as classical was to mediaeval Latin; and Roman law
supplanted indigenous systems in France and in Germany, in Spain and
in Scotland. Both the Roman imperial law and the Roman imperial
constitution were useful models for kings of the New Monarchy; the
Roman Empire was a despotism; _quod principi placuit legis habet
vigorem_ ran the fundamental principle of Roman Empire.[66] Nor was
this all; Roman emperors were habitually deified, and men in the
sixteenth century seemed to pay to their kings while alive the Divine
honours which Romans paid to their emperors when dead. "Le nouveau
Messie," says Michelet, "est le roi."[67]

[Footnote 66: The conclusion of the maxim _utpote
cum lege regia quae de imperio ejus lata est,
populus ei et in eum omne suum imperium et
potestatem conferat_ (Ulpian, _Digest_, I., iv.,
1), was conveniently forgotten by apologists for
absolutism, though the Tudors respected it in
practice.]

[Footnote 67: _Hist. de France_, ed. 1879, ix.,
301.]

Nowhere was the king more emphatically the saviour of society than in
England. The sixty years of Lancastrian rule were in the seventeenth
century represented as the golden age of parliamentary government, a
sort of time before the fall to which popular orators appealed when
they wished to paint in vivid colours the evils of Stuart tyranny. But
to keen observers of the time the pre-eminent characteristic of
Lancastrian rule appeared to be its "lack of governance" or, in modern
phrase, administrative anarchy.[68] There was no subordination in the
State. The weakness of the Lancastrian title left the king at the
mercy of Parliament, and the limitations of Parliament were never (p. 033)
more apparent than when its powers stood highest. Even in the realm of
legislation, the statute book has seldom been so barren. Its principal
acts were to narrow the county electorate to an oligarchy, to restrict
the choice of constituencies to resident knights and burgesses, and to
impair its own influence as a focus of public opinion. It was not
content with legislative authority; it interfered with an executive
which it could hamper but could not control. It was possessed by the
inveterate fallacy that freedom and strong government are things
incompatible; that the executive is the natural enemy of the Le