The despotic work of Louis XI., of Richelieu, and of Louis XIV., the creation of a sultan, levelling taken for true equality, the bastinado given by the sceptre, the common abasement of the people, all these Turkish tricks in France the peers prevented in England.  The aristocracy was a wall, banking up the king on one side, sheltering the people on the other.  They redeemed their arrogance towards the people by their insolence towards the king.  Simon, Earl of Leicester, said to Henry III., “King, thou hast lied!” The Lords curbed the crown, and grated against their kings in the tenderest point, that of venery.  Every lord, passing through a royal park, had the right to kill a deer:  in the house of the king the peer was at home; in the Tower of London the scale of allowance for the king was no more than that for a peer—­namely, twelve pounds sterling per week.  This was the House of Lords’ doing.

Yet more.  We owe to it the deposition of kings.  The Lords ousted John Lackland, degraded Edward II., deposed Richard II., broke the power of Henry VI., and made Cromwell a possibility.  What a Louis XIV. there was in Charles I.!  Thanks to Cromwell, it remained latent.  By-the-bye, we may here observe that Cromwell himself, though no historian seems to have noticed the fact, aspired to the peerage.  This was why he married Elizabeth Bouchier, descendant and heiress of a Cromwell, Lord Bouchier, whose peerage became extinct in 1471, and of a Bouchier, Lord Robesart, another peerage extinct in 1429.  Carried on with the formidable increase of important events, he found the suppression of a king a shorter way to power than the recovery of a peerage.  A ceremonial of the Lords, at times ominous, could reach even to the king.  Two men-at-arms from the Tower, with their axes on their shoulders, between whom an accused peer stood at the bar of the house, might have been there in like attendance on the king as on any other nobleman.  For five centuries the House of Lords acted on a system, and carried it out with determination.  They had their days of idleness and weakness, as, for instance, that strange time when they allowed themselves to be seduced by the vessels loaded with cheeses, hams, and Greek wines sent them by Julius II.  The English aristocracy was restless, haughty, ungovernable, watchful, and patriotically mistrustful.  It was that aristocracy which, at the end of the seventeenth century, by act the tenth of the year 1694, deprived the borough of Stockbridge, in Hampshire, of the right of sending members to Parliament, and forced the Commons to declare null the election for that borough, stained by papistical fraud.  It imposed the test on James, Duke of York, and, on his refusal to take it, excluded him from the throne.  He reigned, notwithstanding; but the Lords wound up by calling him to account and banishing him.  That aristocracy has had, in its long duration, some instinct of progress.  It has always given out a certain quantity of appreciable