of character, They felt themselves a body dissevered not merely from the old Norman aristocracy, but from the chivalrous nobility of continental Europe, and that it was necessary for them to identify themselves with some new principle, in order to maintain their existence. Their first principle was one which it would be very difficult to describe,-they adopted the king's religion; whether Henry VIII ever had a very definite creed may be questioned; we have some evidence to shew that he believed two articles-transubstantiation and his own supremacy, since he burned Protestants for denying the one, and Catholics for rejecting the other; but the converts he made by such efficacious arguments as titles, pensions, and grants, were always in a state of perplexity respecting the amount and nature of the belief required of them; in fact, they had adopted a provisional creed, and were unable to conjecture its probable duration.

On the accession of Edward VI, the new nobility had for the first time liberty to choose a religion; they naturally selected protestantism, which offered to confirm the titles of their estates, in preference to popery, which preached the disagreeable doctrine of restitution. The sickly boy, not far removed from idiotcy, in whose name the government was administered, had no voice in the direction of affairs,-the factions which were formed in his court scarcely heeded his existence. On one side, the nobles connected with the old aristocracy under the Lord Protector, sought to form an alliance with that ancient body, and erect a barrier against the further progress of the new nobility; on the other side the Tudor peers, headed by the Duke of Northumberland, sought a further extension of new creeds and new institutions, as a pretext for new confiscations. The latter triumphed at the moment when the death of the king rendered their victory not merely useless, but absolutely ruinous. Had not the Greys and Dudleys been accustomed to regard the court as the nation, they never would have been such blockheads as to proclaim Lady Jane Grey, without taking the precaution of canvassing for supporters, by promises of new forfeitures. The great bulk of the nation adhered to the old religion, the old nobility, and the legitimate heir to the crown. Mary became queen in the teeth of acts of parliament; and nothing can better shew how slight was the hold which the new nobility, created by the Tudors, had on the affection, or even the respect of the country, than the utter contempt with which the laws and privileges of the parliament were

treated, both by the sovereign and the people. Mary's reign scarcely produced any effect on English society; like her father, she had a passion for burning heretics, but her wrath fell principally on those who had adopted the principles of the German reformation, and who therefore sought organic changes in the church, such as could scarcely have been effected without organic changes in the state. It is no apology for the cruelty of Mary, that she regarded heretics as traitors, and that her most eminent victims were partisans of her rival, the unfortunate Lady Jane; but it deserves to be remarked, that very few of the new nobility interfered to save the protestant martyrs; after having once secured their estates, and obtained a secret stipulation against the restitution of church lands, they allowed the queen to burn and slaughter at her pleasure.

Elizabeth was maternally connected with the new aristocracy created by her father and grandfather, and she was forced to favour protestantism because she was bastardized by the rival religion. The turning-point of the policy of her reign was the disputed legitimacy of her birth; an incomprehensible blockhead occupied the throne of St. Peter; he proclaimed the English Queen a bastard usurper, when if he had held out the recognition of her legitimacy as a bribe he might have stipulated for the recognition of his supremacy, and would certainly have retained a modified authority over the Anglican church. The old aristocracy of England seceded from the court without abandoning their allegiance; their adhesion to the papacy was connived at for a time, and the dissensions which began to divide the new nobility diverted attention from their proceedings, until some insane caprices of the Romish court provoked. the jealousy of the government.

The new nobility created by the Tudors was taken from the ranks of the country gentlemen; in Elizabeth's reign those who were elevated to the peerage were generally selected for their statesmanlike qualifications; and even those who were promoted from motives of personal favour, Leicester and other real or supposed lovers of the queen, possessed sufficient talent to fill a high station respectably. Unfortunately Elizabeth was induced to play the game of forfeitures in Ireland, and she thus excited the ambition and avarice of unprincipled adventurers, traders in rebellion, suborners of perjury, ingenious in devising provocations to treason. The church-lands had been exhausted by Henry and the speculators in crown grants could only look

for a new supply in a second spoilation of the church, or in adopting such a course of policy towards the catholics as would drive them to treason and furnish pretences for new forfeitures.

But an element of a different kind was developed in English society during Elizabeth's reign, which soon acquired extraordinary strength, and has to the present hour exercised a marked influence on the policy of the country. Most of those who fled from the persecutions under Mary had found shelter in Geneva and other free cities, which in that age were a species of Theocratic republic; their churches were governed on the presbyterian model, and their consistories not only managed ecclesiastical discipline but municipal government. When these men returned to England, they found that the queen and the government had resolved on establishing an episcopal system in which the supremacy of the state and the civil government should be most firmly established. They denounced episcopacy as an approach to popery, and they stigmatized the supremacy of the sovereign as downright Erastianism. Elizabeth detested the puritans for their hostility to her spiritual prerogatives, and she suspected, not without reason, that they shared Knox's dislike to female royalty; but many of her courtiers secretly protected the party, believing, if their principles triumphed, there would be a chance of some pickings in a new scramble for ecclesiastical plunder.

