he same which afterward claimed the common lands from
the village communities. It was the same institution which only two
generations before had eagerly helped to destroy, not merely things of
popular sentiment like the monasteries, but all the things of popular
utility like the guilds and parishes, the local governments of towns and
trades. The work of the great lords may have had, indeed it certainly
had, another more patriotic and creative side; but it was exclusively
the work of the great lords that was done by Parliament. The House of
Commons has itself been a House of Lords.

But when we turn to the other or anti-despotic aspect of the campaign
against the Stuarts, we come to something much more difficult to dismiss
and much more easy to justify. While the stupidest things are said
against the Stuarts, the real contemporary case for their enemies is
little realized; for it is connected with what our insular history most
neglects, the condition of the Continent. It should be remembered that
though the Stuarts failed in England they fought for things that
succeeded in Europe. These were roughly, first, the effects of the
Counter-Reformation, which made the sincere Protestant see Stuart
Catholicism not at all as the last flicker of an old flame, but as the
spread of a conflagration. Charles II., for instance, was a man of
strong, sceptical, and almost irritably humorous intellect, and he was
quite certainly, and even reluctantly, convinced of Catholicism as a
philosophy. The other and more important matter here was the almost
awful autocracy that was being built up in France like a Bastille. It
was more logical, and in many ways more equal and even equitable than
the English oligarchy, but it really became a tyranny in case of
rebellion or even resistance. There were none of the rough English
safeguards of juries and good customs of the old common law; there was
_lettre de cachet_ as unanswerable as magic. The English who defied the
law were better off than the French; a French satirist would probably
have retorted that it was the English who obeyed the law who were worse
off than the French. The ordering of men's normal lives was with the
squire; but he was, if anything, more limited when he was the
magistrate. He was stronger as master of the village, but actually
weaker as agent of the King. In defending this state of things, in
short, the Whigs were certainly not defending democracy, but they were
in a real sense