wo with the Republic. From this combination of the
people with the Lords arose the Bill of Rights--a sketch of the French
_Droits de l'homme_, a vague shadow flung back from the depths of
futurity by the revolution of France on the revolution of England.

Such were the services of the peerage. Involuntary ones, we admit, and
dearly purchased, because the said peerage is a huge parasite. But
considerable services, nevertheless.

The despotic work of Louis XI., of Richelieu, and of Louis XIV., the
creation of a sultan, levelling taken for true equality, the bastinado
given by the sceptre, the common abasement of the people, all these
Turkish tricks in France the peers prevented in England. The aristocracy
was a wall, banking up the king on one side, sheltering the people on
the other. They redeemed their arrogance towards the people by their
insolence towards the king. Simon, Earl of Leicester, said to Henry
III., "_King, thou hast lied_!" The Lords curbed the crown, and grated
against their kings in the tenderest point, that of venery. Every lord,
passing through a royal park, had the right to kill a deer: in the house
of the king the peer was at home; in the Tower of London the scale of
allowance for the king was no more than that for a peer--namely, twelve
pounds sterling per week. This was the House of Lords' doing.

Yet more. We owe to it the deposition of kings. The Lords ousted John
Lackland, degraded Edward II., deposed Richard II., broke the power of
Henry VI., and made Cromwell a possibility. What a Louis XIV. there was
in Charles I.! Thanks to Cromwell, it remained latent. By-the-bye, we
may here observe that Cromwell himself, though no historian seems to
have noticed the fact, aspired to the peerage. This was why he married
Elizabeth Bouchier, descendant and heiress of a Cromwell, Lord Bouchier,
whose peerage became extinct in 1471, and of a Bouchier, Lord Robesart,
another peerage extinct in 1429. Carried on with the formidable increase
of important events, he found the suppression of a king a shorter way to
power than the recovery of a peerage. A ceremonial of the Lords, at
times ominous, could reach even to the king. Two men-at-arms from the
Tower, with their axes on their shoulders, between whom an accused peer
stood at the bar of the house, might have been there in like attendance
on the king as on any other nobleman. For five centuries the House of
Lords acted on a system, and carried it out with determ