ck. Elizabeth assembled Parliament as seldom as possible, and reduced
the House of Lords to sixty-five members, amongst whom there was but one
marquis (Winchester), and not a single duke. In France the kings felt
the same jealousy and carried out the same elimination. Under Henry III.
there were no more than eight dukedoms in the peerage, and it was to the
great vexation of the king that the Baron de Mantes, the Baron de
Courcy, the Baron de Coulommiers, the Baron de Chateauneuf-en-Thimerais,
the Baron de la Fere-en-Lardenois, the Baron de Mortagne, and some
others besides, maintained themselves as barons--peers of France. In
England the crown saw the peerage diminish with pleasure. Under Anne, to
quote but one example, the peerages become extinct since the twelfth
century amounted to five hundred and sixty-five. The War of the Roses
had begun the extermination of dukes, which the axe of Mary Tudor
completed. This was, indeed, the decapitation of the nobility. To prune
away the dukes was to cut off its head. Good policy, perhaps; but it is
better to corrupt than to decapitate. James I. was of this opinion. He
restored dukedoms. He made a duke of his favourite Villiers, who had
made him a pig;[22] a transformation from the duke feudal to the duke
courtier. This sowing was to bring forth a rank harvest: Charles II. was
to make two of his mistresses duchesses--Barbara of Southampton, and
Louise de la Querouel of Portsmouth. Under Anne there were to be
twenty-five dukes, of whom three were to be foreigners, Cumberland,
Cambridge, and Schomberg. Did this court policy, invented by James I.,
succeed? No. The House of Peers was irritated by the effort to shackle
it by intrigue. It was irritated against James I., it was irritated
against Charles I., who, we may observe, may have had something to do
with the death of his father, just as Marie de Medicis may have had
something to do with the death of her husband. There was a rupture
between Charles I. and the peerage. The lords who, under James I., had
tried at their bar extortion, in the person of Bacon, under Charles I.
tried treason, in the person of Stratford. They had condemned Bacon;
they condemned Stratford. One had lost his honour, the other lost his
life. Charles I. was first beheaded in the person of Stratford. The
Lords lent their aid to the Commons. The king convokes Parliament to
Oxford; the revolution convokes it to London. Forty-four peers side with
the King, twenty-t