crown, produced a revolution which closed the struggle, and Henry IV. came to the throne with a parliamentary title, while the council nominated in parliament became in fact a body of national ministers. The rise of parliament had gone hand in hand with the assertion of national life. Edward I. had not only marked out the lines the constitution was to follow, he had rid England of foreign influences. Busying himself but little with the Continent, he had devoted his attention to the conquest of Wales and Scotland. His death before the completion of his conquest of the northern kingdom allowed the Scots to inflict a final defeat upon his weaker son at Bannockburn. But the national feeling of the English, in abeyance during the political disturbances of Edward II.'s reign, reasserted itself in the ambitious efforts of Edward III. to place himself upon the throne of France, and was strengthened by the brilliant victories which attended them. Though the victories were useless, and the war a series of raids rather than a well-considered conquest, the effects at home were of great importance. The continual want of money forced the crown to frequent concessions to the parliament; the spirit of the people was raised by success; and the life of the soldier played an important part in liberating the lower orders from serfdom. The villeinage of earlier times had been gradually declining, and rent and wages were taking the place of villein tenure and forced service. The terrible ravages of the Black Death upset for a while the economic arrangements of the country, and the attempt to drive back the liberated serf to his old position caused the great rising of Wat Tyler in 1381. The insurrection was suppressed, but a death-blow was practically dealt to serfdom. In close connection with this upheaval of the working-classes was the movement in opposition to the church. The doctrines of Wyclif and the Lollards, so much in harmony with the democratic movement, could not fail largely to influence it, and for a while hostility to the church played a considerable part in parliamentary history. The completion of the constitutional system marked by the accession of Henry IV. did not prevent the recurrence of disorder, but during the reign of his son full harmony existed between the king and people. The disturbances which had broken out in France afforded an opportunity for renewing the war, and Henry V. found no difficulty in carrying the people with him in his victorious attacks upon that country. A statesman as well as a conqueror, his progress was very different from that of Edward III. The Treaty of Troyes seemed to promise the ultimate union of the two kingdoms, but the work of consolidation was scarcely begun when the great king died, intimating to those who should carry on the work that the occupation of Normandy should be the limit of their aims. The foreign success and domestic harmony was of short duration. Though the power of the nobles as feudalists had disappeared, they were still too strong to accept easily the co-operation of the other orders in a national system except from the hands of a powerful ruler. Their strength had been increased by the great position given to the royal princes. The parlia mentary establishment of the younger branch upon the throne had opened the door to the rival claims of hereditary succession. A strong government was scarcely possible during the infancy of Henry VI., especially as the council of regency found in the Duke of Gloucester, a man of ill-regulated ambition, an opponent with whom it was difficult to deal. His greater brother, the Duke of Bedford, devoted himself chiefly to the affairs of France, and though he had succeeded in maintaining some degree of order in England, his early death was the signal for an outbreak with which the council and subsequently the young king proved unable to cope. Continual disaster in France still further discredited the government. Taking advantage of the claim of hereditary right, the Duke of York came forward as the champion of order. The nobility ranged themselves on one side or the other of the contending parties, and the country became the seat of a cruel dynastic war. The Yorkists were victorious in the struggle. The death of their old and moderate leader placed at their head his son Edward, a man of great ability imbued with the morality and principles of an Italian despot, and as the long regency had inevitably replaced in the hands of the council much of its independent power, Edward IV. found little difficulty in employing it for his own purposes. Parliament ceased to have much importance except to register the sovereign's will or to grant submissively the taxes he required. In the earlier struggles for national liberty the king had found his chief opponent in the baronage, and subsequently as leaders of the nation the nobles had exercised a great restraining influence. But in the internecine struggle of the Wars of the Roses they had committed political suicide, and Edward IV., surrounded by a nobility of his own creation, and armed with the powers of prerogative, which had never been formally abrogated, found himself able to establish a practical absolutism. The family dispute had not, however, reached its last act; Edward's successor, Richard III., rendered himself odious to all classes of the people, and the battle of Bosworth placed upon the throne a prince who claimed to be a representative of the Lancastrian House, and whose position was so far less absolute than his predecessors that he acknowledged that he was king by the will of the people. face with the one weak point in his position as absolute monarch. The possibility of the assertion of paramount authority by a foreign prince had been studiously hidden from him by his ecclesiastical minister Cardinal Wolsey, who, himself master of the church, had thought to avoid all contest of authorities by devoting his power to the service of the crown. Such a possibility was now suddenly revealed to him. The fall of Wolsey and the substitution in his place of Thomas Cromwell supplied the king with a very able instrument for a high-handed assertion of the independence of the English Church. The movement found support in the excited animosity to the doctrines and practice of Rome which was