_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.

What partiality, what objects of the politics of the House of Lancaster,
or of Cromwell, has his present Majesty, or his Majesty's family? What
power have they within any of these principalities, which they have not
withi