-Tudor period, that the
king must consult the great council of the realm, before he did
anything, since he always wanted help. The right of self-taxation was
justly inserted in the "great treaty"; but it would have been a dead
letter, save for the armed force and aristocratic organisation which
compelled the king to make a treaty; it was a result, not a basis--an
example, not a cause.

The civil wars of many years killed out the old councils (if I might so
say): that is, destroyed three parts of the greater nobility, who were
its most potent members, tired the small nobility and the gentry, and
overthrew the aristocratic organisation on which all previous effectual
resistance to the sovereign had been based.

The second period of the British Constitution begins with the accession
of the House of Tudor, and goes down to 1688; it is in substance the
history of the growth, development, and gradually acquired supremacy of
the new great council. I have no room and no occasion to narrate again
the familiar history of the many steps by which the slavish Parliament
of Henry VIII. grew into the murmuring Parliament of Queen Elizabeth,
the mutinous Parliament of James I., and the rebellious Parliament of
Charles I. The steps were many, but the energy was one--the growth of
the English middle-class, using that word in its most inclusive sense,
and its animation under the influence of Protestantism. No one, I
think, can doubt that Lord Macaulay is right in saying that political
causes would not alone have then provoked such a resistance to the
sovereign unless propelled by religious theory. Of course the English
people went to and fro from Catholicism to Protestantism, and from
Protestantism to Catholicism (not to mention that the Protestantism was
of several shades and sects), just as the first Tudor kings and queens
wished. But that was in the pre-Puritan era. The mass of Englishmen
were in an undecided state, just as Hooper tells us his father
was--"Not believing in Protestantism, yet not disinclined to it".
Gradually, however, a strong Evangelic spirit (as we should now speak)
and a still stronger anti-Papal spirit entered into the middle sort of
Englishmen, and added to that force, fibre, and substance which they
have never wanted, an ideal warmth and fervour which they have almost
always wanted. Hence the saying that Cromwell founded the English
Constitution. Of course, in seeming, Cromwell's work died with him; his
dynasty