n on "The Prerogative Royal," and
"The Trew Laws of Free Monarchies," as he had on witches and devils. All
this verbal despotism is artfully converted into so many acts of despotism
itself; and thus they contrive their dramatic exhibition of a blustering
tyrant, in the person of a father of his people, who exercised his power
without an atom of brutal despotism adhering to it.

* * * * *

THE KING'S IDEA OF THE ROYAL PREROGATIVE.

When James asserted that a king is above the laws, he did not understand
this in the popular sense; nor was he the inventor or the reviver of
similar doctrines. In all his mysterious flights on the nature of "The
Prerogative Royal," James only maintained what Elizabeth and all the
Tudors had, as jealously, but more energetically exercised.[A] Elizabeth
left to her successor the royal prerogative strained to its highest pitch,
with no means to support a throne which in the succeeding reign was found
to be baseless. The king employed the style of absolute power, and, as
Harris says, "entertained notions of his prerogative amazingly great, and
bordering on impiety." It never occurred to his calumniators, who are
always writing, without throwing themselves back into the age of their
inquiries, that all the political reveries, the abstract notions, and the
metaphysical fancies of James I. arose from his studious desire of being
an English sovereign, according to the English constitution--for from
thence he derived those very ideas.

[Footnote A: In Sir Symund D'Ewes's "Journals of the Parliament," and in
Townshend's "Historical Collections," we trace in some degree Elizabeth's
arbitrary power concealed in her prerogative, which she always considered
as the dissolving charm in the magical circle of our constitution. But I
possess two letters of the French ambassador to Charles IX., written from
our court in her reign; who, by means of his secret intercourse with those
about her person, details a curious narrative of a royal interview granted
to some deputies of the parliament, at that moment refractory, strongly
depicting the exalted notions this great sovereign entertained of the
prerogative, and which she asserted in stamping her foot.]

* * * * *

THE LAWYERS' IDEA OF THE ROYAL PREROGATIVE.

The truth is, that lawyers, in their anxiety to define, or to defend the
shadowy limits of the royal prerogative, had contrived some str