1485-1603 Another act of Henry VII. conferred a sort of constitutional right on such persons as are poor, to sue in formâ pauperis, in the courts of law, and to have counsel assigned them, without payment of fees. Court of The Court of Wards was constituted by the 32 Henry VIII., and placed under the jurisdiction of one person, called the master of the court, with a body of Act constiofficers to assist him, for the purpose of taking possession of the lands tuting the belonging to the King's wards, and of selling the same during minority; Wards. in short, all the rights and prerogatives which the feudal system had conferred upon the crown with regard to minors, widows, and others, as idiots and imbeciles, were enforced by this court. The great constitutional law of Elizabeth's reign, the "Act for the Relief of the Poor," will be fully described in the ensuing chapter. to civil always 11. The English Constitution was not an absolute monarchy. From the foregoing view of the practical exercise of government in this period, and of the resistance which parliament made, vigorously, if not successfully, to the high assumptions of the crown, more especially in the reign of Elizabeth, it will be seen that the English constitution was a monarchy bounded by law, far unlike the actual state of the principal kingdoms on the continent, much more, such states as Turkey or Moscovy, to which Hume continually likens England under Elizabeth's rule. Elizabeth certainly attempted a more absolute power than any of her predecessors; but her own wisdom, and the sagacity of her counsellors, always avoided offence in this. Two guarantees Two to civil liberty were always observed in her reign. Justice guarantees was openly administered according to known laws, truly inter- liberty preted, and fair constructions of evidence. Parliament had observed. the right to inquire into, and obtain the redress of, public grievances. The language adopted in addressing Elizabeth was, indeed, remarkably submissive; but hypocritical adulation was so much among the vices of the age, that the want of it passed for rudeness. But several passages might be quoted from the writers of the period, and the speeches in parliament, even from addresses to the Queen, which would prove conclusively that Englishmen then, did not consider that they were the subjects of an absolute monarch, or that they enjoyed no greater measure of civil freedom, or had no more fundamental liberties to boast of, than Frenchmen or Spaniards. Speaker Onslow, in addressing the Queen, in 1566, expressly said, that, by the common law, she could not do as she would at her own pleasure, without order, as other princes did. Aylmer, afterwards Bishop of London, in answer Contemporto Knox's book, called "Blast of the Trumpet against the ary opinions Monstrous Regiment (i. e. government) of Women," which was directed in reality against Mary, Queen of Scots, said that England was a mixed monarchy, the image of which was in the parliament, CHAP. VII. wherein were three estates; the King or Queen representing the monarchy; the Lords, the aristocracy; and the burgesses and knights, the democracy; and that, if parliament used their privileges, the King could ordain nothing without them. Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity will furnish evidence still more satisfactory, as well as the treatise on the commonwealth of England, written by Sir Thomas Smith, secretary of state to Elizabeth. There was, however, a notion very prevalent in the cabinet of Elizabeth, that, besides the common prerogatives, the crown possessed a kind of paramount sovereignty, which was denominated its absolute incident to the abstract nature of sovepower. reignty. A sort of dictatorship, in fact, for the preservation of the state from destruction; on the same ground that martial law is proclaimed during an invasion, and houses destroyed in expectation of a siege. But this extravagant notion was soon destroyed; it was the source of all James I.'s bickerings with his parliaments, and of the troubles which brought his son to the scaffold.* Absolute Good Hope power, THE TUDOR PERIOD. 1485 TO 1603. SECTION I.-TRADERS AND SEAFARERS. 1. Discoveries of the Portuguese and Spaniards. Of all the inventions of the middle ages, that which produced the most rapid change in the fortunes and knowledge of Europeans, was the invention of the mariner's compass, which was first brought into use for naval purposes in the fourteenth century. The Canaries were the earliest discovery made by it (1345); and in the next century the Portuguese made numerous discoveries along Cape of the African coast, until Vasco di Gama, in 1498, doubled discovered. the Cape of Good Hope (which Bartholomew Diaz had previously discovered), and reached India, where he established the first Portuguese settlement in Cochin. He was followed by the great Albuquerque, who established Goa (1511), and made it the capital of all the other settlements in the east. A regular trade thus began with India along the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and the monopoly of the Mediterranean trade with the east, held by the Genoese and Venetians, became worthless. One of the fleets employed in this new traffic was cast on the shores of the American continent (1500), and thus Brazil was * Hallam's Const. Hist., I., 276-284. Discovery of Brazil. 1485-1603 and discovered. But in the meantime, the existence of a new world across the Atlantic had been ascertained by Columbus, the great Genoese navigator, who made his first voyage westward in 1492, in order, as he thought, to reach the further side of India. Men were then ignorant of the true shape of the earth, Voyages of believing it to be flat; and so the world laughed at Columbus. Columbus as a visionary. He laid his plans before many courts; and sent his brother Bartholomew to Henry VII. to ask his support. The English King, eager to acquire wealth, but reluctant to risk anything in its acquisition, sent for Columbus, to learn more of the strange enterprise. But he was too late; Isabella of Spain had already supplied Columbus with money and ships, and thus Spain became the discoverer and owner of the western world. The realization of Columbus's wonderful dreams put all Europe in a great ferment; private gentlemen fitted out expeditions on their own account, one of whom, Amerigo Vespucci, published an account of his voyages; and so all men called the new continent America, after him. About 1521, Cortez, after a bloody Conquests war, conquered Mexico; Pizarro conquered Peru about of Cortez 1535; and other adventurers subdued Terra Firma, New Pizarro. Grenada, and other countries on what was called the Spanish Main. The possession of the gold and silver mines was the object of these conquests; to work the mines, the Spaniards imported negroes from Africa; and two fleets, called the Plate or Silver Fleets, annually brought their treasures to Spain, the one sailing from Porto Bello, the other from Vera Cruz. Besides which, a galleon, or plate ship, sailed annually to the Philippines, which fell into the possession of Spain, together with the other Portuguese settlements, when Philip II. united Spain and Portugal under one crown (1581). The Spaniards and Portuguese were thus the first, and, for a time, the only European nations, who established colonies in new lands. To prevent quarrels, therefore, Alexander VI., as arbiter of the world, assigned to Spain all the countries situated to the west of a meridian 375 leagues westward of the Azores, and the rest to Portugal. According to this decision, the position of the Moluccas became a point First of dispute; and it was to decide this, that Magellan set roat out on the first voyage round the world (1519-1522). round the world. 