sovereign action of the whole people, was foiled by
Leicester's incapacity, and by the consummate policy of
Barnevelt. The Huguenots, having lost their leaders in
1572, reconstituted themselves on a democratic footing,
and learned to think that a king who murders his subjects forfeits his divine right to be obeyed. But Junius
Brutus and Buchanan damaged their credit by advocating
regicide; and Hotoman, whose Franco-Gallia is the
most serious work of the group, deserted his liberal
opinions when the chief of his own party became king.
The most violent explosion of democracy in that age
proceeded from the opposite quarter. When Henry of
Navarre became the next heir to the throne of France,
the theory of the deposing power, which had proved
ineffectual for more than a century, awoke with a new
and more vigorous life. One-half of the nation accepted
the view, that they were not bound to submit to a king
they would not have chosen. A Committee of Sixteen
made itself master of Paris, and, with the aid of Spain,
succeeded for years in excluding Henry from his capital.
The impulse thus given endured in literature for a whole
generation, and produced a library of treatises on the
right of Catholics to choose, to control, and to cashier
their magistrates. They were on the losing side. IVlost
of them were bloodthirsty, and were soon forgotten. But
the greater part of the political ideas of Milton, Locke,
and Rousseau, may be found in the ponderous Latin of
Jesuits who were subjects of the Spanish Crown, of
Lessius, Molina, Mariana, and Suarez.
The ideas were there, and were taken up when it suited them by extreme adherents of Rome and of Geneva; but they produced no lasting fruit until, a century after the Reformation, they became incorporated in new religious systems. Five years of civil war could not exhaust the royalism of the Presbyterians, and it required the expulsion of the majority to make the Long Parliament abandon monarchy. It had defended the constitution against the crown with legal arts, defending precedent against innovation, and setting up an ideal in
