Litany; the translation of the Bible into English at the same time brought about changes of a similar character in the devotional system of the church: "This process went slowly on in the issuing of two primers in 1535 and 1539, the rendering into English of the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, the publication of an English Litany for outdoor an English processions in 1544,1 and the adding to this of a collection of English prayers in 1545."2 In the last month of that year it was that Henry, worn out by the hopeless task of hushing a strife which day by day increased in bitterness, made his last exhortation to parliament, an exhortation in which he appealed to the warring religious factions about him to be tolerant with Henry's appeal for each other, so that "you, by verity, conscience, and charity religious between yourselves, may in this point, as you be in divers toleration; others, accounted among the rest of the world as blessed men.' "3 All such vain hopes were, however, destined soon to be blighted, as Henry's steadily failing health now surely admonished him that the religious truce, which rested alone upon. his personal authority, was soon to be broken by his death. How to provide for the permanency of his work, how to secure his final the stability of his throne during the bitter strife that was ments; sure to follow the transfer of the vast powers which he had concentrated in his own strong hands to those of his infant successor, were the perplexing problems that vexed the king's life as it drew to a close. The nearest male relatives of Jane the SeySeymour's son, now nine years old, were her two brothers, the the nobles eldest of whom, Edward Seymour, had been raised to the earl- of the "new dom of Hertford, and had been intrusted with the chief command in the war against Scotland. The part which Hertford was sure to play in the coming reign, coupled with his wellknown inclination to the new doctrine, naturally made him the leader of the court faction known as the "new men," a term of reproach applied by their adversaries to the new nobility who, without historical connections with the past, had been bishop Parker: which was to be superseded in its turn, after forty years, by that since used for two centuries and a half." Blount, Reform. of the Church of Eng., vol. i. p. 521. 1 See as to the Litany, which after receiving the final sanction of convocation in March, 1543-44, was promul gated by the crown on June 11, 1544, 2 Green, Hist. of the Eng. People, 8 An account of the speech is given by Hall, and by Mason in a letter to Paget, in MS., in the State Paper Office. See Froude, vol. iv. pp. 196–199. arrange mours and blood;" built up from the court by royal favor, and enriched by the crown out of the monastic estates of which the church had been plundered. To these nobles of the "new blood," such as the Seymours, the Russells, the Wriothesleys, the Cavendishes, the Fitzwilliams, and the Herberts, who were thus raised up as the great temporal lords were stricken down, and who by irrevocably the very method of their creation and enrichment were bound irrevocably to the cause of the Reformation,1 the small yet of the Re- resolute party of change were looking for guidance in the movement to be made after Henry's death for the breaking of the yoke of the Six Articles, and for the drawing of the English Church into closer communion with the reformed churches of the continent. bound to the cause formation. Edward's crown: 8. As to the validity of Edward's title to the crown there title to the could be no possible difficulty. Since the kingship had ceased summary of to be purely elective the two principles which regulated the principles succession were "that, no act of the legislature intervening, the succes- the crown and the royal dignity ought to descend from ances regulating sion elective kingship blended theory of tor to heir in a certain established course of descent; but that this course of descent is subject to the controul of the legislature." 2 These principles were the natural outcome of the process through which the ancient elective kingship gradually became blended with the new feudal theory of hereditary right. with feudal The several stages of that process, as heretofore explained, hereditary may be summarized as follows: (1) The Old-English kingright, ship, although elective, was associated from the beginning with the hereditary principle by virtue of the rule which limited the election to the members of a single royal house. Subject to that limitation, the right of election was freely exercised by the witan, whose action conferred the inchoate right to become civil always king, a right which was perfected, after the taking of the usual followed by ecclesiasti- oaths, by the ceremony of unction and coronation, wherein cal election, the clergy and assembled people repeated the election in the died with worked no change in tive system, from per ritorial sanctuary, as a spiritual ratification of the choice which the state had made.1 The new reign was then dated from the coronation, and during the interval the king's peace was sus- king's peace pended. After the king came to be regarded as the source him, of all peace and law, both were supposed to die with him and to rise again with his successor.2 (2) The coming of William the Conand the consequent substitution of a new royal stock worked re no immediate change in the outward form of the primitive immediate system.3 The change which followed that event resulted the primifrom the quickening of the feudalizing process, already under way, through which the archaic idea of personal or tribal was transition gradually transformed into that of territorial kingship, a pro- sonal to tercess wherein the king of the English was ultimately developed kingship, into the king of England. Thus under the influence of feudal ideas the theory gained ground that the royal office was an royal office regarded as estate that belonged to the king as feudal lord, descendible a descendfrom ancestor to heir, according to the strict rules of hereditary right which had begun to regulate the descent of land. This doctrine had so far advanced by the time of the accession of Edward I. that the old rule of dating the new reign from the coronation was