Charles the Bold.  Comines, who had lived amidst the wealthy cities of Flanders, and who had visited Florence and Venice, had never seen a people so well governed as the English.  “Or selon mon advis,” says he, “entre toutes les seigneuries du monde, dont j’ay connoissance, ou la chose publique est mieulx traitee, et ou regne moins de violence sur le peuple, et ou il n’y a nuls edifices abbatus ny demolis pour guerre, c’est Angleterre; et tombe le sort et le malheur sur ceulx qui font la guerre.”

About the close of the fifteenth and the commencement of the sixteenth century, a great portion of the influence which the aristocracy had possessed passed to the crown.  No English king has ever enjoyed such absolute power as Henry the Eighth.  But while the royal prerogatives were acquiring strength at the expense of the nobility, two great revolutions took place, distined to be the parents of many revolutions, the invention of Printing, and the reformation of the Church.

The immediate effect of the Reformation in England was by no means favourable to political liberty.  The authority which had been exercised by the Popes was transferred almost entire to the King.  Two formidable powers which had often served to check each other were united in a single despot.  If the system on which the founders of the Church of England acted could have been permanent, the Reformation would have been, in a political sense, the greatest curse that ever fell on our country.  But that system carried within it the seeds of its own death.  It was possible to transfer the name of Head of the Church from Clement to Henry; but it was impossible to transfer to the new establishment the veneration which the old establishment had inspired.  Mankind had not broken one yoke in pieces only in order to put on another.  The supremacy of the Bishop of Rome had been for ages considered as a fundamental principle of Christianity.  It had for it everything that could make a prejudice deep and strong, venerable antiquity, high authority, general consent.  It had been taught in the first lessons of the nurse.  It was taken for granted in all the exhortations of the priest.  To remove it was to break innumerable associations, and to give a great and perilous shock to the principles.  Yet this prejudice, strong as it was, could not stand in the great day of the deliverance of the human reason.  And it was not to be expected that the public mind, just after freeing itself by an unexampled effort, from a bondage which it had endured for ages, would patiently submit to a tyranny which could plead no ancient title.  Rome had at least prescription on its side.  But Protestant intolerance, despotism in an upstart sect, infallibility claimed by guides who acknowledged that they had passed the greater part of their lives in error, restraints imposed on the liberty of private judgment at the pleasure of rulers who could vindicate their own proceedings only by asserting the liberty of private judgment, these