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provided, and his good name dimmed. Some remedy must be had for such a state of things; for he must not only retrieve his position as sovereign, but prosecute with renewed energy his foreign projects. His mind evidently hit upon the only possible course to pursue. The barons were as poor as himself; the lower estate must be courted. Then came unusual concessions, the royal consent to greater liberty, and a dignified stand made by the Commons. It was a mutual bargain, to which the King was reduced by his necessities, and into which the Commons entered to increase their voice in the State. The King wanted men and money; the Commons granted them. The Commons demanded conditions; the King yielded to them.

Afterwards, in the same reign, the Commons showed their spirit by joining the Peers for the purpose of restraining the height to which royal power was attaining. They insisted on a reaffirmation of the Magna Charta by the King and his whole household. They demanded that peers should be tried by their own order for public offences. They even required that the King should only appoint ministers duly approved by the council and the barons. Then, having received the royal assent to these presumptuous measures, they granted him large supplies. But as yet the young strength of the Commons was not well seasoned for a long strain, and the association with the barons could not be cordial enough to continue; so when the wily Edward had secured the supplies, he protested against the late law, declared it not binding, and, trusting to the divisions of his Parliament, coolly disregarded every item of the

treaty. After two years of tacit acquiescence, Parliament, at his request, repealed the law.

Although Leicester may be justly called the founder of the House of Commons, it was in the reign of Edward the Third that it approached to system and regular action. His warlike enterprise and unceasing activity in every department of State affairs compelled him to seek unusual supplies and unusual support. These were only to be gained by persuasive and reciprocal methods; they were not to be forced. He was therefore absolutely driven to grant popular liberties, to court popular leaders, to further popular justice. Perhaps he would have been even more willing than he was to take that course, had he foreseen that this infant power was in time to become a Hercules standing before the throne to save it. Such was the authority which the Commons obtained under him, that ministers of the Crown were impeached, his mistress was banished by their order, and they made efforts, attended with some success, toward regulating the elections to their chamber.

The death of Edward the Third, and the succession of a mere child, gave the new estate an apt occasion for exerting their recently-conceded authority; and they were not slow to seize it. That they exercised it with temper and caution indicates that they were fortunate in the leadership of wise men. At so critical a moment, the advantage of moderation was incalculable.

For the first time, they were left free to choose a Speaker; and their choice of De la Mare, a bold and outspoken, no less than sagacious and incorruptible man, displayed their intention to assert a power, yet to assert it without arrogance. Having taken this

step, they refrained from a participation in the choice of the regency, and, by a petition to the Peers, gave into their hands the undisturbed discretion of settling the government and instituting guardianship over the King's person. But, the regency once established, the Commons took another step forward. They remonstrated against the treasonable combinations of the barons for the purpose of using illegal powers. They urged that the officers of State should be named by Parliament during the minority, in which they should have a voice.

Upon their dissolution, they declared the necessity of their being summoned annually, and appointed two treasurers of the fund they had voted for the King's use. Subsequent Parliaments displayed an equally worthy spirit of independence, and more and more, as the years went by, added to their influence as a power in the State.

Of course, during this process of growing popular authority, the usual disorders which attend the transitions of nations from less to greater freedom became prevalent. Hence we read of riots and seditious orators, rude philosophers proclaiming the equality of man, arrant demagogues inciting the vulgar to overthrow the monarchy, foolish resistance to stringent laws, robberies, murders, and arsons. These are, at

least, evidences that the lower classes began to consider themselves as of increasing importance, and that the ball which had been set in motion would now with infinite difficulty be checked.

This was the position of the lower House at the period of the usurpation of Henry of Lancaster. They had come to be recognized as a formidable element in the State; inferior, indeed, to the barons,

but possessing, through their financial power, a restraint upon the license of royal encroachment, and, through their concordance with the Crown, a restraint upon the presumption of the Peers.

Having now viewed the military spirit of the centuries which immediately preceded the Lancastrian line, and having shown what forces were in progress toward a broader civil system, it is fitting to revert briefly to a subject which has an important and vivid interest in regarding the acts of that dynasty.

The Church had, for centuries before the reign of Richard the Second, met with no greater calamities in their English supremacy than an occasional quarrel with the sovereign, short-lived contests with the barons, and a temporary alienation of lands and convents. The tenets of their faith had continued undoubted; their edicts had met, if not with approval, at least with systematic obedience; their supremacy, even over the temporal affairs of the people, was vast, and hardly disputed; the treasuries of their cathedrals, monasteries, and prelates overflowed with gold, while their lands embraced the most lovely, fertile, and prolific spots on the island. They were masters of a system which controlled alike the passions, the interests, the pleasures, and the sentiments of the people; and were in possession of the most coveted privilegesof wealth unbounded, of power irresistible, of rank unsurpassed. The Roman Pontiff had assumed authority of a most arrogant and overbearing nature— appointing and annulling without regard to the temporal power, confiscating land, and showing himself in every manner an absolute despot. Throughout Christendom, his clergy were the willing and even eager ministers of his rapacity and ambition. Out of so

extensive and so absolute a dominance, grew natural. ly avarice, and the corrupt satellites which follow in its wake. Every thing began to be bought and soldbenefices, pardons, excommunications, the execution of the law or its avoidance, high ranks, the degradation of kings and nobles, the murder of peasants, the overthrow and exaltation of politics. After a little, the Pope began to cheat the English priests, and the English priests to hide their gains from the Pope: so we find in the thirteenth century that his Holiness, distrusting and hating the native clergy, poured into England, with the king's sanction, a multitude of Italians, who swallowed up the preferments, and, little heeding the complaints of their parishes, monopolized the worldly comforts of the country. Against such an intrusion the hatred of the people began to boil up and vent itself. It became unsafe for these Italians to go abroad from their houses. They awoke in the night to find their barns in flames, their cattle scattered, their thick crops plundered. It was with trembling that they attempted, at indecently long intervals, to perform the sacred rites of their office. It happened to be in the time of a weak and superstitious king, who clung to the Pope's crosier as his best defence, alike from the attacks of English priests and from those of English subjects. Here then were King and Pope against people and priesthood; but the abuse became too atrocious; the King tried to resist the Pope, the Pope threatened extreme penalties, and vacillation, confusion, and concession marked every step in the conflict. At the end the triple crown still issued fulminations, plundered the treasures, trampled on public and private rights, and debased the dynasty. Every crime sullied the acts of the successors of

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