miseries, pitiable idolatries, prostrate meanness, fantastic assumptions, horrible outrages, and moral slaveries. From that day the eternal struggle of English kings to make themselves demi-gods and their people hereditary puppets, was at an end. The block at Whitehall in 1049, and the heralds at the same place in 1689 proclaiming an elective king and queen, are beacon-lights in history on which the most aspiring monarchs cannot turn their gaze without becoming sobered, nor any people, however distant, or trodden down, without feeling in their secret souls that their oppressions are but of human, not divine origin, and that there is a remedy for them when they can gather into the national heart the spirit and the political union of England.
CHAPTER XV.
THE PROGRESS OF THE NATION.
CONSTITUTION AND LAWS.
The final expulsion of the Stuarts constitutes a new era, at which it is necessary to pause and notice what has been the effect on the condition of the mass of the people, and what they themselves have been doing amid these extraordinary revolutions. We have, however, detailed the alterations in the constitution, the laws, and the church with so much minuteness, that little more is required of us on those heads in this review. From the commencement of the reign of Charles I. to 1640. the country was in a state of constant conflict betwixt the king and the parliament on the question of constitutional rights, which finally became actual warfare, and the country obeyed whichever power was in the ascendant by its armies, the nominal government, however, being chiefly in the parliament in the name of the king. On the death of Charles at the hands of his subjects, in 1649, the commons of England, then sitting as the Long parliament, became the supreme power in the state, declaring themselves so without king or house of lords. But Cromwell's victories enabled him to dismiss this parliament summarily, and from that time forward England was under the dictatorship of Cromwell, who endeavoured to rule by the assistance of a parliament, but found it impossible, and held the reins of government himself, with the aid of a small council.
All the ancient forms of the constitution were thus completely broken down; yet, in no period of our history, as we have seen, were the laws more efficiently administered, or the liberties of the subject more respected; never was the power of the nation more acknowledged abroad. Cromwell was, it is true, too much occupied with maintaining his novel power against a swarm of public and private opponents to be able to carry out all the reforms in the abuses of the state which he contemplated; but he made, or the Long Parliament made, some very sweeping ones. In 1650 the parliament ordered all the report books of the resolutions of judges and other law books to be translated into English, that every one might understand them; and though this was never carried out, yet the requirements of the same acts were that all writs, processes and their returns, all rules, pleadings, indictments, all patents, commissions, records, judgments, statutes, &c., and all proceedings in any courts of law, including courts-leet, courts-baron, and customary courts, should all be written in English, and not in Latin, French, or any other language, and in an ordinary hand and character, and not in what is called court-hand, which most people found difficult to read. This was a regulation received with great repugnance by the lawyers, and overthrown at the restoration.
In the same year certain oppressive fees, called damage-clear, or damna clericorum which had been paid to the clerks of the different law courts before judgment could be executed, were abolished; and this salutary reform was confirmed by a special act of 1665, that is, after the restoration, so that it became a perpetual gain.
In 1653 an act was passed, allowing marriages to be effected before a magistrate, and introducing the simple Scotch custom of a declaration of the parties that they took each other as husband and wife being sufficient. This very reasonable reform, which exempted dissenters from the necessity of going to the churches of the establishment to solemnise their marriages, was also done away with at the restoration, and never recovered by the public till 1830, when dissenters were also authorised to have their marriages effected by their own ministers. At the same time, August, 1653, an act was passed establishing registers of marriages, deaths, and births in every parish—a most important regulation.
In 1654 Cromwell and his council exerted themselves to put down those cruel and debasing sports which had been the delight of the English court as well as of the people—cock-fighting, bull and bear-baiting, and similar practices Colonels Pride and Hewson destroyed the bear gardens which had been so eagerly and constantly frequented by queen Elizabeth, and killed the bears—a circumstance which gave rise to the celebrated poem of "Hudibras," by Butler. And during the same year the protector and council also passed an act prohibiting duels, and making the delivering of a challenge to fight one punishable by six months imprisonment, and the production of securities for good behaviour for a year. So far was Cromwell beyond the spirit of his own and even of our times till within a very recent period. This act went so far as to make it punishable by fine, and by reparation to the party injured, to provoke any one to violence by provoking words or gestures—a measure introduced now into our police laws.
At the same time an act was issued to reform the court of chancery, expediting its dispatch of business by relieving it of a multitude of causes, which were distributed through the other courts, and regarding its fees, and fixing them by a table. In 1652 the Long Parliament had voted the abolition of this court altogether; but Cromwell opposed its entire suppression, believing it might be reformed to the advantage of the public, and this reform he now accomplished.
In 1656 that radical parliament nick-named the Barebones Parliament by the indignant lawyers, abolished all the chief feudal tenures by which lands had been held of the crown, and abolished the court of wards and liveries, taking away "all homages, fines, licences, seizins, pardons for alienation, incident or arising from, or by reason of wardship, livery, primer seizen, or oustre le main," &c.; and that all tenures in capite and knights' service should be abolished, and such
