The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-08-13

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of La Fere-en-Lardenois, the Baron
of Mortagne, and few more, maintained
themselves barons and peers of France. In
England the crown gladly let peerages die
out: in Annes time, to take only one example,
the extinctions since the twelfth century had
come to make total of five hundred and
sixtv-fve peerages abolished The War of
the Roses had commenced that determination
of dukes which Mary Tudor completed with
the axe. It was decapitating the nobility.
Cutting off its dukes was cutting off its head.
Good policy, doubtless; but bribing is better
than killing James [ understood this He
made a duke of his favorite Villiers, who
had made him a pig. Transformation
of the feudal duke into the courtier duke.
We shall have a swarm of the new brood.
Charles II will make duchesses of two of his
mistresses, Barbara of Southampton and
Louisa de Querouel. Under Anne, twenty
five dukes, three of whom foreigners, Cum
berland, Cambridge, and Schonberg. Are
these courtly proceedings, invented by James
!, successful No. The House of Lords feels
itself managed by intrigue, and is irritated.
1t is angry with James /; it is angry with
Charles l, who, let us say incidentally, may
have helped to kill his father, as Mary de Me
dici may have helped to kill her husband.
There is a break between Charles / and the
peerage. The Lords, who, under James
!, had summoned to their bar speculation
in the person of Bacon, under Charles 1 tried
treason in the person of Straiford. They had
condemned Bacon; they condemn Stralford
One had lost his honor the other lost his life
Straffords execution was a preliminary de-
capitation of Charles l. The Lords assisted
the Commons. The king holds a Parliament
at Oxford; the revolution holds one in Lon
don; forty-three peers go with the king,
twenty-five with the republic. From this ac-
knowledgment of the people by the lords
springs the bill If 5ghts, an outline of our
2ightS of nun, dim shadow thrown from the
depths of the future, by the French Revolu-
ton, upon the English.
Such were the services of the peerage In
voluntary, it is true. And dearly paid, for
this peerage is a terrible parasite. Still, con-
siderable The despotic work of Louis XI.
Richelieu. Louis XIV, the construction of a
Sultan, general abasement taken for equality,
the bastinado administered by the sceptre, the
masses levelled in ubjugation-all this Orien-
tai structure raised in France, was prevented
in England by the peers They made of their
aristocracy WALL hemming in the
king on one side, sheltering the peo-
pie on the other. They atone for their
arrogance to the people by their insolence to
the king. Simon Earl Of Leicester, said to
Henry III, King you lie :" The peers i'm
pose servitudes on the crown; they touch the
king in his sensitive point, hunting. Every
nobleman who passes through a royal park
has the right to kill a deer in it. The noble
man is at home in the kings palace 1t is
owing to the nobility that the king was pro-
vided for in the Tower of London at the same
rate as peer, twelve pounds sterling a week.
Nay, more. 1t is owing to the mobiles that
the king could be uncrowned. The Lords
turned out John Lakeland, degraded Edward
pi,1,,pl al,o IIo,,
and made Cromwell possible. What a pos
sible Louis XIV in Charles T. Thanks to
Cromwell, it remained latent. Besides let
us say here Cromwell himself aspired to the
peerage, a fact which no historian has no.
ticed: this was why he married Elizabeth
Bourchier, descendant and heiress of a GER
tain Cromwell, Lord Bourchier whose peer
age had become extinct in 147l, and of a
Bourshier, Lord RObesart, another peerage
extinct in 1929. Growing with the
formidable growth of events, he found
it shorter to rule by suppressing the
king than by reclaiming the peerage. The
forms Of the peers, sometimes threatening,
included the king. The two sword-bearers Of
the Tower, standing, axe on shoulder, at the
right and left Of the accused peer who ap-
peared at the bar, were as much for the king
as for any other lord. During five centuries,
the old House of Lords had plan, and fol-
lowed it steadily We may note its days of
negligence and weakness, as, for instance,
that singular occasion when it allowed itself
to be seduced by the shipload Of Sheeses,
hams, and Greek wines which Julius II sent
it. The English aristocracy was restless,
naughty, ungovernable, always on the watch,
patriotically defiant. At the end of the
seventeenth century, by the tenth act of the
year 1854, it took from the borough of Stock
bridge, in Southampton, the right of repre-
sentation, and forced the Commons to annul
the election in that borough, because it was
contaminated by papist fraud. 1t had inn
posed the test-oath on James, Duke of York;
and on his refusal, excluded him from the
throne. Nevertheless, he regned; but the
Lords finally caught him again and
! drove him out. During its long existence
this aristocracy has had some instinct of pro.
gress. A certain amount of appreciable LIGHT
has always emanQted from it, except near it's
end, which is now approaching. Under
! James ii, it maintained in the Lower House
the proportion of three hundred and FORTY.
! six burgesses to ninety-tWO knights the six
! teen barons of courtesy of the Cinque Ports
were more than counterbalanced by the fifty
citizens of the twenty-five towns. ALTHOUGH
a great source of corruption and very selfish
the aristocracy were singularly impartial
/ in certain cases. 1t has been hardly Judged
! History has kept its best treatment for the
Commons. The justice of the proceeding
maybe questioned. econsidert that the Lord
played a grand part Oligarchy is indepen
denoe in the stage of barbarism; but it is in
dependence. Look at Poland, nominally
kingdom, really a republic. The peers OF
England suspected the throne, and kept it il
ward. On many occasions the Lords knew
how to resist better than the Commons
They gave check to the king. Thus in the
Ill l., Il n