awed for more than two centuries, it simply strove to extinguish forever the vital spirit which in the better days had made them actual restraints upon the royal authority. With the despotic powers of the crown reorganized and reëstablished in a royal council, which was practically unlimited save by the authority which created it, the monarchy had more to gain than to fear from the perpetuity of a set of lifeless institutions which it could override at its pleasure, or manipulate at its convenience. The reëstablishment of the monarchy did not end the existence of the parliament; as a shadow of its former self it lived on as a convenient place in which acts and decrees dictated or permitted by the council could be registered, and business of minor importance transacted. Neither was the ordinary administration of law in the central and local tribunals radically modified or suspended, — the whole judicial system was simply overawed by and made subservient to the unrestrained and despotic powers of the council, in which the royal will was omnipotent. The forms of the older constitutional life were retained, and yet the monarchy as reëstablished by Edward was in substance the monarchy as it had existed under the Norman and early Angevin kings, a monarchy still limited by the self-imposed restraints arising out of administrative routine and orderly legal procedure, and yet absolutely unlimited by the coercive constitutional restraints which had been put upon it by the patriots an statesmen of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. claimed trians were In the reestablishment of the monarchy Edward was care- Edward ful to emphasize the fact that, as the right of the house of that the Lancaster to the throne had rested solely on a parliamentary Lancaselection, that of the house of York rested solely upon an in- kings de facto non defeasible hereditary title, a title which he claimed the dejure. Lancastrian parliaments had no right to ignore, no power to set aside. Upon that assumption, then for the first time. practically asserted in English politics, Edward held that the Lancastrian kings were only kings de facto non de jure2 1 "The doctrine of indefeasable hereditary right, the doctrine that there was some virtue in a particular line of succession which the power of parliament itself could not overthrow, was first brought forward as the formal justification of the claims of the house of York."- Freeman, The Growth of the Eng. Const., p. 194. See, also, Sir 2 The theory was that Edward IV. that their judicial acts were valid and binding only so far as he and his parliaments saw fit to ratify them. The strength which the monarchy drew from the self-sustaining theory embodied in this new doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right, Edward was careful to supplement by every practical expedient which he could devise for its protection against that most dangerous of all the restraining measures to which the parliamentary system had given birth, the power of the estates to coerce the crown through the withholding of supplies. What had given edge to this weapon in the hands of the Lancastrian parliaments was the continual need of the kings of that house of the means with which to carry on strife with Scotland, and at the same time to maintain the never-ending war with France, which was only brought to a close by the final loss of Acquitane late in the reign of Edward's Henry VI. The financial relief which the ending of the policy of Hundred Years' War then brought to the monarchy was made peace. permanent by a policy of peace which, throughout the reigns of Edward IV. and Henry VII., remained unbroken. While the treasury was thus protected from the drain of war on the one hand, its coffers were filled on the other by various expedients which, although they involved the agency of parliament in the first instance, did not involve its annual assent or coöperation. In the flush of victory which followed the A sweeping battle of Towton, Edward obtained the passage of a sweeptainder, and ing bill of attainder 2 through which the crown was enriched a life grant by forfeiture of the estates of fourteen lords and more than a hundred knights and esquires. Four years later, after the victory at Hexham, he obtained from parliament a grant of tunnage and poundage and the subsidy on wool for life.3 After this life grant of the customs made in 1465, the meetings of parliament grew less and less frequent. The long established right of the nation to express its will at least once a year through the national council was first suspended during the later years of Henry VI., when elections were avoided as bill of at of the customs. Meetings of parliament grow less and less fre quent. and that the three Lancastrian kings 1 Rot. Parl., v. pp. 489 seq. The validity of laws passed during the Lancastrian reigns was not questioned. 2 Ibid., v. pp. 467-475. 8 Ibid., v. p. 508. in favor of ward's much as possible, and when such parliaments as were called were rather armed assemblies of the greater nobles, with their liveried partisans at their backs, than authoritative meetings of the king's advisers. The blow thus directed at the authority of parliament during the confusion resulting from civil war was now followed by a studied contempt of its influence in times of peace. During the quarter of a century of Yorkist rule the nation was but seven times called upon to elect new parliaments, and in the brief periods during which such parliaments sat their deliberations were confined to the registry of such acts as the king in council saw fit to dictate, or to the enactment of statutes touching the growing commerce of the realm which it was his interest to promote.1 In the No statute words of Hallam: "The reign of Edward IV. is the first liberty dur during which no statute was passed for the redress of grieving Edances or maintenance of the subject's liberty."2 As a part of reign. the policy through which Edward thus freed the monarchy from all actual dependence upon the parliamentary system must be noted that most despotic of all the