Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/284

 very much the same position as the Chancellor in the Upper House; he is the manager of business on the part of the crown, and probably the nominee either of the king himself or of the chancellor. Although the forms of election, apology and protest, of address to the king and royal admission, were maintained and developed, we know both from Sir Thomas Smith and from Coke that the king appointed the Speaker: even in the House of Lords the sovereign exercised the same right when the chancellor was not a peer; in 1539, as we learn from Chapuys' dispatches, that Warham was elected, but set aside as too old. The result was that the Speaker, instead of being the defender of the liberties of the house, had often to reduce it to an order that meant obsequious reticence or sullen submission. Happily it was not every Speaker that was like Rich, whose extant addresses to the king are nauseous compliments on his majesty's gifts of nature, fortune, and grace, the beauty of his person, the felicity of his enterprises, the perfect virtue of his character; compliments which the king deprecates with a modest reference to the Giver of all good gifts, but with a conscious acquiescence as ridiculous as the mock humility of the Speaker. But where even More himself had the greatest difficulty in behaving with decent independence, so poor a creature as Rich may stand excused.

The Speakers of the reign were Sir Thomas Englefield, M.P. for Berks; Sir Thomas Sheffield, for Lincolnshire; Sir Thomas Nevill, probably for Kent; all men of dignity and simplicity. The Speaker of 1523 was Sir Thomas More; he was succeeded in the parliament of 1529 by Audley, who succeeded him also as Chancellor in 1533. Humfrey Wingfield, whom I have mentioned, succeeded Audley; Rich was Speaker in 1536, Sir Nicolas Hare in 1539, and Sir Thomas Moyle in 1542. Moyle's speeches were formed on the model of Rich's; Hare's speech in 1540) although scarcely less complimentary, was better put together; he congratulated the realm on the felicity of having such a king as Henry, who had won, a boon which had fallen to the lot of no other Christian commonwealth, the distinction that under him, without any single