ry bad grace--and admit
the law to their records. We shall soon have occasion to note one of the
most striking instances of this unequal contest between king and
parliament, in which power rather than right or learning won the day. In
spite, however, of occasional checks, parliament manfully and
successfully maintained its right to throw obstacles in the way of hasty
or inconsiderate legislation. In this it was often efficiently assisted
by the Chancellor of France, the highest judicial officer of the crown,
to whom, on his assuming office, an oath was administered containing a
very explicit promise to exercise the right of remonstrance with the
king before affixing the great seal of state to any unjust or
unreasonable royal ordinance.[35]

[Sidenote: Abuses in the administration of justice.]

Not that either the Parliament of Paris or the provincial parliaments
were free of grave defects deserving the severe animadversion of
impartial observers. It was probably no worse with the Parliament of
Bordeaux than with its sister courts;[36] yet, when Charles the Ninth
visited that city in 1564, honest Chancellor L'Hospital seized the
opportunity to tell the judges some of their failings. The royal
ordinances were not observed. Parliamentary decisions ranked above
commands of the king. There were divisions and violence. In the civil
war some judges had made themselves captains. Many of them were
avaricious, timid, lazy and inattentive to their duties. Their behavior
and their dress were "dissolute." They had become negligent in judging,
and had thrown the burden of prosecuting offences upon the shoulders of
the king's attorney, originally appointed merely to look after the royal
domain. They had become the servants of the nobility for hire. _There
was not a lord within the jurisdiction of the Parliament of Bordeaux but
had his own chancellor in the court to look after his interests_.[37] It
was sufficiently characteristic that the same judicial body of which
such things were said to its face (and which neither denied their truth
nor grew indignant), should have been so solicitous for its dignity as
to send the monarch, upon his approach to the city, an earnest petition
that its members _should not be constrained to kneel_ when his Majesty
entered their court-room! To which the latter dryly responded, "their
genuflexion would not make him any less a king than he already
was."[38]

[Sidenote: The University of Paris.]

Amon