CHAPTER II.
IMPARTIALITY.
The creation of an equality with the king, called Peerage, was, inbarbarous epochs, a useful fiction. This rudimentary political expedientproduced in France and England different results. In France, the peerwas a mock king; in England, a real prince--less grand than in France,but more genuine: we might say less, but worse.
Peerage was born in France; the date is uncertain--under Charlemagne,says the legend; under Robert le Sage, says history, and history is notmore to be relied on than legend. Favin writes: "The King of Francewished to attach to himself the great of his kingdom, by the magnificenttitle of peers, as if they were his equals."
Peerage soon thrust forth branches, and from France passed over toEngland.
The English peerage has been a great fact, and almost a mightyinstitution. It had for precedent the Saxon wittenagemote. The Danishthane and the Norman vavassour commingled in the baron. Baron is thesame as vir, which is translated into Spanish by _varon_, and whichsignifies, _par excellence_, "Man." As early as 1075, the barons madethemselves felt by the king--and by what a king! By William theConqueror. In 1086 they laid the foundation of feudality, and its basiswas the "Doomsday Book." Under John Lackland came conflict. The Frenchpeerage took the high hand with Great Britain, and demanded that theking of England should appear at their bar. Great was the indignation ofthe English barons. At the coronation of Philip Augustus, the King ofEngland, as Duke of Normandy, carried the first square banner, and theDuke of Guyenne the second. Against this king, a vassal of theforeigner, the War of the Barons burst forth. The barons imposed on theweak-minded King John Magna Charta, from which sprang the House ofLords. The pope took part with the king, and excommunicated the lords.The date was 1215, and the pope was Innocent III., who wrote the "Veni,Sancte Spiritus," and who sent to John Lackland the four cardinalvirtues in the shape of four gold rings. The Lords persisted. The duelcontinued through many generations. Pembroke struggled. 1248 was theyear of "the provisions of Oxford." Twenty-four barons limited theking's powers, discussed him, and called a knight from each county totake part in the widened breach. Here was the dawn of the Commons. Lateron, the Lords added two citizens from each city, and two burgesses fromeach borough. It arose from this, that up to the time of Elizabeth thepeers were judges of the validity of elections to the House of Commons.From their jurisdiction sprang the proverb that the members returnedought to be without the three P's--_sine Prece, sine Pretio, sinePoculo_. This did not obviate rotten boroughs. In 1293, the Court ofPeers in France had still the King of England under their jurisdiction;and Philippe le Bel cited Edward I. to appear before him. Edward I. wasthe king who ordered his son to boil him down after death, and to carryhis bones to the wars. Under the follies of their kings the Lords feltthe necessity of fortifying Parliament. They divided it into twochambers, the upper and the lower. The Lords arrogantly kept thesupremacy. "If it happens that any member of the Commons should be sobold as to speak to the prejudice of the House of Lords, he is called tothe bar of the House to be reprimanded, and, occasionally, to be sent tothe Tower." There is the same distinction in voting. In the House ofLords they vote one by one, beginning with the junior, called the puisnebaron. Each peer answers "_Content_," or "_Non-content_." In the Commonsthey vote together, by "Aye," or "No," in a crowd. The Commons accuse,the peers judge. The peers, in their disdain of figures, delegated tothe Commons, who were to profit by it, the superintendence of theExchequer--thus named, according to some, after the table-cover, whichwas like a chess-board; and according to others, from the drawers of theold safe, where was kept, behind an iron grating, the treasure of thekings of England. The "Year-Book" dates from the end of the thirteenthcentury. In the War of the Roses the weight of the Lords was thrown, nowon the side of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, now on the side ofEdmund, Duke of York. Wat Tyler, the Lollards, Warwick the King-maker,all that anarchy from which freedom is to spring, had for foundation,avowed or secret, the English feudal system. The Lords were usefullyjealous of the Crown; for to be jealous is to be watchful. Theycircumscribed the royal initiative, diminished the category of cases ofhigh treason, raised up pretended Richards against Henry IV., appointedthemselves arbitrators, judged the question of the three crowns betweenthe Duke of York and Margaret of Anjou, and at need levied armies, andfought their battles of Shrewsbury, Tewkesbury, and St. Albans,sometimes winning, sometimes losing. Before this, in the thirteenthcentury, they had gained the battle of Lewes, and had driven from thekingdom the four brothers of the king, bastards of Queen Isabella bythe Count de la Marche; all four usurers, who extorted money fromChristians by means of the Jews; half princes, half sharpers--a thingcommon