_ That mixture in the English Government, that harmony between King,
Lords, and commons, did not always subsist. England was enslaved
for a long series of years by the Romans, the Saxons, the Danes, and
the French successively. William the Conqueror particularly, ruled
them with a rod of iron. He disposed as absolutely of the lives and
fortunes of his conquered subjects as an eastern monarch; and
forbade, upon pain of death, the English either fire or candle in
their houses after eight o'clock; whether was this to prevent their
nocturnal meetings, or only to try, by an odd and whimsical
prohibition, how far it was possible for one man to extend his power
over his fellow-creatures. It is true, indeed, that the English had
Parliaments before and after William the Conqueror, and they boast
of them, as though these assemblies then called Parliaments,
composed of ecclesiastical tyrants and of plunderers entitled
barons, had been the guardians of the public liberty and happiness.
The barbarians who came from the shores of the Baltic, and settled
in the rest of Europe, brought with them the form of government
called States or Parliaments, about which so much noise is made, and
which are so little understood. Kings, indeed, were not absolute in
those days; but then the people were more wretched upon that very
account, and more completely enslaved. The chiefs of these savages,
who had laid waste France, Italy, Spain, and England, made
themselves monarchs. Their generals divided among themselves the
several countries they had conquered, whence sprung those margraves,
those peers, those barons, those petty tyrants, who often contested
with their sovereigns for the spoils of whole nations. These were
birds of prey fighting with an eagle for doves whose blood the
victorious was to suck. Every nation, instead of being governed by
one master, was trampled upon by a hundred tyrants. The priests
soon played a part among them. Before this it had been the fate of
the Gauls, the Germans, and the Britons, to be always governed by
their Druids and the chiefs of their villages, an ancient kind of
barons, not so tyrannical as their successors. These Druids
pretended to be mediators between God and man. They enacted laws,
they fulminated their excommunications, and sentenced to death. The
bishops succeeded, by insensible degrees, to their temporal
authority in the Goth and Vandal government. The popes set
themselves at their head, and armed with their briefs, their bulls,
and reinforced by monks, they made even kings tremble, deposed and
assassinated them at pleasure, and employed every artifice to draw
into their own purses moneys from all parts of Europe. The weak
Ina, one of the tyrants of the Saxon Heptarchy in England, was the
first monarch who submitted, in his pilgrimage to Rome, to pay St.
Peter's penny (equivalent very near to a French crown) for every
house in his dominions. The whole island soon followed his example;
England became insensibly one of the Pope's provinces, and the Holy
Father used to send from time to time his legates thither to levy
exorbitant taxes. At last King John delivered up by a public
instrument the kingdom of England to the Pope, who had
excommunicated him; but the barons, not finding their account in
this resignation, dethroned the wretched King John and seated Louis,
father to St. Louis, King of France, in his place. However, they
were soon weary of their new monarch, and accordingly obliged him to
return to France.
Whilst that the barons, the bishops, and the popes, all laid waste
England, where all were for ruling the most numerous, the most
useful, even the most virtuous, and consequently the most venerable
part of mankind, consisting of those who study the laws and the
sciences, of traders, of artificers, in a word, of all who were not
tyrants--that is, those who are called the people: these, I say,
were by them looked upon as so many animals beneath the dignity of
the human species. The Commons in those ages were far from sharing
in the government, they being villains or peasants, whose labour,
whose blood, were the property of their masters who entitled
themselves the nobility. The major part of men in Europe were at
that time what they are to this day in several parts of the world--
they were villains or bondsmen of lords--that is, a kind of cattle
bought and sold with the land. Many ages passed away before justice
could be done to human nature--before mankind were conscious that it
was abominable for many to sow, and but few reap. And was not
France very happy, when the power and authority of those petty
robbers was abolished by the lawful authority of kings and of the
people?
Happily, in the violent shocks which the divisions between kings and
the nobles gave to empires, the chains of nations were more or less
heavy. Liberty in England sprang from the quarrels of tyrants. The
barons forced King John and King Henry III. to grant the famous
Magna Charta, the chief design of which was indeed to make kings
dependent on the Lords; but then the rest of the nation were a
little favoured in it, in order that they might join on proper
occasions with their pretended masters. This great Charter, which
is considered as the sacred origin of the English liberties, shows
in itself how little liberty was known.
The title alone proves that the king thought he had a just right to
be absolute; and that the barons, and even the clergy, forced him to
give up the pretended right, for no other reason but because they
were the most powerful.
Magna Charta begins in this style: "We grant, of our own free will,
the following privileges to the archbishops, bishops, priors, and
barons of our kingdom," etc.
The House of Commons is not once mentioned in the articles of this
Charter--a proof that it did not yet exist, or that it existed
without power. Mention is therein made, by name, of the freemen of
England--a melancholy proof that some were not so. It appears, by
Article XXXII., that these pretended freemen owed service to their
lords. Such a liberty as this was not many removes from slavery.
By Article XXI., the king ordains that his officers shall not
henceforward seize upon, unless they pay for them, the horses and
carts of freemen. The people considered this ordinance as a real
liberty, though it was a greater tyranny. Henry VII., that happy
usurper and great politician, who pretended to love the barons,
though he in reality hated and feared them, got their lands
alienated. By this means the villains, afterwards acquiring riches
by their industry, purchased the estates and country seats of the
illustrious peers who had ruined themselves by their folly and
extravagance, and all the lands got by insensible degrees into other
hands.
The power of the House of Commons increased every day. The families
of the ancient peers were at last extinct; and as peers only are
properly noble in England, there would be no such thing in
strictness of law as nobility in that island, had not the kings
created new barons from time to time, and preserved the body of
peers, once a terror to them, to oppose them to the Commons, since
become so formidable.
All these new peers who compose the Higher House receive nothing but
their titles from the king, and very few of them have estates in
those places whence they take their titles. One shall be Duke of D-
, though he has not a foot of land in Dorsetshire; and another is
Earl of a village, though he scarce knows where it is situated. The
peers have power, but it is only in the Parliament House.
There is no such thing here as haute, moyenne, and basse justice--
that is, a power to judge in all matters civil and criminal; nor a
right or privilege of hunting in the grounds of a citizen, who at
the same time is not permitted to fire a gun in his own field.
No one is exempted in this country from paying certain taxes because
he is a nobleman or a priest. All duties and taxes are settled by
the House of Commons, whose power is greater than that of the Peers,
though inferior to it in dignity. The spiritual as well as temporal
Lords have the liberty to reject a Money Bill brought in by the
Commons; but they are not allowed to alter anything in it, and must
either pass or throw it out without restriction. When the Bill has
passed the Lords and is signed by the king, then the whole nation
pays, every man in proportion to his revenue or estate, not
according to his title, which would be absurd. There is no such
thing as an arbitrary subsidy or poll-tax, but a real tax on the
lands, of all which an estimate was made in the reign of the famous
King William III.
The land-tax continues still upon the same foot, though the revenue
of the lands is increased. Thus no one is tyrannised over, and
every one is easy. The feet of the peasants are not bruised by
wooden shoes; they eat white bread, are well clothed, and are not
afraid of increasing their stock of cattle, nor of tiling their
houses, from any apprehension that their taxes will be raised the
year following. The annual income of the estates of a great many
commoners in England amounts to two hundred thousand livres, and yet
these do not think it beneath them to plough the lands which enrich
them, and on which they enjoy their liberty. _