Henry III., who was the most
contemptible of tyrants, and against his heir, Henry of Navarre, who, as
a Protestant, repelled the majority of the nation, fought for the same
principles with sword and pen.

Many shelves might be filled with the books which came out in their
defence during half a century, and they include the most comprehensive
treatises on laws ever written. Nearly all are vitiated by the defect
which disfigured political literature in the Middle Ages. That
literature, as I have tried to show, is extremely remarkable, and its
services in aiding human progress are very great. But from the death of
St. Bernard until the appearance of Sir Thomas More's _Utopia_, there
was hardly a writer who did not make his politics subservient to the
interest of either Pope or King. And those who came after the
Reformation were always thinking of laws as they might affect Catholics
or Protestants. Knox thundered against what he called _the Monstrous
Regiment of Women_, because the Queen went to mass, and Mariana praised
the assassin of Henry III. because the King was in league with
Huguenots. For the belief that it is right to murder tyrants, first
taught among Christians, I believe, by John of Salisbury, the most
distinguished English writer of the twelfth century, and confirmed by
Roger Bacon, the most celebrated Englishman of the thirteenth, had
acquired about this time a fatal significance. Nobody sincerely thought
of politics as a law for the just and the unjust, or tried to find out a
set of principles that should hold good alike under all changes of
religion. Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_ stands almost alone among the
works I am speaking of, and is still read with admiration by every
thoughtful man as the earliest and one of the finest prose classics in
our language. But though few of the others have survived, they
contributed to hand down masculine notions of limited authority and
conditional obedience from the epoch of theory to generations of free
men. Even the coarse violence of Buchanan and Boucher was a link in the
chain of tradition that connects the Hildebrandine controversy with the
Long Parliament, and St. Thomas with Edmund Burke.

That men should understand that governments do not exist by divine
right, and that arbitrary government is the violation of divine right,
was no doubt the medicine suited to the malady under which Europe
languished. But although the knowledge of this truth might become an