That mixture in the English Government,that harmony between King,Lords,and commons,did not always subsist.England was enslaved for a long series of years by the Romans,the Saxons,the Danes,and the French successively.William the Conqueror particularly,ruled them with a rod of iron.He disposed as absolutely of the lives and fortunes of his conquered subjects as an eastern monarch;and forbade,upon pain of death,the English either fire or candle in their houses after eight o'clock;whether was this to prevent their nocturnal meetings,or only to try,by an odd and whimsical prohibition,how far it was possible for one man to extend his power over his fellow-creatures.It is true,indeed,that the English had Parliaments before and after William the Conqueror,and they boast of them,as though these assemblies then called Parliaments,composed of ecclesiastical tyrants and of plunderers entitled barons,had been the guardians of the public liberty and happiness.
The barbarians who came from the shores of the Baltic,and settled in the rest of Europe,brought with them the form of government called States or Parliaments,about which so much noise is made,and which are so little understood.Kings,indeed,were not absolute in those days;but then the people were more wretched upon that very account,and more completely enslaved.The chiefs of these savages,who had laid waste France,Italy,Spain,and England,made themselves monarchs.Their generals divided among themselves the several countries they had conquered,whence sprung those margraves,those peers,those barons,those petty tyrants,who often contested with their sovereigns for the spoils of whole nations.These were birds of prey fighting with an eagle for doves whose blood the victorious was to suck.Every nation,instead of being governed by one master,was trampled upon by a hundred tyrants.The priests soon played a part among them.Before this it had been the fate of the Gauls,the Germans,and the Britons,to be always governed by their Druids and the chiefs of their villages,an ancient kind of barons,not so tyrannical as their successors.These Druids pretended to be mediators between God and man.They enacted laws,they fulminated their excommunications,and sentenced to death.The bishops succeeded,by insensible degrees,to their temporal authority in the Goth and Vandal government.The popes set themselves at their head,and armed with their briefs,their bulls,and reinforced by monks,they made even kings tremble,deposed and assassinated them at pleasure,and employed every artifice to draw into their own purses moneys from all parts of Europe.The weak Ina,one of the tyrants of the Saxon Heptarchy in England,was the first monarch who submitted,in his pilgrimage to Rome,to pay St.
Peter's penny (equivalent very near to a French crown)for every house in his dominions.The whole island soon followed his example;England became insensibly one of the Pope's provinces,and the Holy Father used to send from time to time his legates thither to levy exorbitant taxes.At last King John delivered up by a public instrument the kingdom of England to the Pope,who had excommunicated him;but the barons,not finding their account in this resignation,dethroned the wretched King John and seated Louis,father to St.Louis,King of France,in his place.However,they were soon weary of their new monarch,and accordingly obliged him to return to France.
