ave the signal for battle
and massacre on the spot. The peasants closed in roaring, "They have
killed our leader"; when a strange thing happened; something which gives
us a fleeting and a final glimpse of the crowned sacramental man of the
Middle Ages. For one wild moment divine right was divine.

The King was no more than a boy; his very voice must have rung out to
that multitude almost like the voice of a child. But the power of his
fathers and the great Christendom from which he came fell in some
strange fashion upon him; and riding out alone before the people, he
cried out, "I am your leader"; and himself promised to grant them all
they asked. That promise was afterwards broken; but those who see in the
breach of it the mere fickleness of the young and frivolous king, are
not only shallow but utterly ignorant interpreters of the whole trend
of that time. The point that must be seized, if subsequent things are to
be seen as they are, is that Parliament certainly encouraged, and
Parliament almost certainly obliged, the King to repudiate the people.
For when, after the rejoicing revolutionists had disarmed and were
betrayed, the King urged a humane compromise on the Parliament, the
Parliament furiously refused it. Already Parliament is not merely a
governing body but a governing class. Parliament was as contemptuous of
the peasants in the fourteenth as of the Chartists in the nineteenth
century. This council, first summoned by the king like juries and many
other things, to get from plain men rather reluctant evidence about
taxation, has already become an object of ambition, and is, therefore,
an aristocracy. There is already war, in this case literally to the
knife, between the Commons with a large C and the commons with a small
one. Talking about the knife, it is notable that the murderer of Tyler
was not a mere noble but an elective magistrate of the mercantile
oligarchy of London; though there is probably no truth in the tale that
his blood-stained dagger figures on the arms of the City of London. The
mediaeval Londoners were quite capable of assassinating a man, but not of
sticking so dirty a knife into the neighbourhood of the cross of their
Redeemer, in the place which is really occupied by the sword of St.
Paul.

It is remarked above that Parliament was now an aristocracy, being an
object of ambition. The truth is, perhaps, more subtle than this; but if
ever men yearn to serve on juries we may probably guess th