orking mines as busily as ever, but in
new directions. He sought to make himself recognised as necessary either
by the King or by the nation. With the sanguine elasticity which no
failures could damp, he tried to storm his way as a politician into the
royal confidence a few months after he is said to have experienced as a
scholar an effect of the King's invincible prejudice. At some period
after May, 1615, he wrote, and dedicated to James, an imaginary dialogue
between a Counsellor of State and a Justice of the Peace. Under the
title of _The Prerogative of Parliaments in England_ it was published
first posthumously in 1628, at Middleburg. In his lifetime it circulated
in manuscript copies.

[Sidenote: _Hallam's Misconception._]

A conspicuous instance of the misconceptions of which he was the habitual
victim is the view taken of this treatise by Algernon Sidney, and by the
judicious and fair-minded Hallam. Its object was to influence the King to
call a Parliament. Ralegh's point of view of the royal prerogative was, it
must be admitted and remembered, that of a Tudor courtier. It was very
different from that which the Long Parliament learnt and taught. But it was
liberal for his own day, according to a Tudor standard of liberalism. It
was too liberal for the taste of the Court of James. Hallam has caught at
some phrases couched in the adulatory style, 'so much,' Hallam allows,
'among the vices of the age, that the want of it passed for rudeness.'
Ralegh told James in his dedication that 'the bonds of subjects to their
kings should always be wrought out of iron, the bonds of kings unto
subjects but with cobwebs.' Sidney had already protested against these
obsequious phrases; and to Hallam they seem 'terrible things.' He is
equally horrified by a statement in the dialogue that Philip II 'attempted
to make himself not only an absolute monarch over the Netherlands, like
unto the Kings of England and France, but Turk like to tread under his feet
all their national and fundamental laws, privileges, and ancient rights.'
The tenor of the essay itself only has to be equitably considered to enable
its readers to place a more lenient construction than Hallam's even upon
the former sentence. Ralegh merely was pursuing his object, with some
carelessness, after his manner, as to form. Throughout he endeavoured to
sweeten advice he knew to be unpalatable, by assurances that the King need
not fear his prerogative would be permanently i