enough in more recent times, but not held in good odour in thosedays. Up to the fifteenth century the Norman Duke peeped out in the Kingof England, and the acts of Parliament were written in French. From thereign of Henry VII., by the will of the Lords, these were written inEnglish. England, British under Uther Pendragon; Roman under Caesar;Saxon under the Heptarchy; Danish under Harold; Norman after William;then became, thanks to the Lords, English. After that she becameAnglican. To have one's religion at home is a great power. A foreignpope drags down the national life. A Mecca is an octopus, and devoursit. In 1534, London bowed out Rome. The peerage adopted the reformedreligion, and the Lords accepted Luther. Here we have the answer to theexcommunication of 1215. It was agreeable to Henry VIII.; but, in otherrespects, the Lords were a trouble to him. As a bulldog to a bear, sowas the House of Lords to Henry VIII. When Wolsey robbed the nation ofWhitehall, and when Henry robbed Wolsey of it, who complained? Fourlords--Darcie, of Chichester; Saint John of Bletsho; and (two Normannames) Mountjoie and Mounteagle. The king usurped. The peerageencroached. There is something in hereditary power which isincorruptible. Hence the insubordination of the Lords. Even inElizabeth's reign the barons were restless. From this resulted thetortures at Durham. Elizabeth was as a farthingale over an executioner'sblock. Elizabeth assembled Parliament as seldom as possible, and reducedthe House of Lords to sixty-five members, amongst whom there was but onemarquis (Winchester), and not a single duke. In France the kings feltthe same jealousy and carried out the same elimination. Under Henry III.there were no more than eight dukedoms in the peerage, and it was to thegreat vexation of the king that the Baron de Mantes, the Baron deCourcy, the Baron de Coulommiers, the Baron de Chateauneuf-en-Thimerais,the Baron de la Fere-en-Lardenois, the Baron de Mortagne, and someothers besides, maintained themselves as barons--peers of France. InEngland the crown saw the peerage diminish with pleasure. Under Anne, toquote but one example, the peerages become extinct since the twelfthcentury amounted to five hundred and sixty-five. The War of the Roseshad begun the extermination of dukes, which the axe of Mary Tudorcompleted. This was, indeed, the decapitation of the nobility. To pruneaway the dukes was to cut off its head. Good policy, perhaps; but it isbetter to corrupt than to decapitate. James I. was of this opinion. Herestored dukedoms. He made a duke of his favourite Villiers, who hadmade him a pig;[22] a transformation from the duke feudal to the dukecourtier. This sowing was to bring forth a rank harvest: Charles II. wasto make two of his mistresses duchesses--Barbara of Southampton, andLouise de la Querouel of Portsmouth. Under Anne there were to betwenty-five dukes, of whom three were to be foreigners, Cumberland,Cambridge, and Schomberg. Did this court policy, invented by James I.,succeed? No. The House of Peers was irritated by the effort to shackleit by intrigue. It was irritated against James I., it was irritatedagainst Charles I., who, we may observe, may have had something to dowith the death of his father, just as Marie de Medicis may have hadsomething to do with the death of her husband. There was a rupturebetween Charles I. and the peerage. The lords who, under James I., hadtried at their bar extortion, in the person of Bacon, under Charles I.tried treason, in the person of Stratford. They had condemned Bacon;they condemned Stratford. One had lost his honour, the other lost hislife. Charles I. was first beheaded in the person of Stratford. TheLords lent their aid to the Commons. The
king convokes Parliament toOxford; the revolution convokes it to London. Forty-four peers side withthe King, twenty-two with the Republic. From this combination of thepeople with the Lords arose the Bill of Rights--a sketch of the French_Droits de l'homme_, a vague shadow flung back from the depths offuturity by the revolution of France on the revolution of England.
Such were the services of the peerage. Involuntary ones, we admit, anddearly purchased, because the said peerage is a huge parasite. Butconsiderable services, nevertheless.
The despotic work of Louis XI., of Richelieu, and of Louis XIV., thecreation of a sultan, levelling taken for true equality, the bastinadogiven by the sceptre, the common abasement of the people, all theseTurkish tricks in France the peers prevented in England. The aristocracywas a wall, banking up the king on one side, sheltering the people onthe other. They redeemed their arrogance towards the people by theirinsolence towards the king. Simon, Earl of Leicester, said to HenryIII., "_King, thou hast lied_!" The Lords curbed the crown, and gratedagainst their kings in the tenderest point, that of venery. Every lord,passing through a royal park, had the right to kill a deer: in the houseof the king the peer was at home; in the Tower of London the scale ofallowance for the king was no more than that for a peer--namely, twelvepounds sterling per week. This was the House of Lords' doing.
