THE reign of Charles the First stands out by itself from all the other English reigns since the beginning of the monarchy. We have had civil wars in other reigns; but only in this a civil war of principles. Opposite principles have struggled for the ascendancy in other reigns, but only in this with the sword. Here is the only decided turning-point, or hinge, as we may call it, in the progressive movement of the constitution; the changes it has undergone at all other times have been made gradually, and as it were by a bending process; at this crisis it was forced, as if by a fracture, to develop

VOL. VI.

B

itself in altogether a new direction. The twenty years, indeed, from 1640 to 1660, do make such a disruption as occurs nowhere else in our history: they lie like a gulf beyond which everything is old; on this side of which everything is comparatively new or modern. Our original political system closes with the reign of Charles I.; that system was then seen for the last time in its integrity. It never was rebuilt from the ruin that then overtook it. For it is a great mistake to suppose that even the Restoration was a restoration of the spirit and actuating principle of that old system—that even the misgovernment of the twenty-eight years which preceded the Revolution was at all a thing of the same nature with the_monarchism which prevailed before the meeting of the Long Parliament. Only think of a House of Commons debating the exclusion of the next heir to the throne under either Elizabeth or James I.! The truth is, that down to the civil war the prerogative was, in the theory of the constitution, above the law. It is not possible to deny it. There was nothing short of the destruction of life (if even that was an exception) that might not have been constitutionally done by the crown of its own authority. The liberty of the subject was entirely at the mercy of the crown; any man might at any time be apprehended and thrown into prison by the government, and detained there without being brought to trial, for as long as it chose. Men's property was scarcely better protected from rights of purveyance, claims of wardship, and other arbitrary exactions; if it was even held, which it scarcely was, that the crown had no right of levying taxes in any circumstances by its own authority. But upon that question we might refer to the decision of the judges in the case of ship-money, and the arguments upon which it was founded. Then, for security of person, any man might be charged with a state crime, and in the absence of all evidence might thereupon be put to the rack. Torture, indeed, was illegal, or contrary to law; but it was according to prerogative, and it was in constant use, because the prerogative, as we have said, was above the law. All this