to him. 5. The seizure of the Queen's treasures, and the cruel death of Boisbourdon, rendered her inveterately hostile to her son Charles, and the Armagnacs, and at the same time, reconciled her to the D. of B. who with 1500 chosen horsemen, liberated her from her confinement at Tours, and con ducted her to Troyes, where she assumed the title, autho rity, and functions of Regent. 6. Deputies were named by the Queen and D. of B. and by the Dauphin in the name of the King, who drew up a treaty; but the Constable D'Armagnac and the Chancellor De Marle prevented the latter from signing it, being fully acquainted with the treaty of Calais. 7. May 29, 1418, Lisle Adam, a partizan of the D. of B. carri ed off the King from Paris: the Dauphin escaped. 8. The D. of B. kept his treaty with Henry strictly secret: If he had not, great part of the towns that adhered to him, would have left him, and declared for the Dauphin. He published manifestos full of patriotic cant; and having the Queen on his side, and the King in his power, was the better able to deceive the people. 9. The Queen and D. of B. never were sincere in their negotiations, with the Dauphin: Henry's proposals to him were equally deceitful. Henry never was in any danger from a coalition between these two parties. The differences at the interview of Meulan were only pretended: the advances towards a reconciliation, which the Duke afterwards made to the Dauphin, were there concerted, under the expectation that they would either result in bringing the Dauphin into the power of the Queen and Duke, or in setting appearances against him, if a reconciliation could not be effected, and that the civil war would go on with greater fury. 10. The death of the Duke of Burgundy at Montereau WAS NOT PREMEDITATED; and Tannegui du Chatel did not commit the homicide. 11. The Duke of B. was killed 10th September, 1419: The treaty of Troyes was made 21st May, On the 234 December, following an arret is published condemning the Dauphin as guilty of high treason; and

1420.

the 10th April, 1421, the depositions of the survivors of the ten who had accompanied the Duke are taken; though it is proved that these witnesses were in Paris in December, 1420. Thus, the Dauphin was first condemned and then tried,

Pages 110-116. "Here I think it incumbent upon me to "combat a vulgar error, that the Turks live under an ab"surd kind of government, called despotic; that the people

are all slaves to the Sultan ;" &c. "The Turks ARE NOT 66 ONLY FREE, but they have no distinction of nobility among "them: they know no other superiority but that of employ“ments.”—“ There is no great body established in this "country to render the laws respectable, and the Sovereign's "person sacred: no barrier of the constitution against the

unjust encroachments of the Vizir. Hence there is very "little remedy for the subject, when he is oppressed, or for "the master when a conspiracy is formed against his life. "The Grand Seignior, though considered as the most potent "Sovereign in the world, is, at the same time, the least set"tled on the throne; he is deposed on one day's insurrecti"on." "The fear of being dethroned is a greater check "to the Turkish Emperors than all the laws of the Koran. "Though he is absolute master in his seraglio; master of "the lives of his officers by means of the Mufti's fetfas, yet

66

he has not the same power over the customs of the empire: "He cannot increase the taxes, nor meddle with the public money; even his private treasure is separated from that of the public." "The Sultans have only the externals of "despotism; they are not absolute, except when they know

how to exert that lust for arbitrary power which seems to "be innate in all mankind." Is it credible that this can be written to shew that "the Turks are free," and that they do not live under a despotism? Does it not rather shewthat from the throne down to the lowest of the multitude, there is no security for persons or property? The institution in the frame of this government that chiefly upholds its

