daring, the nation to a pitch which it had yet neither the education nor the experience to enable it to maintain. Traitor ambition enslaved them through the army: and the army, once more in alliance with artful aristocracy, brought in again monarchy. But the Stuarts were a race of incorrigible dunces in the school of experience: they were swept away, and with them terminated the second great period of our aristocratic history.

During this era they had first been humbled by the crown, and then compelled to alliance with it against the people. They had now, in the final expulsion of the Stuarts, learned a lesson so striking in itself, and of such fatal import to them, that it became written in indelible characters on their hearts. They beheld the ancient order of things totally reversed. The people, who had been regarded but as the ground on which the only creatures worthy of the name of men trod; or, at best, but as the dust of the ground which dared to rise no higher than to curl round and lick their shoes, now stood forth in vast and colossal masses as unquestionably the great and supreme power on earth. The crown, which they, the aristocracy, had always held as their gift, was gravely seized, and presented as its sole and resumeable gift to the man of its choice. They themselves, who had formerly been the sole lawgivers, and had, at their pleasure, curbed the crown, and humbled it to the dust, now stood before the people and the people's king, a third and questionable estate, which another movement of the mass might for ever annihilate. The reign of the strong hand-the reign of feudalism—was for ever past. No menaces of hostile arms, no martial alliance with kingship, could ever serve them. The reign of STRENGTH was closed: there was but one alternative, and to that they resorted to CUNNING.

Here commenced the third and last era of aristocratic power in England, the era which has continued to our days, and yet continues. They could no longer openly conquer the people by violence, they resolved therefore to deceive them. In this their subtle scheme, how stupendous has been their success ! Artfully allying themselves with the crown, because thence should flow on them honours and emoluments, they have, at the same time, eternally boasted of "The glorious constitution of England; 'its three finely-balanced powers-king, nobles, and comThe people, busy in weaving and spinning, in all species of curious handicraft art and manufactures, in farming at home, in trafficking on the seas, in founding colonies, and conquering nations abroad, have gone on wonderfully augmenting their own wealth, and the value of the lands of the aristocracy.

of

mons."

In the mean time, this aristocracy, burrowing like moles mining in the dark, have by degrees carefully ousted the people out of the constitution altogether, As the old borough towns fell into insignificance, they resisted all removal of their franchises by their everlasting cries of the glorious, the sacred constitution, which must not be touched. By this means, and by purchase, they ultimately became the possessors of the third state in the constitution,—of the house called the House of Commons, and the consequences everybody knows, and everybody feels. It is long since the people of England ceased to possess any actual share in the constitution. The House of Commons, no longer the House of the People, became the greatest man-trap which ever was framed in the history of the world by Cunning and Strength. It became a rack on which the people were stretched and compelled to give up at pleasure their wealth and their heart's blood. In their own name the people had the mortification and the misery to see their money voted away; their children murdered in foreign wars for the maintenance of the rotten system of aristocracy; the profits of their ships, their manufactures, their handicraft labours, their steam-engines and their ploughs, all extracted from their pockets, and expended on the brood of the aristocracy. The national debt, the most stupendous debt ever piled on the head of any luckless nation since the foundation of the world, has been heaped on them by this Protean and insolent class; and, spite of the fame of the Reform Bill, aristocracy still sits in the people's house, and makes them groan with its exactions.

But the extent to which it has succeeded in possessing itself of everything belonging to the British people, government, colonies, offices, taxes, pensions, public charities, corn-laws, and, in fact, of everything, will form the subject of a later chapter. We have here taken a rapid glance at its successive periods, shapes, and changes, and shall now proceed to trace these out a little more closely.

CHAPTER VI.

HISTORIC VIEW OF THE ARISTOCRACY OF THE MIDDLE AGES,

We have seen that the broods of mongrel foreigners which the Conqueror had planted in the land, were of the most savage and rapacious nature. They were equally ready to plunder the people as to revolt against their king and benefactor, if they were at all restrained in their lawless courses. The usurpation of Henry I. obliged him to give to these marauders fresh license. Stephen, again, in the same case, was, in order to win them to himself and prevent them going to the empress, compelled to grant them all permission to fortify their castles and build new ones; and these, says Henry of Huntingdon, became, almost without exception, dens of thieves and cut-throats. But this did not secure faith where no faith was. They speedily began to declare that they were not sufficiently paid for their adhesion, and began to seize the keys of royal castles and estates. Having got what they could of these, they fell away from him on all sides; and, shutting themselves up in the castles which he himself had allowed them to fortify, laid him under the necessity of either besieging them one after another, or of granting fresh concessions to their clamorous and insatiable demands of lands, honours, and offices. The Saxon chronicler has left a most striking description of these so-called nobles, and of their treatment of the people:-"All this king's time, all was dissension, and evil, and rapine. The great men soon rose against him. They had sworn oaths, but maintained no truth. They had built castles, which they held out against him. They cruelly oppressed the wretched people of the land with this castle-work. They filled their castles with devils and evil men. They seized those whom they supposed to have any goods, and threw them into prison for their gold and silver, and inflicted on them unutterable tortures. Some they hanged up by the feet, and smoked with foul smoke; some by the thumbs, or by the beard, and hung coats of heavy mail on their feet. They threw them into dungeons with adders and snakes and toads They made

