to be such, than laws in our ordinary sense.  They were the “deeds of arrangement” of mediaeval society affirmed and re-affirmed from time to time, and the principal controversy was, of course, between the king and nation—­ the king trying to see how far the nation would let him go, and the nation murmuring and recalcitrating, and seeing how many acts of administration they could prevent, and how many of its claims they could resist.

Sir James Mackintosh says that Magna Charta “converted the right of taxation into the shield of liberty,” but it did nothing of the sort.  The liberty existed before, and the right to be taxed was an efflorescence and instance of it, not a sub-stratum or a cause.  The necessity of consulting the great council of the realm before taxation, the principle that the declaration of grievances by the Parliament was to precede the grant of supplies to the sovereign, are but conspicuous instances of the primitive doctrine of the ante-Tudor period, that the king must consult the great council of the realm, before he did anything, since he always wanted help.  The right of self-taxation was justly inserted in the “great treaty”; but it would have been a dead letter, save for the armed force and aristocratic organisation which compelled the king to make a treaty; it was a result, not a basis—­an example, not a cause.

The civil wars of many years killed out the old councils (if I might so say):  that is, destroyed three parts of the greater nobility, who were its most potent members, tired the small nobility and the gentry, and overthrew the aristocratic organisation on which all previous effectual resistance to the sovereign had been based.

The second period of the British Constitution begins with the accession of the House of Tudor, and goes down to 1688; it is in substance the history of the growth, development, and gradually acquired supremacy of the new great council.  I have no room and no occasion to narrate again the familiar history of the many steps by which the slavish Parliament of Henry VIII. grew into the murmuring Parliament of Queen Elizabeth, the mutinous Parliament of James I., and the rebellious Parliament of Charles I. The steps were many, but the energy was one—­the growth of the English middle-class, using that word in its most inclusive sense, and its animation under the influence of Protestantism.  No one, I think, can doubt that Lord Macaulay is right in saying that political causes would not alone have then provoked such a resistance to the sovereign unless propelled by religious theory.  Of course the English people went to and fro from Catholicism to Protestantism, and from Protestantism to Catholicism (not to mention that the Protestantism was of several shades and sects), just as the first Tudor kings and queens wished.  But that was in the pre-Puritan era.  The mass of Englishmen were in an undecided state, just as Hooper tells us his father was—­“Not believing in Protestantism,