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.