many thousands perish with hunger. They laid tribute after tribute upon towns and cities, and this in their language they called tenserie (chastisement). When the townsmen had nothing more to give, they set fire to all the towns. Thou mightest go a whole day's journey, and not find a man sitting in a town, nor an acre of land tilled. The poor died of hunger, and those who

had been men well to do, begged for bread. Never was more mischief done by heathen invaders. To till the ground was to plough the sands of the sea. This lasted the nineteen years that Stephen was king, and it grew continually worse and worse."

This is a pretty good picture of the ancestors of our aristocracy to begin with. To such an extent had they not only invaded the property of the people, but the property and demesne of the crown, that on Henry II. coming to the throne, he found that, of the vast estates of his fathers, there was not enough left to maintain his establishment. With the sanction, therefore, of his council, he set about to wrest from them his own. But he was compelled to raise a great army to accomplish this, and to besiege and drive out those sturdy usurpers. Some of their castles were surrendered without bloodshed; but others were only reduced by storm or famine. Eleven hundred of these "dens of thieves" were levelled to the ground, to the great joy of the people. But this great work had nearly cost Henry his life at the siege of the castle of Bridgenorth, which Hugh de Mortimer held against him. Amongst the names of the nobles thus introduced, we find not only this Mortimer, but the Earl of Nottingham, the Earl of Albemarle, the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen's brother, and other great names; these were, however, not only such as had fortified themselves in their recent aggressions, but there still remained the host of the castles of older times, to which some of these very men, when expelled from their more newly gotten holds, retired.

In the absence of Henry in his continental wars, and in the unsettled times of Richard and John, we read that the whole kingdom was studded with these castles, from which the owners were ready to dart out on all that they were able to overcome : they extended their parks and chases in imitation of the kings, and, for this purpose, drove, with lawless violence, the people from their fields, meadows, and pasture lands; and when these ferocious hunters burst through inclosures and swept over cornfields in pursuit of the flying deer, the wretched cottagers were compelled to hurry to their doors with provisions and refreshments, lest they should be reckoned disaffected and be punished as traitors.*

While the people were thus recklessly trodden down, the nobles continually increased their armed bands, and assumed a style of living at once rude, savage, and oppressive. From the king downwards, every man kept about him a great train, and travelled, thus attended, from place to place. The train of

* William of Newbury; Roger Hoveden, &c.

Henry II., as described by Peter of Blois, a cotemporary and friend of the king, consisted of knights and nobles, throngs of cavalry and foot soldiers, baggage-waggons, tents, and packhorses, players, prostitutes, and marshals of the prostitutes, gamesters, cooks, confectioners, mimes, dancers, barbers, pimps, and parasites; and at the setting forth of the day's march, there was such jostling, overturning, shouting, and brawling, that you might have imagined hell had let loose its inhabitants.

The style of living and the train of Beckett, the chancellor of the kingdom, was still more extraordinary: his house was crowded by several hundred servants, many in the richest dresses, and a perpetual feast was served up in costliest vessels. On his embassage to Paris, he was attended by two hundred knights, many barons and nobles, and a complete host of domestics, all richly armed and attired, the chancellor himself having four-andtwenty changes of apparel: his train of waggons and sumpterhorses, his hounds and hawks, his huntsmen and falconers, seemed to announce the presence of more than a king. When he entered a town, the ambassadorial procession was led by two hundred and fifty boys, singing national songs: then followed his hounds, led in couples, and these were succeeded by eight waggons, each with five large horses and five drivers in frocks; each waggon was covered with skins, and guarded by two men and a fierce mastiff: two of the waggons were loaded with ale to give to the people, one carried the vessels and furniture of his chapel, another of his bed-chamber, a fifth was loaded with his kitchen apparatus, a sixth carried his attendant plate and wardrobe, and the other two were devoted to the use of his household servants. After the waggons, came twelve sumpter-horses, a monkey riding on each with a groom behind on his knees: then came the esquires, carrying the shields, and leading the war-horses of their respective knights, and then other esquires, youths of gentle blood, falconers, officers of the household, knights, and priests, and, last of all, appeared the great chancellor himself with his familiar friends.* That the French nobility had not arrived at this cumbrous pomp is evident by the French remarking, on seeing it, "What manner of man must the king of England be, when his chancellor travels in such state ?"

In the reign of Cœur de Lion, his chancellor, Longchamp, manifested an equal pomp; a numerous guard always surrounded his house, he seldom travelled attended by less than a thousand horses, and cotemporaries declared that, wherever he staid a night on the road, in abbey or house, he and his

* Fitzstephen; Peter of Blois.

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