filling Europe. Led by the energy of Cromwell, Henry proceeded beyond mere separation to the destruction of much of the apparatus of the old church. Reformed liturgies, an English Bible, the dissolution of the monasteries, seemed to secure a triumph for the advanced reformers. But the minister had overshot the desire of his master, and the reign closed amid Henry's efforts by even-handed severity to establish the supremacy of the crown without allowing the ' predominance of either party. So delicate an equilibrium could not be maintained. A burst of reforming zeal, supported by ministers of questionable character and still more questionable prudence, went far to destroy the position of England; and it was not without a very general consensus in her favour that Mary, the champion of the old faith, ascended the throne. Unfortunately, her birth and natural prejudices led her to ally herself closely with Spain. A great reaction in favour of Roman Catholicism throughout Europe had begun; Spain was at the head of the movement, and there seemed every probability that England would lose its national independence and be bound not only to the ecclesiastical supremacy of Rome, but to the temporal The accession of Henry VII. and the Tudor House supremacy of Spain. Religious persecutions of a opens the second act of the drama of English history, severity unknown in England added strength to the The great principles of the middle ages had passed angry feelings then excited. Protestantism and away; it was the age of the rebirth of learning; print- national independence were forced into connection, ing had been invented; firearms were superseding and it became the inevitable duty of Elizabeth on the lance and bow; the discovery of the western her accession to play her part as the supporter of world was soon to excite the spirit of nautical this twofold cause. With the aid of her great enterprise; capital was taking the place of the minister Lord Burghley, she acted with consumrestricted guild system; the inclosure of commons mate ability. Far too weak to oppose at once the was changing the face of the country, depopulating powerful forces of united Catholicism, she contrived the fields and filling the cities; the church had by a temporising policy to avoid the dangers which begun to be shaken from its foundations. In the would have attended an open defiance. She took midst of this changed society the new dynasty had advantage abroad of every opening for indirect ascended the throne, claiming to rest upon the support of the Protestant cause; at home, skilfully popular will, but invested with all the absolute mingling politics and religion, without direct religiauthority with which the late reigns had surrounded ous persecution she treated her opponents as traitors. the crown. It is not perhaps going too far to say She encouraged with all her woman's wit the feelthat the king was endowed with a temporary dicta-ing for nautical enterprise which was rife in the torship. The typical representative of this phase country; and at length, with the obstacles which of government is Henry VIII., a man in whom had met her early course removed, firmly seated on gross passion and unscrupulous determination to her throne, and regarded both at home and abroad gratify his own will were curiously blended with a as the champion of Protestantism, she was able to certain amount of culture and a real desire for the bid defiance to the power of Spain and establish the well-being of his people. Charged as it were with supremacy of the English navy in the repulse of the the duty of re-establishing an orderly national life Spanish Armada. upon a strong monarchical basis, he plunged into war as a ready means of asserting national power. France and Spain were already on the threshold of their great struggle for the supremacy of Europe, and it was in strict accordance with the tradition of English policy that Henry allied himself with the Spanish house. But a change was speedily to pass over the foreign relations of England. Instigated by his passion for Anne Boleyn, Henry de manded a divorce from his Spanish wife; the opposition of the papacy precipitated the Reformation in England, and transferred the national hostility from France to Spain. The difficulties he encountered in his pursuit of the divorce brought him face to In carrying out the sweeping changes of his reign, Henry VIII. had found the support of his people necessary. Even the settlement of the succession, though intrusted to Henry and carried out according to his wish, was arranged with parliamentary sanction. The co-operation of the people was still more necessary for Elizabeth. Throughout her reign the influence of parliament had been rising. Social changes had still further tended in this direction; if the old nobility had chiefly disappeared, a new nobility had taken its place, and the gentlemen of England, with property often increased from the monastic spoils, had become an important class. Though Elizabeth constantly assumed a masterful position with regard to her parliaments, she none the less listened to them and at times yielded to their remonstrances. It remained for the House of Stuart to force by unwise opposition this rising power into a position of supremacy. The death of the Virgin Queen seemed likely to open the question of the succession, but the crown passed without difficulty to the Scottish king, and the long-delayed union of the two kingdoms under one ruler was accomplished. The parliamentary settlement of Henry VIII. had set aside the Scottish line; it was therefore by strict law of inheritance only that James found himself called to the throne. Trained in a different school of politics, and apparently succeeding by what it was the fashion of the time to speak of as 'divine right,' he failed entirely to understand the position of his predecessors. This miscomprehension of his historical position handed on to his descendants was the cause of the disasters which attended their dynasty. Conceiving themselves possessed of the powers inherent in the old English crown, and determined to make them good, they forced the nation to fight over again the battle which had already been decided in the time of the Lancastrians. The contest between personal monarchy and constitutional