Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/350

Rh 330 ENGLAND [HISTORY. Compari son of England with con tinental countries. Illegal doings of the kings. its position had risen. The place of representative of a city or borough was now sought for by men who were not actual citizens or burgesses. And, owing to the restric tive statute of Henry VI. and to the change in the con stitutions of the boroughs, both knights and burgesses were now chosen by less popular constituencies than those who choss them in earlier times, Yet, low as parlia ments had fallen from their ancient standard, they still kept virtue enough for kings to dread them. Every king of this age who deemed himself safe on his throne tried to reign without a parliament. During the first reign of Edward IV., parliament met, formally at least, with one exception, every year. In the latter part of his reign five years passed without a parliament. So it was with Henry VII. Parliaments were frequent while insurrections wers frequent. The last -eleven years of Henry s reign saw only a single parliament. On the other hand, Ilichard III., whose throne was not safe during a moment of his short reign, was the least unconstitutional king of this period. He had time only for a single parliament, but that was a parliament rich in legislation, and which passed one great law restraining a special abuse of royal power. Edward IV., in the times when he dispensed with parlia ments, brought in a practice of gathering what were called benevolences, gifts to the crown which were nominally free will offerings, but which it was dangerous for the subject to refuse. These benevolences were expressly declared illegal by the statute of Richard. But Ilichard himself broke his own law ; and later kings found it convenient to follow his practice rather than his legislation. And when the statute of Richard was quoted against them, they were not ashamed to plead that the act of the usurper was of itself null. This then was the time of trial for England and her liberties. She and they were now full grown, and their strength had to be proved. Her probation went on for more than two hundred years; but now it began. In the end the nation and its liberties proved too strong for the kings. Parliaments were bullied, packed, and corrupted; their sittings were stopped for years together; but they were never abolished. The great laws which secured freedom were often broken, but they were never repealed or set aside. At the beginning of this period the distinction between an absolute and a limited monarchy was as clearly drawn out by a minister of Henry VI. as it could be by any modem political writer. And, if the practice did not always conform to the model traced by Sir John Fortescue, the law always did. Tho old principles of freedom were never so utterly forgotten, never so utterly trodden under foot, that they could not be called to life again when the favourable moment came. In this, it is plain, the history of England differs from the history of France, of Spain, of most continental countries. And certainly one reason for the difference was that they were continental countries, while England is insular. Constant rivalries, constant warfare with immediate neighbours, gave better pretexts for the maintenance of standing armies than could be found in England. The only immediate neighbour of England was Scotland. And the wars with Scotland, though work ing constant damage to the border shires, were not so dan gerous to the kingdom in general that either prince or people would have dreamed of keeping up a standing army on their account. And, after Henry VII. s treaty, war with Scot land ceased to be the regular state of things. Our kings therefore, without a standing army, could not utterly root out freedom as their continental brethren did. In the worst times they were driven to summon parliaments from time to time, and those parliaments now and then showed traces of the old spirit. Still from this time onward the adminis tration becomes highly arbitrarv. The king and his council were guilty of constant illegal interference with the liberty of the subject. The court of Star-Chamber, an offshoot from the Privy Council and so from the old curia, regis, though sometimes useful in punishing offenders who were too strong for the ordinary course of law, became a terrible engine ot oppression. It is characteristic of the time that judicial Torture torture, unknown at all times to English law, and unknown to English practice at all times before the fifteenth century and after the seventeenth, now began to be freely used. But it was used in every case by a special and illegal exercise of prerogative. No man was ever tortured to extort confes sion in any of the regular courts of English law. 1 The age which brought in the rack could hardly fail to be a merciless age. In fact the civil struggles of each age had, from the twelfth century onwards, been getting more Frequer and more bloodthirsty. During the Wars of the Roses each execu- revolution, each battle, was followed by something that tions&amp;lt; might be called a massacre, by a general slaughter of the leading men on both sides. On the other hand, the slaughter was mainly confined to the leading men. But the murders or executions wrought at every stage of these wars undoubtedly had a political effect in lessening the numbers of the old nobility to a degree which mere slaughter in battle could never have done. In this age too began the general practice of attainder by Act of Parliament. That is, a man is placed by a legislative act in the same position as if he had been convicted after a regular trial. This Acts of process was now freely used, not only against the living, attainde but sometimes against the dead. The main object in the latter case was of course the confiscation of the estate of the attainted person. It at first sight seems singular that the man who stands out as the foremost actor in the cruelties of this time was the man who was also fore most as a scholar and patron of learning. This was John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, who in the one character was bewailed by Caxton, while in the other he gained the popu lar surname of the Butcher. But Tiptoft brought his learn ing from Italy ; he was in fact the first-fruits of the Italian Renaissance in England. And the Italian Renaissance, if it was a school of taste and learning, was hardly a school of either justice or mercy. Arbitrary power cruelly exercised can easily exist alongside of learning and refinement. This truth England began to learn in the present period. It learned it yet more thoroughly in the next. The Italian studies of the earl of Worcester were certainly not shared by many of the contemporary nobles. Yet before this time, Humfrey duke of Gloucester had appeared as a patron of learning, and the foundation of colleges in both universities went on through the whole of the fifteenth century. But the new learning, as it was called, that wider The new field of study of which Greek learning was the most easily learning recognized outward badge, hardly took root in England till quite the end of this period, under Henry VII. Caxton had already begun to print under Edward IV, at a time when the native literature of England had sunk lower than it ever sank before or after. Yet signs were not wanting that the practice of writing, and writing in English, was now widely spread. The Paston Letters, which let us into the inmost life of a knightly family of Norfolk, are worth any amount of courtly Latin. But they are hardly litera ture. Mediaeval art too now entered on its latest phase imme diately before its final overthrow. The architectural style of The this time loses the aspiring lines of earlier times, and gives us instead a lavishness and intricacy of ornament, such as ture _ we see at St George s at Windsor and in Henry VII. s chapel 1 Torture strictly so called, torture to bring the prisoner to confess, was never known to English law. It must not be confounded either with the painful form of death which formed the penalty of treason, or with the peine more accurately prisone forte etdurc, the pressing to death, which was the fate of those who refused to plead.