abandoned. At the funeral of Henry III., which occurred four days after his death, the baronage swore fealty to the absent Edward, and three days thereafter the council declared the new peace in the name of the first English king who had so far reigned before his coronation. This new rule, Edward which was emphasized by the accession of Edward II. the day fore his reigns beafter his father's death, never ripened, however, until the reign coronation, of Edward IV., into the maxim that the king never dies, from Richard I., and John, who were absent In the proclamation he was de- ible estate, Richard II. under the doctrine of repre maxim that which results the correlative idea that the king's peace can the king never be suspended. When Richard II. as the heir of his never dies finally eses grandfather succeeded to the crown to the exclusion of his tablished, accession of uncles by virtue of the doctrine of representation, that doctrine, already settled as one of the rules regulating the descent of feudal estates,2 was for the first time applied to the succession sentation, of the crown of England. (3) While the new feudal rule of representative primogeniture was thus becoming a part of the law of the land, the dual right of election by church and state became a mere ceremony, and then the ceremony itself bemony, came obsolete. As such the ecclesiastical election by clergy ecclesiasti- and people survived down to the accession of Henry VIII., in cal election the programme of whose coronation, prepared by the king him elections become a mere cere of Henry VIII., estates re asserts self, traces of the ancient system still lingered in the declarations that Henry, the "rightfull and undoubted enheritour by the lawes of God and man," was "electe, chosen, and required by all the three estates of this lande to take upon hym the said coronne and royall dignitie."3 (4) While the ancient forms under which the witan had immemorially regulated the succession of the crown were thus passing away, the reorganized assembly of national assembly was careful to reassert the substance of the right in a manner so emphatic as to put its existence beyond right to reg- all question. The right of deposition which had been exercised by the witan before the Conquest was never asserted by the less authoritative feudal councils that gathered around the Norman and early Angevin kings during the two centuries which followed that event. Not until after those feudal councils had been transformed into an assembly of estates, did the representatives of the nation dare to revive that highest of all rights which the witan had occasionally exercised from the earliest times. To Edward I. belongs the honor of having transformed the feudal councils into an assembly of estates, and within thirty years after the meeting of such assembly at ulate suc cession, 1 Vol. i. p. 405. 2 See Reeves' Hist. Eng. Law, vol. i. p. 77. 3 The people were asked: "Woll ye serve at this tyme, and geve your wills and assents to the same consecration, enunction, and coronacion? Whereunto the people shall say with a grete voyce, Ye, Ye, Ye; So be it; Kyng Henry, Kyng Henry."-Marskell, Monumenta Ritualia, etc., vol. iii. p. 73; Freeman, Norm. Conq., vol. iii. p. 622. This form, devised by Henry VIII. to be used "at every coronation," was not observed at that of Edward VI. See the new order for that occasion printed in Burnet, vol. ii. (Collectanea) cxcv. of Edward of the Lan IV.'s. asser Westminster, the limit of its sovereign power was reached in the deposition of his son Edward II.,1 an event which was fol- deposition lowed after an interval of seventy-two years by the deposition II. and of Richard II.2 If upon the deposition of Richard the new Richard II., feudal rule of representative primogeniture had prevailed, the crown would have passed at once to Edward Mortimer, the ancestor of the house of York. But the parliament saw fit to ignore that rule, and to elect another member of the royal house whom it deemed more competent to govern. The long parliamenrule of the house of Lancaster by virtue of the parliamentary 3 tary title title thus acquired gave all possible emphasis to the right of casters, parliament not only to depose the king but to elect his successor. While Edward IV. did all that he could to assert Edward the contrary doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right, upon the tion of inassumption that he really succeeded to Richard II., and that defeasible right, the Lancastrian kings were mere usurpers, mere kings de facto non de jure, he finally sought a parliamentary recognition of his title; and a like recognition became the only real basis of the right of the house of Tudor. The three memorable acts 5 parliamenby which parliament as many times regulated the succession ments in during the reign of Henry VIII., often in open defiance of the reign of rules of hereditary right, removed any doubt that might have viii. remained as to the fact that the crown cannot "descend from ancestor to heir in a certain established course of descent," when there is an "act of the legislature intervening." Under either theory the right of Edward was perfect. He was not only Henry's lawful male heir, but his right to the succession had been expressly recognized not only by the act of 28 Hen. Statutes VIII. c. 7, but also by the subsequent act of 35 Hen. VIII. c. Edward's recognizing 1,6 which, after affirming his right, put in the entail, next after right. the lawful issue, male or female, of the king and Prince Edward, first Mary and then Elizabeth, subject to such conditions as the king by letters patent or his last will might appoint. 1 See vol. i. pp. 504, 505. 2 Ibid., p. 513. 8 Ibid., p. 536. The succession was four times regulated by parliament during the reign of Henry IV. For the history of these acts- - specially as to the act of 1406 establishing Salic succession see Bailey, The Succession to the Crown, pp. 32-36. 4 Vol. i. p. 577. See also Bailey, p. 59. 5 25 Hen. VIII. c. 22; 28 Hen. VIII. c. 7; 35 Hen. VIII. c. I. See above, pp. 73, 84. For a detailed history of the acts, see Sir Michael Foster's Crown Law, p. 406 et seq. 6 That was Henry's third and last succession act. As to the first, see above, p. 73; as to the second, p. 84. tary settle Henry |