THE ENGLISH GOVERNMENT AND CONSTITUTION. CHAPTER I. FIRST PRINCIPLES OF THE ENGLISH GOVERNMENT AND CONSTITUTION. It is now the generally received opinion, and I think a probable opinion, that to the provisions of that reign (viz. of Henry the Seventh) we are to refer the origin, both of the unlimited power of the Tudors, and of the liberties wrested by our ancestors from the Stuarts; that tyranny was their immediate, and liberty their remote consequence; but he must have great confidence in his own sagacity, who can satisfy himself that, unaided by subsequent events, he could from a consideration of the causes have foreseen the succession of effects so different.'-Fox's History of James II. It would undoubtedly have required a sagacity of no ordinary kind to have predicted, at the commencement of the arbitrary sway of the House of Tudor, the course of weak misrule and daring opposition, of fierce contention, and not less cruel victory, which, marking with a line of blood the history of the Stuart dynasty, at length ended in a peaceable revolution, and the establishment of regular liberty. But those who have seen the harvest can have no doubt that the seed was in the ground; and at this day it ought to be within our power to point out what were the elements of freedom in the state of England, during the reign of the Tudors, which have been since developed in her matchless B |