BEFORE THE RESTORATION.

39

to the present day, and which has produced many important CII I AP -moral and political effects.

The government ofHenry the Seventh, ofhisson, and ofhis grandchildren was, on the whole, more arbitrary than thatof the Plantagenets. Personal character may in some degreeexplain the difference; for courage and force of will werecommon to all the men and women of the House of Tudor.

They exercised their power during a period of a hundred andtwenty years, always with vigour, often with violence, some-times with cruelty. They, in imitation of the dynasty whichhad preceded them, occasionally invaded the rights of thesubject, occasionally exacted taxes under the name of loansand gifts, and occasionally dispensed with penal statutes; nay,though they never presumed to enact any permanent law bytheir own authority, they occasionally took upon themselves,when Parliament was not sitting, to meet temporary exigenciesby temporary edicts. It was, however, impossible for theTudors to carry oppression beyond a certain point: for theyhad no armed force, and they were surrounded by an armedpeople. The palace was guarded by a few domestics whomthe array of a single shire, or of a single ward of London,could with ease have overpowered. These haughty princeswere therefore under a restraint stronger than any which merelaws can impose, under a restraint which did not, indeed,prevent them from sometimes treating an individual in anarbitrary and even in a barbarous manner, but which effec-tually secured the nation against general and long continuedoppression. They might safely be tyrants within the precinctof the court: but it was necessary for them to watch withconstant anxiety the temper of the country. Henry theEighth, for example, encountered no opposition when hewished to send Buckingham and Surrey, Anne Boleyn andLady Salisbury, to the scaffold. But when, without the con-sent of Parliament, he demanded of his subjects a contri-