taken him prisoner before his accession, that it did not become the king of France to avenge the quarrels of the duke of Orleans. He had for his coat of arms a royal bee surrounded by a swarm, with this inscription, non utitur aculeo rex cui paremus. Henault, vol. 1. p. 338,

346.

(ii) In the reign of Henry VIII. indeed, when the government had been recently strengthened by the union of the two rival houses, England took a part in the general policy of the continent, of which that monarch affected to hold the balance; adopting as his motto the words, cui adhæreo præest: and Elizabeth was the leader of the great party of the Protestants, which was opposed to that of the Roman Catholic powers but from the time of the death of this queen to the revolution, or during eightysix years, the English government may be considered as occupied with its own processes.

(kk) The king assembled his troops at Lyons in the month of July, arrived at Ast in Piedmont on the ninth of September, and made his entry into Naples on the twenty-second of February, having then become master of almost the whole kingdom. Abrege de l'Hist. tome 5. 505, 506, 532.

(U) Isabella, a daughter of John, king of France, was married to John Galeas Viscomti the first duke of Milan; a match by which,

says Mezeray, tome 4. p. 135, the princess was sold for six hundred thousand crowns of gold, to assist in paying the ransom of the king, the sum required by the English being three millions of gold. Ibid. p. 133. This was the first connection formed between the families of the kings of France and of the princes of Milan. Valentine, a princess of the latter family, was married to the duke of Orleans, a son of Charles V; and it was then stipulated, that the succession of Milan should devolve to her, if her brother should die without heirs, which case actually occurred but Francis Sforza, who had married an illegitimate daughter of the deceased duke, possessed himself of Milan, and left to Valentine only the pretension. Lewis XII. was the grandson of Valentine, and had himself been duke of Orleans before he succeeded to the throne.

LECTURE XXVIII.

Of the history of England, from the beginning of the reign of Edward II. in the year 1307, to that of the reign of Henry IV. in the year

IN a former part of this Course I employed three successive lectures in tracing the progress of the English government from the establishment of a feudal monarchy, which was the consequence of the Norman conquest, to the successive introduction of the two distinct classes of the representative members of the legislature, the knights of shires and the bur

gesses. These two classes however do not appear to have been yet formally associated in one common assembly, separated from the temporal lords and the prelates, but seem to have existed only as the elements of a future combination. The combination appears to have been effected.in the period which I now propose to consider, comprehending the three reigns of Edward II, Edward III, and Richard II; and the reign of Richard II, with which it concludes, evinced the importance of the new assembly of representatives, even by the efforts which the king successfully employed to corrupt its independence.

Of the three reigns which I propose now to consider, the first and third have a remarkable resemblance, and are not less remarkably contrasted to the intermediate one of Edward III, both Edward II. and Richard II. having been weak and incapable princes, and both having been ultimately driven from the throne, whereas the reign of Edward III, which lasted the extraordinary number of fifty years, was successful abroad, and useful at home, and constitutes in the whole one of the most brilliant periods of the English history. We thus observe two successive alternations of illustrious and feeble sovereigns, the imbecility of Edward II. having immediately followed the glorious government of the first prince of that

name, as that of Richard II. succeeded the splendid rule of the third Edward. Such alternations may however be easily shown to have been favourable to the formation of a mixed constitution, in which various powers were to be combined in very complicated relations. The principles of political activity, elicited in the reign of an able and enterprising sovereign, find an opportunity of more free exertion in the weakness and agitation of that of an incapable successor, but would probably become mischievously violent, if permitted to enjoy the same liberty through two successive reigns; and though another able and enterprising prince may again excite new energies in the social system, yet under such a government all the various agencies of the state will be retained in their subordination, and hindered from producing disturbance and confusion.

The influence of the vigorous government of Edward I. has been already shown to have consisted partly in effecting the re-establishment of order after the protracted struggles of the preceding period, and partly also in bestowing a very important improvement on the system of English legislation, and in introducing into the councils of the nation the order of burgesses, which completed the representative part of those assemblies. When public