All who know anything of those times, know that the conduct of Hampden in the affair of the ship-money met with the warm approbation of every respectable Royalist in England.  It drew forth the ardent eulogies of the champions of the prerogative and even of the Crown lawyers themselves.  Clarendon allows Hampden’s demeanour through the whole proceeding to have been such, that even those who watched for an occasion against the defender of the people, were compelled to acknowledge themselves unable to find any fault in him.  That he was right in the point of law is now universally admitted.  Even had it been otherwise, he had a fair case.  Five of the judges, servile as our Courts then were, pronounced in his favour.  The majority against him was the smallest possible.  In no country retaining the slightest vestige of constitutional liberty can a modest and decent appeal to the laws be treated as a crime.  Strafford, however, recommends that, for taking the sense of a legal tribunal on a legal question, Hampden should be punished, and punished severely, “whipt,” says the insolent apostate, “whipt into his senses.  If the rod,” he adds, “be so used that it smarts not, I am the more sorry.”  This is the maintenance of just authority.

In civilised nations, the most arbitrary governments have generally suffered justice to have a free course in private suits.  Stratford wished to make every cause in every court subject to the royal prerogative.  He complained that in Ireland he was not permitted to meddle in cases between party and party.  “I know very well,” says he, “that the common lawyers will be passionately against it, who are wont to put such a prejudice upon all other professions, as if none were to be trusted, or capable to administer justice, but themselves:  yet how well this suits with monarchy, when they monopolise all to be governed by their year-books, you in England have a costly example.”  We are really curious to know by what arguments it is to be proved, that the power of interfering in the law-suits of individuals is part of the just authority of the executive government.

It is not strange that a man so careless of the common civil rights, which even despots have generally respected, should treat with scorn the limitations which the constitution imposes on the royal prerogative.  We might quote pages:  but we will content ourselves with a single specimen:  “The debts of the Crown being taken off, you may govern as you please:  and most resolute I am that may be done without borrowing any help forth of the King’s lodgings.”

Such was the theory of that thorough reform in the state which Strafford meditated.  His whole practice, from the day on which he sold himself to the court, was in strict conformity to his theory.  For his accomplices various excuses may be urged; ignorance, imbecility, religious bigotry.  But Wentworth had no such plea.  His intellect was capacious.  His early prepossessions were on the side of popular