is, that the suit cost about fifteen thousand pounds.  But as the Duke of Lancaster is but a sort of Duke Humphrey, and not worth a groat, our sovereign was obliged to pay the costs of both.  Indeed, this art of converting a great monarch into a little prince, this royal masquerading, is a very dangerous and expensive amusement, and one of the king’s menus plaisirs, which ought to be reformed.  This duchy, which is not worth four thousand pounds a year at best to revenue, is worth forty or fifty thousand to influence.

The Duchy of Lancaster and the County Palatine of Lancaster answered, I admit, some purpose in their original creation.  They tended to make a subject imitate a prince.  When Henry the Fourth from that stair ascended the throne, high-minded as he was, he was not willing to kick away the ladder.  To prevent that principality from being extinguished in the crown, he severed it by act of Parliament.  He had a motive, such as it was:  he thought his title to the crown unsound, and his possession insecure.  He therefore managed a retreat in his duchy, which Lord Coke calls (I do not know why) “par multis regnis.”  He flattered himself that it was practicable to make a projecting point half way down, to break his fall from the precipice of royalty; as if it were possible for one who had lost a kingdom to keep anything else.  However, it is evident that he thought so.  When Henry the Fifth united, by act of Parliament, the estates of his mother to the duchy, he had the same predilection with his father to the root of his family honors, and the same policy in enlarging the sphere of a possible retreat from the slippery royalty of the two great crowns he held.  All this was changed by Edward the Fourth.  He had no such family partialities, and his policy was the reverse of that of Henry the Fourth and Henry the Fifth.  He accordingly again united the Duchy of Lancaster to the crown.  But when Henry the Seventh, who chose to consider himself as of the House of Lancaster, came to the throne, he brought with him the old pretensions and the old politics of that house.  A new act of Parliament, a second time, dissevered the Duchy of Lancaster from the crown; and in that line tilings continued until the subversion of the monarchy, when principalities and powers fell along with the throne.  The Duchy of Lancaster must have been extinguished, if Cromwell, who began to form ideas of aggrandizing his house and raising the several branches of it, had not caused the duchy to be again separated from the commonwealth, by an act of the Parliament of those times.