nd that he alone could make or alter the laws of his
kingdom."[419] In 1399 such language was already held to be criminal in
England. In 1527 Claude Gaillard, prime President of the Parliament of
Paris, says in his remonstrance to Francis I., king of France: "We do
not wish, Sire, to doubt or question your power; it would be a kind of
sacrilege, and we well know you are above all law, and that statutes
and ordinances cannot touch you.... "[420] The ideas on political
"sacrilege" differed widely in the two countries.

From the end of the fourteenth century, an Englishman could already say
as he does to-day: My business is not the business of the State, but the
business of the State is my business. The whole of the English
constitution, from the vote on the taxes to the _habeas corpus_, is
comprised in this formula. In France the nation, practical, lucid, and
logical in so many things, but easily amused, and too fond of chansons,
neglected the opportunities that offered; the elect failed to attend the
sittings; the bargains struck were not kept to. The Westminster
Parliament voted subsidies on condition that reforms would be
instituted; the people paid and the king reformed. In France, on the
contrary, during the Middle Ages, the people tried not to pay, and the
king tried not to reform. Thus the levying of the subsidy voted by the
States-General of 1356-7, was the cause of bloody riots in France; the
people, unenlightened as to their own interests, did their best to
destroy their defenders: the agents of the States-General were massacred
at Rouen and Arras; King John "the Good" published a decree forbidding
the orders of the States to be fulfilled, and acquired instant
popularity by this the most tyrannic measure of all his reign.

These differences between the two political bodies had important
consequences with regard to the development of thought in the two
countries; they also excited the wonder and sometimes the admiration of
the French. "The king of England must obey his subjects," says
Froissart, "and do all they want him to."[421] "To my mind," writes
Commines, "of all the communities I know in the world, the one where
public business is best attended to, where the people are least exposed
to violence, where there are no buildings ruined and pulled down on
account of wars, that one is England."[422] "The English are the masters
of their king," writes Ambassador Courtin in 1665, in almost the same
words as Froiss