the House of Lords to sixty-five members, amongst whom there was but one marquis (Winchester), and not a single duke.  In France the kings felt the same jealousy and carried out the same elimination.  Under Henry III. there were no more than eight dukedoms in the peerage, and it was to the great vexation of the king that the Baron de Mantes, the Baron de Courcy, the Baron de Coulommiers, the Baron de Chateauneuf-en-Thimerais, the Baron de la Fere-en-Lardenois, the Baron de Mortagne, and some others besides, maintained themselves as barons—­peers of France.  In England the crown saw the peerage diminish with pleasure.  Under Anne, to quote but one example, the peerages become extinct since the twelfth century amounted to five hundred and sixty-five.  The War of the Roses had begun the extermination of dukes, which the axe of Mary Tudor completed.  This was, indeed, the decapitation of the nobility.  To prune away the dukes was to cut off its head.  Good policy, perhaps; but it is better to corrupt than to decapitate.  James I. was of this opinion.  He restored dukedoms.  He made a duke of his favourite Villiers, who had made him a pig;[22] a transformation from the duke feudal to the duke courtier.  This sowing was to bring forth a rank harvest:  Charles II. was to make two of his mistresses duchesses—­Barbara of Southampton, and Louise de la Querouel of Portsmouth.  Under Anne there were to be twenty-five dukes, of whom three were to be foreigners, Cumberland, Cambridge, and Schomberg.  Did this court policy, invented by James I., succeed?  No.  The House of Peers was irritated by the effort to shackle it by intrigue.  It was irritated against James I., it was irritated against Charles I., who, we may observe, may have had something to do with the death of his father, just as Marie de Medicis may have had something to do with the death of her husband.  There was a rupture between Charles I. and the peerage.  The lords who, under James I., had tried at their bar extortion, in the person of Bacon, under Charles I. tried treason, in the person of Stratford.  They had condemned Bacon; they condemned Stratford.  One had lost his honour, the other lost his life.  Charles I. was first beheaded in the person of Stratford.  The Lords lent their aid to the Commons.  The king convokes Parliament to Oxford; the revolution convokes it to London.  Forty-four peers side with the King, twenty-two with the Republic.  From this combination of the people with the Lords arose the Bill of Rights—­a sketch of the French Droits de l’homme, a vague shadow flung back from the depths of futurity by the revolution of France on the revolution of England.

Such were the services of the peerage.  Involuntary ones, we admit, and dearly purchased, because the said peerage is a huge parasite.  But considerable services, nevertheless.