Yet more. We owe to it the deposition of kings. The Lords ousted JohnLackland, degraded Edward II., deposed Richard II., broke the power ofHenry VI., and made Cromwell a possibility. What a Louis XIV. there wasin Charles I.! Thanks to Cromwell, it remained latent. By-the-bye, wemay here observe that Cromwell himself, though no historian seems tohave noticed the fact, aspired to the peerage. This was why he marriedElizabeth Bouchier, descendant and heiress of a Cromwell, Lord Bouchier,whose peerage became extinct in 1471, and of a Bouchier, Lord Robesart,another peerage extinct in 1429. Carried on with the formidable increaseof important events, he found the suppression of a king a shorter way topower than the recovery of a peerage. A ceremonial of the Lords, attimes ominous, could reach even to the king. Two men-at-arms from theTower, with their axes on their shoulders, between whom an accused peerstood at the bar of the house, might have been there in like attendanceon the king as on any other nobleman. For five centuries the House ofLords acted on a system, and carried it out with determination. They hadtheir days of idleness and weakness, as, for instance, that strange timewhen they allowed themselves to be seduced by the vessels loaded withcheeses, hams, and Greek wines sent them by Julius II. The Englisharistocracy was restless, haughty, ungovernable, watchful, andpatriotically mistrustful. It was that aristocracy which, at the end ofthe seventeenth century, by act the tenth of the year 1694, deprived theborough of Stockbridge, in Hampshire, of the right of sending members toParliament, and forced the Commons to declare null the election forthat borough, stained by papistical fraud. It imposed the test on James,Duke of York, and, on his refusal to take it, excluded him from thethrone. He reigned, notwithstanding; but the Lords wound up by callinghim to account and banishing him. That aristocracy has had, in its longduration, some instinct of progress. It has always given out a certainquantity of appreciable light, except now towards its end, which is athand. Under James II. it maintained in the Lower House the proportion ofthree hundred and forty-six burgesses against ninety-two knights. Thesixteen barons, by courtesy, of the Cinque Ports were more thancounterbalanced by the fifty citizens of the twenty-five cities. Thoughcorrupt and egotistic, that aristocracy was, in some instances,singularly impartial. It is harshly judged. History keeps all itscompliments for the Commons. The justice of this is doubtful. Weconsider the part played by the Lords a very great one. Oligarchy is theindependence of a barbarous state, but it is an independence. TakePoland, for instance, nominally a kingdom, really a republic. The peersof England held the throne in suspicion and guardianship. Time aftertime they have made their power more felt than that of the Commons. Theygave check to the king. Thus, in that remarkable year, 1694, theTriennial Parliament Bill, rejected by the Commons, in consequence ofthe objections of William III., was passed by the Lords. William III.,in his irritation, deprived the Earl of Bath of the governorship ofPendennis Castle, and Viscount Mordaunt of all his offices. The House ofLords was the republic of Venice in the heart of the royalty of England.To reduce the king to a doge was its object; and in proportion as itdecreased the power of the crown it increased that of the people.Royalty knew this, and hated the peerage. Each endeavoured to lessen theother. What was thus lost by each was proportionate profit to thepeople. Those two blind powers, monarchy and oligarchy, could not seethat they were working for the benefit of a third, which was democracy.What a delight it was to the crown, in the last century, to be able tohang a peer, Lord Ferrers!
However, they hung him with a silken rope. How polite!
"They would not have hung a peer of France," the Duke of Richelieuhaughtily remarked. Granted. They would have beheaded him. Still morepolite!
Montmorency Tancarville signed himself _peer of France and England_;thus throwing the English peerage into the second rank. The peers ofFrance were higher and less powerful, holding to rank more than toauthority, and to precedence more than to domination. There was betweenthem and the Lords that shade of difference which separates vanity frompride. With the peers of France, to take precedence of foreign princes,of Spanish grandees, of Venetian patricians; to see seated on the lowerbenches the Marshals of France, the Constable and the Admiral of France,were he even Comte de Toulouse and son of Louis XIV.; to draw adistinction between duchies in the male and female line; to maintain theproper distance between a simple _comte_, like Armagnac or Albret, and a_comte pairie_, like Evreux; to wear by right, at five-and-twenty, theblue ribbon of the Golden Fleece; to counterbalance the Duke de laTremoille, the most ancient peer of the court, with the Duke Uzes, themost ancient peer of the Parliament; to claim as many pages and horsesto their carriages as an elector; to be called _monseigneur_ by thefirst President; to discuss whether the Duke de Maine dates his peerageas the Comte d'Eu, from 1458; to cross the grand chamber diagonally, orby the side--such things were grave matters. Grave matters with theLords were the Navigation Act, the Test Act, the enrolment of Europe inthe service of England, the command of the sea, the expulsion of theStuarts, war with France. On one side, etiquette above all; on theother, empire above all. The peers of England had the substance, thepeers of France the shadow.
To conclude, the House of Lords was a starting-point; towardscivilization this is an immense thing. It had the honour to found anation. It was the first incarnation of the unity of the people: Englishresistance, that obscure but all-powerful force, was born in the Houseof Lords. The barons, by a series of acts of violence against royalty,have paved the way for its eventual downfall. The House of Lords at thepresent day is somewhat sad and astonished at what it has unwillinglyand unintentionally done, all the more that it is irrevocable.
What are concessions? Restitutions;--and nations know it.
"I grant," says the king.
"I get back my own," says the people.
The House of Lords believed that it was creating the privileges of thepeerage, and it has produced the rights of the citizen. That vulture,aristocracy, has hatched the eagle's egg of liberty.
And now the egg is broken, the eagle is soaring, the vulture dying.
Aristocracy is at its last gasp; England is growing up.
Still, let us be just towards the aristocracy. It entered the scaleagainst royalty, and was its counterpoise. It was an obstacle todespotism. It was a barrier. Let us thank and bury it.