Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/12

vi meet them at Runnymede, when he signed the charter, and again immediately repudiated it. The barons were thus in the condition of a man who has got an acceptance—good, if taken up; waste paper, if dishonoured. Their charter was dishonoured. The debt of liberty had to be fought for, and John beat them. Thus worsted, they committed a most treasonable act in calling in the son of the French king to their aid, promising him the crown. John beat both them and their French king. On his death, Hubert de Burgh, constable of Dover, with a body of English sailors, and William de Collingham, with the archers of Sussex, drove the French prince out of the kingdom, put down the barons, and obtained the confirmation of the great charter from Henry III., with a new charter, the charter of the Forests. Thus the people—not the barons—acquired the charter; and Blackstone, in his work on the Great Charter, confirms this plain fact, by saying that it is not John's charter, but the charter of Henry III. from which we date our liberties. As to these barons who, under pretence of establishing our liberties, would have reduced England to a French province, Carte says that on John's death a letter, signed by upwards of forty of them, was foxed in his pocket, offering to give up the charter on condition of a full pardon, and restoration of their estates. It is certain that the remnant left of them were only too glad to receive a pardon from Henry III., and never ceased to pursue the honest Hugh de Burgh for his share in defeating them. They never relaxed their malice till they ruined him with the king, though he was become judiciary of the kingdom—its chief minister—and made his life one miserable martyrdom for his patriotism.

The next great point which we have been able to bring out and place in complete light, is the great epoch of the revolution of our fiscal system, which took place by the bargain of Charles II. with the party which restored him (see our account in his reign, again adverted to under the head of Laws and Constitution), by which he surrendered all the feudal services for the grant of the excise for ever. The operation of this transaction, which transferred the support of his crown from the landholders to the people at large, with all its consequences of extravagant taxation and national debt, will be found first to be fully demonstrated in this present volume. The statute of 12 Car. II., which makes this transfer, has been incidentally referred to by former historians, as we have remarked, but without any clear perception of the grand revolution in our whole system of taxation which it originated; perhaps, after all, the greatest revolution, as it concerns the rights and property of the community at large, which this country has seen.

Had we only succeeded in establishing these two vital points, we should have deemed them worth all the labour of research and composition, but we think we may refer with pride to the unvarying determination displayed through the whole work, to assert and maintain the great principles of justice and popular right. Whilst adverting to the testimony of Lord Brougham, on a late occasion, to this fact, we must, as a matter of justice to individuals, modify in some degree one of his assertions. It is, that none of the modern historians to whom he alluded, had condemned the French invasion of Henry V., though they had those of Edward III. This is not strictly true as regards us. In condemning the invasion of France by Edward III., we condemned the invasion of Henry V. at the same time. We condemned those wars in toto. See Vol.I.,p.369. "The invasions of France by Edward III. raised the martial glory of England to the highest pitch. There is nothing in the miracles of bravery done at Leuctra, Marathon, or Thermopylæ, which can surpass those performed at Crecy, Poictiers, and on other occasions; but there the splendour of the parallel ends. The Greek battle-fields are sanctified by the imperishable renown of patriotism; those of England, at that period, are distinguished only by empty ambition and unwarrantable aggression. The Greeks fought and conquered for the very existence of their country and liberties—the English to crush those of an independent people. The wars commenced by Edward III. inflicted the most direful miseries on France, were continued for generations, and perpetuated a spirit of hostility between the two great neighbour countries, which has been prolific of bloodshed, and most injurious to the progress of liberty and civilisation."

After this and similar denunciations of all those wars, it was not necessary to swell our pages by fresh ones under the reign of Henry V., but we explicitly kept in the reader's view that it was an unauthorised invasion of France. Speaking of Henry V.'s message to the French king, we say, Vol.I.,p.528: "This was singular language for a man to hold who was notoriously in a foreign country with a hostile force, come