The connection between religion and confiscation was first made by Henry VIII; Elizabeth adopted it and in Ireland acted upon it, or rather allowed it to be acted upon by her servants, to a greater extent than was either prudent or politic; but her successor carried it to the utmost extreme, and may almost have been said to have made robbery a part of his religion. Some attempts have been recently made to whitewash the character of James I; they have provoked new investigations of the records of his reign, and these have unquestionably proved that he was a thoroughly demoralized blockhead; an unmanly profligate who practised the grimaces of piety, while he indulged in crimes for which language blushes to find a name. "The divine right of kings" was a doctrine specially devised for his behoof, and it was the only reason that could be assigned for allowing such a being to remain at the head of a nation. In his reign the Tudor nobles for the most part deserted the class of the country-gentlemen or middle class from which they had sprung, and insisted on grasping the feudal power of the old Norman aristocracy; royalty and episcopacy

were brought to their aid; a stand was made against the movement which had set in with the Reformation; and it became a question whether England was to retrograde to the social condition of the middle ages, or to see its institutions gradually enlarged into perfect equality of civil rights. The question was tried by an appeal to arms in the reign of Charles I; the country-gentlemen won the victory, abused it and lost its fruits. A military despotism united with a fanatical asceticism became for a brief space supreme, the nation was wearied by the tyranny of the one and sickened by the cant of the other; even a negro rebelled against the union of Preachee and Floggee, and the puritans were equally active in both exercises.

Charles II began the empire of downright debauchery; the honour of man and the chastity of woman were equally unknown in his court; his parliaments were scenes of unabashed profligacy and venality; patriots did not hesitate to accept bribes from France and from Holland; most of them sold themselves to both courts, and, with great impartiality, betrayed the interests of either, as best suited their convenience. The rival parties of the day had the merit of discovering a new engine of political warfare; they fought with false oaths, and made perjury the agent of victory. It would be amusing to enter upon the anatomy of the parties of that day; it must for the present suffice to say, that they are best described by Lord Byron

Arcades ambo-i.e., blackguards both.

James II had the misfortune to be too honest; had he, like his brother, lived a hypocrite, he would have died a king. From his memoirs we learn, that he was ruined by believing the protestations of the English peers and prelates; they preached the doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance so strenuously, that James believed them to the letter, and ventured to display his Romish partialities. To his great surprise, he found that non-resistance, in the mouths of the prelates and preachers, meant a compliance with every thing which they liked, and nothing more. Those very persons who had stigmatized Presbyterians and Puritans for asserting that royalty had its duties as well as its rights, now proclaimed that persecution was so stringent a duty, that the monarch forfeited his rights by its abandonment. James proclaimed liberty of conscience, and all his clerical supporters abandoned him in a body.

Though the English Commonwealth was an abortive attempt to

establish a monarchy of the middle classes, the failure was not so signal as to destroy the love of freedom in the breasts of the mercantile community. Puritanism, and its republican tendencies, had still great influence in the ranks of merchants and manufacturers, but the country gentlemen, who had formed the strength of the liberal party in the reign of Charles I, had been gradually won over to the side of the court and the church. Towards the close of the reign of Charles II, the landed interest was regarded as Tory and High-Church, the mercantile interest was ranked as Whig and Low-Church. They had one principle in common, an intense hatred of Popery, which was political on the part of the Tories, and fanatical on the part of the Whigs. The favour which James naturally showed to his own religion was the only principle that could have united the two parties for a single instant. Had the unfortunate king commenced by granting religious freedom to Protestant dissent, and suspended his designs in favour of the Catholics until the Whigs and Tories were irretrievably committed on the question of toleration, he would certainly have so perplexed both that they would never have united against his crown. In fact, when they did unite, they did not comprehend the purposes of their union; each party successfully disguised its objects from the other, and the result obtained was unexpected by both. The Revolution was effected by two sets of hypocrites, neither of which wished for it, while both were obliged to accept it as the best compromise that could be made under existing circumstances.

Most readers of modern history must have been struck with the singular coincidences which gave the throne of England to the Prince of Orange, in 1688, and that of France to Louis Philippe, in 1830. A few honest men, on both occasions, wished to erect a monarchy surrounded by republican institutions, but in England the Revolution led merely to an oligarchy, and in France it rendered the personal influence of the sovereign greater than ever. To a certain extent both Revolutions were frauds; but the English fraud was greater than the French, because it professed to have been effected for the interests of religion, though nine-tenths of those who acted in it were either profligates or hypocrites.

It is of course a fact, that there were really some honest patriots in the Convention, and in William's first parliament; but these men threw away their entire influence over the people by seeking to indulge their

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