Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/586

572 region of common sense and common observation. By the preamble to the Statute of Bankruptcy, we find that the progress of commerce had led to great frauds. Men by means of credit got the property of others into their hands and absconded with it. In the 34 and 35 of Henry VIII., therefore, it was enacted that the chancellor or keeper of the great seal, with the lord treasurer, lord president, privy seal, and others of the privy council, and chief justices, or any three of them—the chancellor, keeper, president, or privy seal being one—should have power to constitute a court, before which, on complaints from a party aggrieved, they should summon the defaulter, should take possession of all property in his possession, should hear all necessary evidence on oath, and should make a distribution of his effects amongst the creditors according to their claims. Persons concealing effects of the offender were to forfeit double their value; and claimants making fraudulent claims were to forfeit double the amount demanded.

This was the first outline and foundation of our court and law of bankruptcy, the main principles of which are still in force, but considerably modified by the greater development of the action of trade, and a spirit of increased enlightenment and humanity. The bankrupt is no longer treated necessarily as a criminal, but as one who has suffered from misfortune; and where he is innocent of dishonest conduct, is discharged from such obligations as he has no means of fulfilling, and the way opened for future enterprise.

The laws of Henry VIII. regarding gaming were strict and rational, and afford a striking contrast to those of the so-called moral princes of Germany in our own day. No person, by himself, or his servant, or other person, for his gain, hiring, or living, was to keep any house, alley, or place of bowling, quoits, tennis, dicing-table, cards, or any other unlawful game, under penalty of forty shillings per day, and of six and eightpence to every such person playing. All justices, mayors, and head officers were empowered to enter any house and search for such offenders, and commit them till they gave security not to offend again. Officers were to make a strict search once a month, or were themselves to suffer a penalty of forty shillings. Workmen, apprentices, and husbandmen were only allowed to play at such games during Christmas, and then only in their masters' houses or presence.

Another statute of this reign introduces the earliest notice of a singular people—the gipsies. It was enacted in the 22 of Henry VIII. that persons calling themselves "Egyptians," who had lately come into the country, used no trade, and practised no handicraft, but wandered from shire to shire in great companies, pretending to tell fortunes, and committing many felonies and robberies, should be allowed sixteen days to depart, and if found in it after that time, should be imprisoned and deprived of all their goods and chattels; and all sheriffs and justices of the peace were commanded to seize all such Egyptians thereafter coming into the country, if they did not depart within fifteen days, and appropriate their effects to the king's use. The continuance of this nomadic tribe on our heaths and commons to the present day decides that the statute of Henry took no effect upon them.

But the laws of Henry were rarely so rational or innocent as these. Wo have seen, in tracing the events of his reign, that, to stop the mouths of his subjects regarding his many criminal deeds, the cruel calumnies on and divorces of his wives, followed by their execution, and the perpetration of fresh marriages equally revolting, he was continually creating new species of treasons, and loading the statute book with the most atrocious specimens of legislation which ever disgraced the annals of any nation, Christian or pagan.

The first of these extraordinary enactments was the statute 25 Henry VIII., c. 22, passed on the occasion of his divorce of Catherine of Arragon, and his marriage of Anne Boleyn. In this he declared that any one who dared to write, print, or circulate anything to the prejudice of this marriage, or the queen herself, or the issue of such marriage, should be guilty of high treason. The same was to be the fate of any one who endeavoured to dispute this alliance by advocating the validity of the former marriage with Catherine, and every one was to take an oath to obey this Act fully; and if any refused to take such oath, they were to be also guilty of misprision of treason. As, however, the tyrant could not prevent people thinking and speaking their minds in private, the next session he got from his pliant Parliament a fresh Act, forbidding all persons to speak or even think a slander against the king; for if they thought, they could have the oath put to them, and must either deny their very thought, or be found guilty of treason.

But by the twenty-eighth year of his reign the fickle despot had cut off the head of this very queen, against whom nobody had on any account been allowed to whisper the slightest fault, on peril of their lives. The marriage with her, as well as that with Catherine, was declared utterly void, and never to have been otherwise; the issue of both was pronounced illegitimate, and the same penalties were enacted against every one who called in question the present marriage with Jane Seymour. Thus, on every occasion that this Royal sensualist thought fit to destroy or divorce a wife and marry another, did he compel the whole of his subjects to swear and forswear at his pleasure; to perjure themselves over and over—to sanction the thing they had lately condemned, and to condemn the thing which lately it was death by his decree to call in question. In a statute of the thirty-first of his reign, c. 8, he clearly enunciated that doctrine of Divine right which the Stuarts, his successors, wielded to their perdition. It is worthy of note, too, that by abolishing the authority of the Pope, to serve his own selfish ends, he let loose the human mind from its long thraldom, and prepared the way—a necessary sequence—for that political rebellion which was certain to be assumed by a people who had once triumphed in a religious one. Thus was political freedom the consequence of this lawless monarch's attempt to crush it, as much as the Reformation was that of his rejection of the Papacy for the gratification of his passions; a triumph of omnipotent Providence over the blind selfishness of despots, which should teach us never to despair of the darkest times.

It is needless to follow Henry VIII. through the still repeated progress of those contradictory oaths as he slew or wedded fresh wives, what was the same in the divorce of Anne of Cleves, on the decapitation of