expedients of royal taxation through which the crown extorted gifts of money from particular subjects under the name of benevo- Benevolences. Although this unconstitutional device, through which lences. the subject's money was taken without parliamentary consent, may have been practised in substance in preceding reigns, its active employment by Edward IV. has put upon him the odium of its authorship. To the wealth which the crown thus derived from forfeitures, confiscations, acts of resumption, from the life grant of the customs, and from benevolences, must be added the profits which Edward derived from his adventures as a private trader,- adventures which bore the fame of the merchant king as far as the ports of Greece and Italy. While Edward was thus emancipating the monarchy from Expansion the financial and political restraints which the growth of the cial powers parliamentary system had put about it, he was also careful to of the coun 1 "In the reign of Edward IV. the parliament seemed to be principally taken up with the arrangement of the commercial system."- Reeves, Hist. Eng. Law, vol. iv. p. 9. 2 Middle Ages, vol. iii. p. 189. regarded even at the time as an inno- Reeves, Hist. Eng. Law, vol. iv. cil. ers first re then expanded by statute. impart a fresh force to the judicial powers of the council which the growth of the law courts and the rise of the equitable jurisdiction of the chancellor had contracted without exhausting. In the explanation heretofore made of the process through which these courts were evolved out of the council, the fact was emphasized that a supreme and undefined residuum of judicial power still remained after their creation. The necessity for protecting the ordinary administration of justice, in the subsidiary tribunals thus organized, from encroachment upon the part of the supreme and undeSuch pow fined judicial power 2 retained by the council, led to the enactstrained,- ment of a series of restraining statutes which extend from the reign of Edward I. to that of Henry IV. Not until the reign of Henry VI. did a new legislative policy begin whose aim was, not to narrow the judicial powers of the council, but to give to them a wider expansion. The uniformly weak and inefficient system of internal administration which prevailed throughout the Lancastrian reigns, and which even in times of peace could neither preserve order nor guarantee a firm administration of law, almost completely gave way during the protracted confusion of the civil war. And yet at the very time when the peace of the kingdom was most poorly kept, at the very time when the steady enforcement of law was scarcely attempted, the law as a science reached a very high Scientific degree of theoretical perfection. During the reigns of Henry perfection VI. and Edward IV. the science of pleading reached the limits of its mediæval growth: the law schools known as inns Henry VI. of court and of chancery were filled with zealous students, while the bench was adorned by able judges who discussed. the law with great learning and elaboration. The difficulty lay not in the scientific perfection of the law, but in the want of administrative power adequate to its enforcement. heretofore explained in connection with the subject of main of the law in the reigns of and Ed ward IV. As tainly survived, and even received extension." Dicey, The Privy Council, p. 69. 8 See above, p. 516 and note 2. 4 Reeves, Hist. Eng. Law, vol. iii. p. 577 Cf. Ibid., pp. 621-627. As to the history of the inns of court, see Fortescue, De Laudibus, c. 49. cal ineffi turbulence times. nary powers tenance, the provincial administration of justice was para- Its practilyzed by the turbulent local magnates, who with their liveried ciency owretinues at their backs could overawe the judges at the assizes, ing to the delay a hazardous issue, seize upon the lands in dispute, or of the even resist the enforcement of a hostile judgment after it was rendered.1 The remedy finally proposed for evils of this char- Extraordiacter took the form of statutes which authorized the council of the counto draw before it all persons and all causes which could not cil invoked be dealt with in the ordinary local tribunals. With this end ervation of in view, the Act of 31st Henry VI. c. 2, was passed, enlarging reign of the powers of the council, whose "judicial authority had, to Henry VI. judge by the minutes of Henry VI.'s reign, been exerted chiefly in cases where, from the might of the offenders, the courts were powerless to enforce justice." 3 for the pres order in the converts into an en The effort thus made in the reign of Henry VI. to Edward IV. strengthen the hands of the council, in order to make it the the council defender of order against anarchy, was followed in the reign gine of of Edward IV. by an attempt to convert the judicial power tyranny. of the king in council into an irresponsible engine of tyranny. By the patents issued by Edward, first to Tiptoft and then to Rivers, the jurisdiction of the high constable was extended, in contempt of the common law, to cases of high treason. The accused were thus deprived not only of the right of trial by jury, but their acquittal or conviction was committed, Jurisdic without appeal, to the high constable, who, as the king's vice- high congerent, was authorized to hear, examine, and conclude all stable. such causes, however begun, even summarily and plainly, without noise and show of judgment, on simple inspection of fact. Through the judgments of this unconstitutional tribunal, which in some cases adopted the law of Padua as the rule of its procedure, Edward made way with many of his Lancastrian opponents. During the period in which the high constable, in contempt 1 See above, p. 567. 2 As to the relation of the council as thus invigorated to the body afterwards called, under the Tudors, the "Star Chamber," see Reeves, Hist. Eng. Law, vol. iii. pp. 469, 470, and notes, Finlason ed. 3 Dicey, The Privy Council, p. 72. 4"Audiendum, examinandum et fine debito terminandum, etiam summarie et de plano sine strepitu et figura judi- tion of the |