Letters on England [14]
and the rest of the nation kiss the chains they are loaded with.
The French are of opinion that the government of this island is more
tempestuous than the sea which surrounds it, which indeed is true;
but then it is never so but when the king raises the storm--when he
attempts to seize the ship of which he is only the chief pilot. The
civil wars of France lasted longer, were more cruel, and productive
of greater evils than those of England; but none of these civil wars
had a wise and prudent liberty for their object.
In the detestable reigns of Charles IX. and Henry III. the whole
affair was only whether the people should be slaves to the Guises.
With regard to the last war of Paris, it deserves only to be hooted
at. Methinks I see a crowd of schoolboys rising up in arms against
their master, and afterwards whipped for it. Cardinal de Retz, who
was witty and brave (but to no purpose), rebellious without a cause,
factious without design, and head of a defenceless party, caballed
for caballing sake, and seemed to foment the civil war merely out of
diversion. The Parliament did not know what he intended, nor what
he did not intend. He levied troops by Act of Parliament, and the
next moment cashiered them. He threatened, he begged pardon; he set
a price upon Cardinal Mazarin's head, and afterwards congratulated
him in a public manner. Our civil wars under Charles VI. were
bloody and cruel, those of the League execrable, and that of the
Frondeurs ridiculous.
That for which the French chiefly reproach the English nation is the
murder of King Charles I., whom his subjects treated exactly as he
would have treated them had his reign been prosperous. After all,
consider on one side Charles I., defeated in a pitched battle,
imprisoned, tried, sentenced to die in Westminster Hall, and then
beheaded. And on the other, the Emperor Henry VII., poisoned by his
chaplain at his receiving the Sacrament; Henry III. stabbed by a
monk; thirty assassinations projected against Henry IV., several of
them put in execution, and the last bereaving that great monarch of
his life. Weigh, I say, all these wicked attempts, and then judge.
LETTER IX.--ON THE GOVERNMENT
That mixture in the English Government, that harmony between King,
Lords, and commons, did not always subsist. England was enslaved
for a long series of years by the Romans, the Saxons, the Danes, and
the French successively. William the Conqueror particularly, ruled
them with a rod of iron. He disposed as absolutely of the lives and
fortunes of his conquered subjects as an eastern monarch; and
forbade, upon pain of death, the English either fire or candle in
their houses after eight o'clock; whether was this to prevent their
nocturnal meetings, or only to try, by an odd and whimsical
prohibition, how far it was possible for one man to extend his power
over his fellow-creatures. It is true, indeed, that the English had
Parliaments before and after William the Conqueror, and they boast
of them, as though these assemblies then called Parliaments,
composed of ecclesiastical tyrants and of plunderers entitled
barons, had been the guardians of the public liberty and happiness.
The barbarians who came from the shores of the Baltic, and settled
in the rest of Europe, brought with them the form of government
called States or Parliaments, about which so much noise is made, and
which are so little understood. Kings, indeed, were not absolute in
those days; but then the people were more wretched upon that very
account, and more completely enslaved. The chiefs of these savages,
who had laid waste France, Italy, Spain, and England, made
themselves monarchs. Their generals divided among themselves the
several countries they had conquered, whence sprung those margraves,
those peers, those barons, those petty tyrants, who often contested
with their sovereigns for the spoils of