and irresponsible; and our grand old Magna
Charta was prefaced in something of an insolent
style—"Henry, by the Grace of God; Know ye,
that we of our meer and free will have given
these liberties;" yet royal irresponsibility, the
rights of parliament, and the power of the people,
had never come into open collision, nor, indeed,
had they been much discussed at all, until the
ungainly son of beautiful Mary hobbled into the
throne, and the person of royalty lost some of the
glory which had been ever assumed as its
inalienable possession.

The person might have lost, but the office
still retained; and the rules and canons of
royal life set forth by that most unroyal Stuart,
came briefly to be these: that God loves
hereditary monarchy, and hates every other system
of human government; that primogeniture is
a divine institution, established before either
the Mosaic or the Christian dispensation, and
no human power, nor length of adverse possession,
not even to ten centuries, or twice ten, can
deprive a legitimate sovereign of his rights, or
give the usurper power as against him (only
power as towards the miserable people—royal
prey under all circumstances); that royal
authority must necessarily be despotic, it depending
on the king himself whether it shall be a
benevolent or a tyrannical despotism—a choice
with which his subjects have nothing to do, nor
may they object, how cruel soever the alternative;
that the laws which in England limit the
royal prerogative have been granted by the
king's own free grace, and may at any time be
resumed; and that any treaty made by the king
with the people is a declaration only of present
intentions, and not a contract of which they can
demand the performance; that the king, as the
fountain of justice, may not be sued by a
subject; and that when the Court of Chancery does
justice, it is by royal grace, and not by right of
the subject to be justified; that he himself, James
the Sixth, had come to the throne by the divine
appointment of inherited right; that he was the
"supreme head of the realm in matters both
civil and ecclesiastical, and consequently inferior
to no man upon earth, dependent on no man, and
accountable to no man;" that the king was as
perfect as immortal, not to be attainted nor
could his office cease (yet the "man Charles" at
Whitehall, and the Protectorate, not so many
years after?); that, as head of the Church, the
infamy of Papists, Brownists, and all other of
the non-orthodox, was done to him as their lawful
guide and most sure sovereign, and was in
no wise evil done against their own souls, seeing
that they had no right over their own souls, which
were bound to go as driven and directed. These
were the chief points on which he insisted in his
letters and pamphlets; adding thereto open
insolence to the parliaments assembled during his
reign; the establishment of the irresponsible,
secret, and illegal Star Chamber; and the
repeated assertion that kings were gods, and must
sit upon their thrones judging their people like
gods.

At all this the nation became uneasy; for the
troublous times of dissent were coming on, and
the rebound from servility to independence, from
slavery to freedom, was beginning to make itself
felt. Indeed, there had been a kind of first
faint essay in the person of poor pitiful John
Colville, whose "Palinod, wherein he doth
penitently recant his former proud offences,
specially that treasonable discourse latelie made
by him against the vndoubted and indeniable
title of his dread Soueraigne Lord King James
the Sixt vnto the crowne of England, after the
decease of her maiesty present"—printed at
Edinburgh in sixteen hundred—is about as base and
sickening a recantation as ever would-be rebel
made. "For the Prince is the immediat Lord
of our bodies," says the Palinodist, "and of all
our worldlie fortunes, having power to dispose
thereupon at his pleasure, whereof Samuel in the
originall institution of a King has left to all
posterities an indenyable testimonie. So Princes
beeing as it were Gods of the earth, they are not
answerable to earthly men, but to the supreme
Godhead allanerlie; and we their vassals, doe
as they list to us, can have no warrand to go
further nor Samuel did go, viz. to pray for
them till God forbid." It would be hard to
find a lower baseness for human opinion to
descend to.

Nearly a century later, in 1685, there was
another poor crazy crawling creature called
Augustus Frezer, a clergyman, who preached
before the "Right Worshipful Fellowship of
Merchants Adventurers of England," on the
occasion of King Charles's death. Augustus
Frezer begins by stating that he thinks he
"could not do a more acceptable piece of
service at this juncture of time to God, my
Prince, and my native country, than by
publishing a Discourse, how mean soever, concerning
the Divine Authority of Kings, the
dignity and soundness of their Persons, and the
unconditional Obedience due to them from their
Subjects;" three points "clear and plain to
every vulgar understanding." Augustus then
goes on to say, that "the death of Kings, who
are not only the image of God after a more
excellent manner than other men, but Gods
themselves, does not happen but by an extraordinary
appointment;" that "to remove the crown from
one head to another is a Prerogative which God
has assumed to himself;" and that "never a
prince so cruel but his death has caused grief
and loss to his subjects;" wherefore when good
kings die it is such an awful calamity that it
shows God to be deeply displeased with his
people, else would he never have punished them
so severely. Indeed it is a kind of puzzle to
Augustus that kings should die at all: an
ordinance of nature which somehow he cannot
quite reconcile to himself, nor comprehend how
it was ever allowed by the All Wise and All
Good.

But Augustus Frezer was not alone in his
baseness. "Unhappily, the Church had long taught
the notion that hereditary monarchy alone, among
our institutions, was divine and inviolable; that
the right of the House of Commons to a share