第65章 Letter XVI(2)
But still the law remained arbiter both of king and people,and the parliament supreme expounder and judge both of it and them.'Though the branches were lopped,and the tree lost its beauty for a time,yet the root remained untouched,was set in a good soil,and had taken strong hold in it:so that care and culture,and time were indeed required,and our ancestors were forced to water it,if I may use such an expression,with their blood;but with this care,and culture,and time,and blood,it shot up again with greater strength than ever,that we might sit quiet and happy under the shade of it;for if the same form was not exactly restored in every part,a tree of the same king,and as beautiful,and as luxuriant as the former,grew up from the same root.
To bring our discourse to that point which is here immediately concerned,Parliaments were never interrupted,nor the right of any estate taken away,however the exercise of it might be disturbed.Nay,they soon took the forms they still preserve,were constituted almost as they now are,and were entirely built on the same general principles,as well as directed to the same purposes.
When I say that they were constituted almost as they now are,I do not mean to enter into any of those minute questions,about which a man may employ much time and study,and have as little true and useful knowledge of our constitution as the most ignorant man alive.But I propose to make a short reJection or two on the property and power of the three estates that compose our Parliament,as they stood formerly,and as they now stand;because although our Parliaments were composed of king,lords and commons in those days,as well as these,yet the difference of the weight which each of these estates hath cast into the scale of government,at different periods,does in effect make some difference in the constitution of Parliaments:and by considering this difference,our thoughts will be led the better to judge of the true poise of our constitution,on maintaining which our all depends;since the nearer we keep to it,the safer our liberty is,and since every variation from it is dangerous to our liberty,in a degree proportionable to such variation.
Property then,and power by consequence,have changed hands,or rather have shifted much in the same hands since the Norman era.Kings,lords and the Church were in those days,and long afterwards,the great proprietors;and by the nature of tenures,as well as by the bulk of their estates,they held the commons in no small subjection,and seem to have governed without much regard to them,or to their concurrence,in many cases.But the regard that was not paid them at first,the kings,the lords and the Church found it necessary to pay them in a short time;and that authority,that weight in the balance of power,which property did not give them,they soon acquired,or rather resumed by their numbers,and by the circumstances that followed.
By the circumstances that followed,I mean the great disorders in the state,and the civil wars,which the ambition of princes,of the nobility,and of the Church too,created.In all these conflicts,some of the commons 'holding for the king,who promised liberty from the lords,and others siding with the lords,who promised them liberty from the king',they came off better in the end than their principals,and an example rarely to be paralleled was set;for general liberty was nursed by these means,under the wings of particular ambition.In later days,when the nation,harassed and spent.
by the long wars of York and Lancaster,seemed glad to settle under the stable government;and in this temper gave many advantages to the cunning of Henry the Seventh,which the violence of his son improved;it is certain that the commons suffered extremely from the avarice of one,the profusion of the other,and the high-strained prerogative of both.But then their sufferings were temporary,and may be said to have ended with these reigns;whereas the sufferings of the nobility and the Church were permanent and irretrievable.
'The king and his council',says the author I quoted last,'under colour of liveries and retainders,brought the whole kingdom to be of their livery.'