2. English discoveries: Cabot's expeditions. Although the voyages of the Spaniards and Portuguese had excited the English as much as any other European nation, and dazzled their imagination with the pictures of new worlds, and new races of men who were the owners of unbounded treasures, which they had neither CHAP. VII. the power to defend nor the skill to extract from the earth, they had not, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, attained to such skill in navigation, as qualified them for carrying into execution such long and hazardous expeditions. While industry and commerce had been making gradual progress for the last two centuries, both in the north and south of Europe, the English, absorbed in their ineffectual efforts to conquer France, continued blind to the advantages of their own situation, and they did little more than creep along their own coasts, in small barks, when the trading vessels of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the Hanse Towns, visited every port in Europe, and carried on an active intercourse with its various nations. Hence we find, that the first voyage of discovery made from an English port, was under the direction of a foreigner. This was John Cabot, a Venetian, who, with his three sons, had settled in Bristol. Henry VII. granted him a patent (1495), authorising him to sail, under the banner of England, towards the east, north, or west, in order to discover countries unoccupied by a Christian state; to take possession of them in his name, and to carry on an exclusive trade with the inhabitants, on condition of paying a fifth part of the profit on every voyage to the crown. Cabot and his son, Sebastian, the most scientific and enterprising of the family, did not set sail till the beginning of May, 1497. They steered to the north-westward, under the impression that they would reach India by a shorter course than that which Columbus had taken, and would fall in with the coast of Cathay or China. On the 24th of June, they descried a large island, which they called Prima Vista, but the Newfound seamen, Newfoundland; continuing their course westdiscovered. ward, they soon reached the continent of North America, and sailed along it from the coast of Labrador to that of Virginia, from 58° to 36° north latitude. No attempt, however, was made at either settlement or conquest; and, when Cabot returned, he found the King unwilling to countenance any further enterprises. The newly-discovered lands lay within the limits of the ample donative which Alexander VI. had conferred upon Ferdinand and Isabella; and as no person, in that age, questioned the validity of a papal grant, and Henry set a high value upon the friendship of Spain, Sebastian Cabot entered into the service of that country (1512). In 1516, he again visited his native country, and made an expedition, at the cost of some Bristol merchants, to Brazil, and other parts of South America; for English traders thus early began to break through the restrictions with which Spain and Portugal had shut out their colonial traffic from strangers.* Hakluyt, III., 498. land 1485-1603 Nor was it only to the west that their energies were directed. They extended their commercial views to the east, and by establishing a direct intercourse with the Archipelago and the Levant, they found new markets for their woollen cloths, and supplied their countrymen with the luxuries of the east, at a price hitherto beyond the reach of all but the very wealthy. But the discovery of a shorter passage to India by the north-west was still the favourite project of the nation; and, in 1517, Sebastian Cabot, in conjunction with one Sir Thomas Perte, made another attempt, and is said to have entered Hudson's Bay. The Discovery voyage, as well as another made afterwards, was disastrous Bay. and unsuccessful; many of the crew perished with hunger, and the survivors were constrained to support life by feeding on the bodies of their dead companions. of Hudson's merchant adventurers 3. Expeditions of Willoughby and Chancellor to discover a north-east passage. One great trade resulted from these voyages of Cabot-the Newfoundland cod-fishery, which was encouraged by several statutes enacted during the reigns of Henry VIII. and his successor. The shorter route to China and the Spice Islands, however, allured the English more than any other scheme of adventure; and Cabot warmly urged that an attempt should be made by the north-east, seeing that three attempts in the opposite direction had failed (1553). This route had been suggested to Henry VIII. by Robert Thorne, a London merchant, who had long resided in Seville. Several noblemen and persons of rank, together with some principal merchants, having associated for this purpose, were incorporated, by a charter from IncorporaEdward (1553), under the title of "The Company of othe Merchant Adventurers, for the discovery of regions, dominions, islands, and places unknown." Cabot was appointed governor of this company, and forthwith three vessels were sent out, under Sir Hugh Willoughby, containing on board 100 mariners, besides merchants, surgeons, a chaplain, and officers. After having reached the 72nd degree of north latitude, Willoughby took refuge for the winter in a harbour in Russian Lapland, where he, and the crews of two of his ships, seventy in number, were frozen to death. The third ship, commanded by Richard Chancellor, reached a solitary port on the White Sea, called St. Nicholas, since grown into the considerable town of Archangel. He there learned that the country was a province of a vast empire, subject to the Great Duke or Czar of Muscovy, who resided in a great city 1,200 miles inland. With a spirit becoming the officer of such an expedition, Chancellor immediately started on sledges |