"

freedom, is the periodical murder of the Sultan by the Janizaries! and, on the same principle, the Romans under their Emperors were free, while the sanguinary licentiousness of the Pratorian bands continued in full vigour and activity! The natural tendency of the existence of a permanent body of regicides, responsible to no authority for the just execution of their trust, (quis enim custodit ipsos custodes?) must be to produce a constant state of distrust and war between this body and the Sultan. The principal victims of a tyrant are those of whom, from whatever cause, he is afraid: the suspicions of a Sultan would be employed in finding out, and destroying, agitators among the Janizaries; he must keep them under, if "he know how to exert that lust for arbitra66 ry power, which seems to be innate in all mankind," or be strangled, and be succeeded by another Ottoman, "an ❝ infant, or an ideot," or worse. The Sultan, it is acknowledged, is master of the lives of his officers, and consequently of the lives of every other body, since, if the prerogative were confined to his officers, he might previously qualify any person he wished to take off, by giving him a commission; besides, if that were not the case, what would become of the "superiority of employments," the only one allowed to subsist? or how could those undignified by employments pretend to an immunity from accidents to which their superiors were liable? They know no other superiority-but that which depends upon the breath of the Sultan; no man has any advantage of rank or consideration, or the means of ever acquiring any independently of him; before him the whole nation is as nothing, and he alone promotes, degrades, and gives them their several denominations. "They have no dis❝tinction of nobility among them:" that is to say, they have no body of sufficient weight and authority to resist the pressure of the Sultan upon the people, or that of the people upon him. “A monarchy, where there is no nobility at all," says Bacon, "is ever a pure and absolute tyranny; as that

"of the Turks; for nobility attempers sovereignty:" it also allows the insolency of inferiors to be broken upon them, "before it come on too fast upon the majesty of Kings." In considering nobility as a barrier between the King and the people, a material distinction should be attended to. Our English Barons obtained all their chartered rights, not as Barons, but as great landed proprietors. They were equally powerful when the term noble signified only rich, and when the titles, that afterwards became hereditary, were only official designations. Without property in land, titles would he idle feathers, absolutely worthless and insignificant; the splendour of families would be too transient to admit of their being hereditary, so that they could only be personal badges of servility, and upstart greatness, as at the Courts of Asia. In European monarchies, the various orders of men, like the different orders of metals, have their intrinsic value very little affected by passing through the royal mint: in Ariastic monarchies, on the contrary, the want of individual property in land denying the possibility of men having any intrinsic value, the whole population resembles leaden counters, and the Sultan may compell any piece to be received, protempore, at any rate he chooses. The European nobles were indebted to their titles for no part of their power, but they assumed their fathers' titles on succeeding to their estates, and transmitted them to their heirs and successors, in consequence of their power: their titles were no wise a cause of power; for, in the free states of antiquity, by far the greatest share of power was in the hands of the untitled great proprietors; but, as they were ornamental trappings, and helped to distinguish and ascertain genealogies, they were a very natural effect of power. In the early period of our history, when the foundations of our incomparable

* The effects of property on society and government by Captain C. Patton.

constitution were laid, the mass of property was exclusively possessed by the nobles, who by themselves constituted the Parliament, and established those fundamental securities, without which, upon their declension the Commons could not have undertaken and completed the work; but, from various causes, the Peers are now inconsiderable in point of numbers, and infinitely outbalanced in property, and consequent ly in political weight, by the Commons. The policy of the crown in promoting the subdivision of estates; the succession of titles per stirpes, and not per capita; the improvement of the arts which invited the nobility to give favourable leases, to mortgage, and alienate their estates, that they might spend their revenues in personal conveniences and Juxuries, and not in feeding and attaching troops of retainers; the diffusion of knowledge, and the extension of commerce gradually produced this change. Henry VII. and Henry VIII. probably never suspected that when, by the unfettering of entails, the alienation of abbey land, the statutes of uses, and of wills, they were providing for their immediate interests, in opening so many channels into which a part of the excessive wealth of their nobility might freely discharge it. self, they were, at the same time, preparing for their successors a contest with a mighty and invincible opponent. The source of power by which the prerogative had formerly been checked, was not annihilated; it was multiplied and propagated over the whole body of the state, and was ultimately employed by the commons in procuring just laws, and ge neral freedom. The reigns of the Tudors occupied the whole of that critical period which intervened between the decline of the Peers and the rise of the commons; a period which the constitution could never have survived, if it had not previously struck its roots so widely and deeply into a congenial soil. The fall of the nobility in France was not followed by the rise of the commonalty, because the former in the days of their strength had not found it necessary to combine