of the kingdom during the king's absence; and, at those times, writs ran in his name and were tested by him.' In this light the chief justiciary is regarded as having been the greatest subject in England. One of the most distinguished of those who held this high office was Ranulph de Glanville, who is usually regarded as the author of the "Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliæ,” the oldest book extant on English law. The last who held the office and bore the title of capitalis justitiarius Anglic was Philip Basset, the third of his family who held that high office-a family of which there were at one time six barons in England; and the first who held the office of capitalis justiciarius ad placita coram rege tenenda, i. e. chief justice of the King's Bench, was Robert de Bruis, appointed in the fifty-second year of Henry III.3 Sir Edward Coke was fond of indulging his vanity by bestowing the same title, "chief justice of England," upon himself whom a court insect such as Buckingham, the minion of James I., could crush; and on the grand justiciary, the capitalis justitiarius Anglia, the principal representative of the high functionary who had been at once chief administrator, supreme judge, and leader of the armies of England and Normandy. This proceeding on the part of Coke was noticed by Lord Chancellor Ellesmere in his address to Sir Henry Montague, Coke's successor, upon his being sworn chief justice, in these words:" Instead of containing himself within the words. of the writ to be the chief justice, as the king called him 'ad placita coram nobis tenenda.'

1 Madox, Hist. of the Exchequer,

p. 17.

2 Madox, p. 35. Beames's Glanville, Introd. p. 12. The two offices of Chief Justiciary and Dapifer seem to

have been sometimes filled by the same person; Ranulph de Glanville seems to have been at the same time Chief Justiciary and Dapifer.

3 Dugd. Orig. 38.

I will here add an observation which will make.apparent the vast power anciently attached to this high office of seneschal, dapifer, or steward. To two of the most illustrious royal lines of modern Europe, the Carlovingians and Plantagenets, it served as a stepping-stone to the throne. It was for fear of its again doing the same thing to the house of Montfort, earls of Leicester, that the office was first taken into the royal family, and afterwards abolished in England. The very name of the House of Stuart came from their holding the office of steward of Scotland.

The English nobility of that time (as distinguished from the class called gentry), though, as we have seen, thus new and thus humble in their origin, to use no stronger word, had displayed, instead of humility, all the insolence of a conquering caste in their demeanour towards their fellow-subjects. Many examples might be given of this insolence; but one which rests on unimpeachable authority will be sufficient. 1 One day, in March, 1603, Sir Herbert Croft, and some other members of the House of Commons, offering to enter the House of Lords, a yeoman of His Majesty's guard, keeping one of the doors of the Upper House, repulsed them, and shut the door in their faces with these words, "Goodman burgess, you come not here. "2 The demeanour of the doorkeeper may be assumed to be a measure by no means inaccurate of the estimate formed by those within the Upper House of the power and dignity of those without it. But between March, 1603, and February, 1648, a change had come over the scene. "Goodman Burgess" had shown by unmistakeable signs that he could do now what the "Upper House" could do

1 It is necessary to bear in mind that before September, 1752, the legal year began on the 25th of March, and that according to that reckoning James succeeded to the throne of England on the

last day of the year 1602, namely, the 24th of March. In this history I will write all the dates between Jan. 1st and Mar. 25th thus-24th Mar. 1603.

2 Com. Jour. Lunæ, Martii 19, 1608.

no longer; that he could do those deeds of which a great authority has truly said that they "are great things, for empires lie beyond them."

The men who did these things proved incontestably that they possessed talent for efficient action of the highest kind; but they unfortunately did not show that they possessed a still more rare and valuable quality of statesmanship. They proved themselves so far sure-footed, but they did not prove themselves far-sighted statesmen. They had effectually shown that they knew how to destroy at a time when the work of destruction seemed the work imperatively demanded. But construction must follow destruction, and in their work of construction they committed errors leading to some most fatal consequences.

A

On the 1st of February, 1648, the House of Lords met, and it was moved to take into consideration the settlement of the Government of England and Ireland in the present conjunction of affairs on the king's death. committee of nine Lords was appointed to join with a proportionate number of Commons, and a message to that effect was sent to the Commons' House. On the following day the messenger sent by the Lords the day before to the Commons acquainted their lordships that they went to that House and waited long, but were not admitted. The Lords thereupon ordered that they should go again, and desire that the committee of both Houses might meet the next morning, at the same hour as before appointed. On the 3rd of February, the Lords being informed that their messengers to the House of Commons were not yet admitted, expressed not the least resentment, but ordered them to go again that day, being Saturday, and desire that the Committee for settling the Government might meet on the Monday next. But on Monday the Lords still found there was no admittance either for their mes

sengers or their message: whereupon, it was once more ordered to send another message for a meeting next morning; only the messengers were changed.1

During this time, in the Commons' House there had been a long and sharp debate on the subject of the Lords' House. The words used by Whitelock,-who was present and took a prominent part in the debate" the debate was long and smart concerning the Lords' House," and, "after a long and quick debate," they passed the vote for abolishing the office of king,2-show that there were several Members of the House of Commons of sufficient weight to command a hearing who were opposed to the design of sweeping away what had always been considered as essential parts of the English Constitution. Yet the majority, more impressed with the result of their own personal experience than with those of records, or histories, or law-books, had come to the settled conclusion that the House of Peers was "useless and dangerous," and that "the office of a king in this nation was unnecessary, burthensome, and dangerous," and they voted accordingly the abolition of the House of Peers and of the office of king.3

Before we pronounce judgment on the judgment these men pronounced on these two parts of the old English Constitution, we ought to take into consideration the experience they had had of them. Lawyers like Coke and Selden, who were familiar with the records of the past, could remember how much, in the times of the Plantagenets, the great barons had done, in securing their own independence, for the security of the independence of all English freemen; and, even without entering into the arguments philosophers might advance, founded on the corrupting

1 Parl. Hist. vol. iii. pp. 1282, 1283, 1284.

2 Whitelock's Memorials, p. 377. Folio. London, 1732.

3 Whitelock's Memorials, ibid. Commons' Journals, Die Mart., 7 Feb., 1648. Parl. Hist., vol. iii. p. 1292.

influence of undivided power, would be apt to vote against the abolition of such an order as had once consisted of those brave and energetic men. But men who looked more to the present than to the past, and whose experience of royalty and nobility was such as theirs, saw no good and much evil in a king such as James or Charles Stuart; and saw, if no danger, at least no use in a House of Lords, which contained neither great statesmen, great soldiers, nor great lawyers. For it is impossible to obtain any approximation to an adequate conception of the thoughts and feelings by which those men were actuated without bearing in mind that those years of the lives of all of them in which the faculties of observation and reflection are most active were the years, or a part of them, during which the Stuarts had occupied the throne of England; that during a portion of those years they had seen sitting in the seat of their ancient kings a king who had carried his vices, his misgovernment, and his baseness to such an extent that the ambassadors of foreign powers resident in England repeatedly expressed their astonishment that the English nation submitted to such oppression and disgrace, and did not rise in insurrection and depose their king and hang his favourites, as the English barons had done in the case of Edward II., and Archibald Bell-the-cat in the case of James III. of Scotland,―calling it cowardice in the English people, and some of them even going so far as to say that there were "no men in England: that, when this king died, his son who succeeded him, instead of treating his father's favourite as Edward III. had treated the minions of Edward II., actually made him his own favourite, and gave up to him the government of England at

1 The Count de Gondemar, the Spanish Ambassador, who used this expression, and to whose hostility Raleigh was sacrificed by the base cur which

then sat on the English throne, probably thought that the last man in England perished with Raleigh.