tutions were discredited and people were
indifferent to parliamentary rights and privileges: "A plague on both
your Houses," was the popular feeling, "give us peace, above all peace
at home to pursue new avenues of wealth, new phases of commercial
development, peace to study new problems of literature, religion, and
art"; and both Houses passed out of the range of popular imagination,
and almost out of the sphere of independent political action.
Parliament played during the sixteenth century a modester part than it
had played since its creation. Towards the close of the period (p. 035)
Shakespeare wrote his play of _King John_, and in that play there is
not the faintest allusion to Magna Carta.[69] Such an omission would
be inconceivable now or at any time since the death of Elizabeth; for
the Great Charter is enshrined in popular imagination as the palladium
of the British constitution. It was the fetish to which Parliament
appealed against the Stuarts. But no such appeal would have touched a
Tudor audience. It needed and desired no weapon against a sovereign
who embodied national desires, and ruled in accord with the national
will. References to the charter are as rare in parliamentary debates
as they are in the pages of Shakespeare. The best hated instruments of
Stuart tyranny were popular institutions under the Tudors; and the
Star Chamber itself found its main difficulty in the number of suitors
which flocked to a court where the king was judge, the law's delays
minimised, counsel's fees moderate, and justice rarely denied merely
because it might happen to be illegal. England in the sixteenth
century put its trust in its princes far more than it did in its
parliaments; it invested them with attributes almost Divine. By Tudor
majesty the poet was inspired with thoughts of the divinity that doth
hedge a king. "Love for the King," wrote a Venetian of Henry VIII. in
the early years of his reign, "is universal with all who see him, for
his Highness does not seem a person of this world, but one (p. 036)
descended from heaven."[70] _Le nouveau Messie est le Roi._

[Footnote 69: Magna Carta may almost be said to
have been "discovered" by the parliamentary
opponents of the Stuarts; and in discovering it,
they misinterpreted several of its clauses such as
the _judicium parium_. Allusion was, however, made