remonstrance, obtained an acknowledgment of
their right to superintend the enrolment, arid
so guard against this kind of fraud. It was
given in these words: "The kyng of his grace
especial, graunteth yat fro hensforth nothing be
enacted to the peticions of his commune yat
be contrarie of hir askyng."

Besides this power of altering the petition on
entering it on the statute-roll, and of course the
right of refusing it in toto in parliament, the
king had—or at least assumed—the right
to respite or postpone the operation of an
ordinance after he had assented to it. This
he did by entering his respectuatur on the
parliament-roll; and there happens to be an act
of the eleventh year of Henry the Fourth, entered
on the parliament-roll, but which appears never
to have been placed on the statute-roll, which
bears in the margin the words "respectuatur per
dominum principem et consilium suum," which
is said to have been one of Prince Hal's frolics.
If so, what is the meaning of " consilium
suum?" Could any of those " old lords of the
council " that Falstaff speaks of, have connived
at the joke; or were Falstaff, Bardolph, and
Poins the "consilium," the advisers of this
"great presumption," as Lord Coke styles it?
Be it as it may, the matter caused grave discussion
at that great tournament of lawyers the
trial of the Earl of Macclesfield, which may
be read in the sixteenth volume of Howell's
State Trials, and where it was very wisely ruled
that neither the presence of a "respectuatur,"
nor the absence of an entry on the statute-roll,
could invalidate an act which had been solemnly
assented to by the king.

King James the First, designated in the act
relating to the Gunpowder Plot as " the most
great, learned, and religious king" that ever
reigned in England, in one of his orations to
the parliament talks of "crop and cuffing"
statutes. And Lord Bacon spoke of " sleeping
statutes." For lack of a better subdivision of
the subject, let us make one founded on these
metaphors.

And, first, of cuffing statutes. The way in
which many of the earlier ordinances battle
with and cuff each other (though in a slightly
different sense to that intended by the English
Solomon) is instructive and entertaining.
Prominent among this pugnacious class of acts, are
those which were passed at the instance of a
dominant faction in the state, with a view to the
annihilation of an opposite party. They
frequently take the extreme form of acts of
attainder and confiscation; they are all remarkable
for the violence with which they denounce
their adversaries, and the eloquence with which
they chant the praises of their own party; and
when we remember that from the reign of
Richard the Second until the accession of the
present dynasty, there were not more than two or
three reigns following each other in which the
succession to the crown was undisturbed; and when
we add the conspiracies of nobles, the schemes
of faction, and even the honest efforts of men
to shake off the oppression of tyrannous rulers;
we shall see an innumerable array of hostile and
conflicting elements, which would be sure to
evoke the spirit of angry and partisan legislation.
When one faction had obtained a victory
over another, the first thing they did was to
invoke the aid of parliament to confirm their
power by attainting and denouncing their
antagonists: generally forgetting that another turn
in the wheel of fortune might bring their enemies
uppermost, and that then the words of a statute
would be but a poor barrier against the will of
the stronger. In the twelfth year of Edward the
Second, an act was passed banishing those
respectable characters, the Spencers—père et fils
—from "the realm of England, never to
return;" but very shortly afterwards, when the
Spencers had again acquired an ascendancy,
another statute was passed which delivered a very
unceremonious cuff to the first, by repealing it
and declaring that it would never have been
passed had not the Earl of Hereford, with his
armed bands, overawed the parliament and the
king. A little while longer, and we see the
nobles again in the ascendant, the Spencers again
banished, and the act revoking their exile itself
repealed. A repetition of this cuffing process
took place in the reign of Richard the Second,
and his successor. By the twentieth of the
twenty-first of Richard, it was enacted by the
party who probably foresaw their own impending
ruin, that whoever should pursue to repeal,
any of the statutes then passed, should be
adjudged a traitor; but by an act passed in the
first year of the traitor Henry the Fourth, the
whole of the proceedings of this parliament
were expressly repealed.

In much later periods of our history we find
the same man a traitor in one reign, and a
patriot in the next, although in the mean while he
may have lost his head. Difficulties sometimes
occurred in these matters; it was easy work to
attaint a man, confiscate his property, behead
him and quarter him; but when it became a
question as to the reversal of the attainder, a
restitution of the status quo was not so easy;
there was no surgeon in the pay of the ruling
powers who could put the head on again which
had been taken off by an unjust sentence; and
although acts of parliament are extraordinarily
powerful, there is not one that ever went so far
as to enact that a man who had suffered judicial
murder should, under pains and penalties, come
to life again. Also, in some instances when the
legal attainder was removed, a moral attainder
might still remain which no legislative act could
remove. Oil the other hand, when the question
was the attainder of a man after his death, a
foolish and imbecile attempt was sometimes made
by his enemies to wreak their vengeance on his
lifeless remains. Thus, after the attainder of
Cromwell by the act of Charles the Second, the
body of that great Englishman was torn from its
resting-place in the sepulchre of the English
kings, and publicly exposed on the gallows at
Tyburn.

The statutes on the subject of religion are,
perhaps, more remarkable than any for their