government was terminated only by the removal of the Stuarts from the throne. A battlefield was found in nearly every department of government. James I. himself ran counter to many of the national prejudices. Thoroughly Protestant at heart, he favoured the new High Church party, who looked for support in a powerful crown; easily influenced by favourites, he fell in with the fashion of the monarchies abroad, and ruled through the hands of a great minister; in disregard of the wishes of the nation, he contracted a friendship for Spain, which was now regarded as the hereditary foe. But his weaknesses were not untempered by sagacity, and he succeeded in avoiding any overt breach with his people. His more obstinate son was less fortunate. From the beginning of his reign he found his parliament arrayed against him; it succeeded even in wringing from him the great Petition of Right. Weary of the struggle in which he seemed to be worsted, he believed himself strong enough to stand alone, and for some years ruled without a parliament and in disregard of the most important liberties of his subjects. Financial difficulties, caused in part by his ill-advised efforts to establish the Episcopalian form of worship in his northern kingdom, compelled him at length to seek parliamentary aid. The long-repressed discontent of the nation thus found a means of expression, and the edifice of personal government fell before it. A grudging consent to hotly pressed reforms, an unfortunate laxity in observing his promises, and unwise efforts at resuming his power drove Charles into open hostility with the people, and the country was plunged into the horrors of civil war. Revolution ran its inevitable course; the constitutional leaders of the early movement gave place to men who dreamed of much more radical changes, and whose politics were deeply tinged with religious fervour. The war brought to the surface successful generals, and in one of them was found a man who united vast practical ability with the subversive views and religious enthusiasm of the advanced party. The parliamentary enemies of Charles, having completed their work by the execution of the king, found themselves mastered by the overwhelming ability of Oliver Cromwell. Raised to what was practically the throne, he set himself to reconstitute upon a new basis the constitutional structure which had been swept away. His large and tolerant views, and his determination to produce order, excited the hostility of the narrow sectarians who He had formed the majority of the Long Parliament. By all men of conservative mind, or who shared in the loyal sentiment so prevalent among Englishmen, he was regarded with aversion. His efforts to bring well-ordered liberty out of the jarring elements with which he was surrounded failed; he was forced throughout his tenure of power to rely upon his own iron will. He succeeded in raising England to a high place among nations; it again assumed the position of leader of the Protestant interest, and again sought its allies among the enemies of Spain. But on the death of the great Protector, and at the prospect of a succession of military tyrannies, a wave of reaction swept over the country. Enthusiasm had died out, and that majority which at all times loves the old ways and prefers the easy paths of habit to the strenuous effort necessary to complete reforms insisted on the restoration of the banished house. With general acclamation, though not without some attempts to restrain his power within legitimate limits, Charles II. was brought back to Whitehall. Less arbitrary than his father, and far more capable of bending to the storm, he proved no less determined to maintain in his own way the fullness of the power he had inherited, had to contend with much more formidable opponents. Though the full restoration of the church and crown had followed upon his accession, the Rebellion had not been without permanent results. It was impossible that the parliament which had for years been regarded as the source of government should sink back into the position it had occupied in the reign of Charles I.; the king could no longer hope to rule without it or to raise the revenue from illegitimate sources. The reign was one long dispute. The character of Charles, licentious, extravagant, and ready to waste the national resources upon his own pleasures, afforded ample ground of complaint. Surrounded by advisers as unscrupulous as himself, he sold himself to the French king to supply his financial wants. At the instigation of his paymaster, he plunged the country into a disastrous war with its Protestant neighbour Holland, and by his mismanagement allowed the enemy's fleet to ride undisturbed at the very threshold of the capital. He tampered with the national credit, and attempted by an exercise of high prerogative to set aside the laws against the Catholics. The enthusiastic parliament elected upon his return became before the close of its long life his bitter opponent. The assaults of the opposition, Whigs as they were now called, were directed against the Duke of York, the king's Roman Catholic brother. Nothing would satisfy them but his absolute exclusion from the throne. To bring discredit upon the Catholics they were not ashamed to lend themselves to the infamous perjuries of Titus Oates. They thought of placing the king's illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, upon the throne; but their insolence defeated itself. Charles, never deficient in political insight, understood the national love for the rights of legitimacy, the dread of a disputed succession, and the sympathy with which his efforts to support his brother were regarded. He dissolved his refractory parliament, and even thought of vengeance. He drove Shaftesbury, the leader of the opposition, from the country, and assaulted the strongholds of his enemies by finding excuses to confiscate the charters of London and other great cities. The Whigs, who saw that such a step by changing the constituencies might easily change the character of future parliaments, were driven to despair. The more statesmanlike among them began to think of seeking for the assistance of the king's nephew, the Prince of Orange. Some of the wilder spirits sought for a speedier remedy in assassination. The discovery |