Essay XI.: On the History of the English Constitution, a Propos of Mr. Henry Hallam’s Work, Entitled “the Constitutional

Mr. Henry Hallam is the author of a work called “Europe during the Middle Ages,” of which a French translation appeared some years ago. It is one of those historical compositions, very common in England, in which the changes of the government and the legislation of the country are endeavoured to be described in an abstract manner. These kind of writings, seductive at the first glance, are far from really giving the instruction they seem to promise. They have one essential fault, that of supposing the civil and even the political history to be well known, and thus presenting the legislative acts apart from the circumstances which gave rise to them, and a faithful picture of which can alone give their true signification. The author of a constitutional history directs all his attention to the study of laws and administrative documents; and for the series of historical facts, he generally trusts to the first narrator he finds, without submitting the facts to a fresh examination, and without making the least effort to penetrate more deeply into the social state, the revolutions of which have brought about the different phases of the legislative constitution. It is thus that Mr. Hallam, when writing his “Europe during the Middle Ages,” ten years ago, in the part of that work which relates to France, has hardly risen above Velly and his continuators, who appeared to him to have given a satisfactory idea of the national manners of the French people, from the sixth to the sixteenth century. The same faults, quite as remarkable in the chapters devoted to the empire of Germany, to Italy, and the other states of Europe, are less felt in those which treat of England. In this part of his work, the author, naturally better informed of the history of his own country, required less special studies; he ought therefore to be congratulated on having renounced his former plan, and having limited himself to continuing the constitutional history of England from the sixteenth down to the middle of the eighteenth century. Mr. Hallam’s vast erudition as a lawyer renders his work the most complete and accurate catalogue of the English parliamentary acts; but the real motives of these laws and acts can be but feebly discerned in the small number of historical facts which fall by chance from the pen of the historian. We see the constitution of the English people, in its various stages; but the English people itself never appears.

It is against abstraction in history, that the new school which has commenced the regeneration of historical studies in France, has principally raised its voice. This school has struck a mortal blow at the monarchical version of the history of France. We believe that it is likewise destined to strike hard blows at the constitutional version of the history of England. Already have three French writers presented in a new light three of the principal events of the political history of Great Britain, the Norman Conquest, the popular Revolution of 1640, and the aristocratic Revolution of 1688. Certainly, nothing in their works can take the place of Mr. Hallam’s voluminous work on English legislation; but the works of the historians, connected with that of the lawyer, might give this immense compilation the life it requires. For, we repeat, the comprehension of events is not Mr. Hallam’s predominant faculty; and generally speaking, this quality by no means predominates among English writers. Whatever there is characteristic in the different periods of their national history, is smothered by them under a covering of conventional formulas and metaphysical expressions. The word parliament has done more harm to the history of England than the thing itself has done good. It has been the cause of a number of anachronisms of the grossest sort, those which transpose from one period to another, not material circumstances, but moral facts and political situations; it is owing to it that the English constitution prolongs its existence in the writings of historians, from the invasion of William the Conqueror to the present day. And the invasion itself, the most important event in the history of England, figured in modern narratives only as a change of succession, feebly contested and quickly accomplished until Walter Scott, in one of his poetical creations, showed his countrymen, for the first time, what the Norman Conquest really was.

The false aspect under which the historians of England have considered this conquest, not only prejudices the truth of their narratives during the short space of time which separates the battle of Hastings and the last Saxon insurrection; but it gives great inexactness to the judgments pronounced on most of the great succeeding events. It is truly impossible that a country in which there really were for several centuries, two distinct and mutually hostile nations, although the strangers confounded them all under one name, should not present something peculiar in its political revolutions, something not to be found in states in which society is homogeneous. The words aristocracy, democracy, and even monarchy, which we have borrowed from the books of the ancients, to apply them, properly or improperly, to the different forms adopted by the social state of our time, are incapable of giving an exact idea of the various changes which have taken place in the institutions of the middle ages. The most certain plan would be to abandon them entirely, when it is necessary to bring on the scene men who employed perfectly different formulas to express their ideas, their wants or their political passions. The most certain, but the most difficult way, would be to get at the facts, and describe them just as they present themselves, without endeavouring to give them any general qualification, and bringing them into frames traced out beforehand.

By applying this method to the history of England, it would be deprived of that species of philosophical marvellousness, which seems to surround it, to the exclusion of all other modern histories. If, turning away our eyes from the present, that we may not remain under its influence, we look back dispassionately, if we cease to colour the past with a reflex of cotemporaneous opinions, we shall perceive entirely different things under the same names. The words Parliament, House of Peers, House of Commons, will lose the prestige with which the present liberty of the English people surrounds them. We shall see liberty, that fruit of modern civilization, spring, at a recent period, out of an order of society, the principle of which was the most illiberal that can be conceived, in which the powerful portion of the nation boasted of its foreign origin, and of having usurped its inheritance, titles and nobility, at the edge of the sword; in which, distinction between various classes was only the expression of the distance between the conqueror and the conquered, in which all social authority was tainted by this violent origin, and in which, royalty, belonging by right to the line of the chief of the conquest, was not, properly speaking, an institution, but a fact. From the midst of all this has arisen modern England, which is, in almost every point, the reverse of ancient England. The interval which separates them one from the other, presents rather the gradual decay of a violent order of things, than the slow formation of a society, destined to serve as a model to others. The latter opinion, however, has prevailed; it reigns almost universally among the historians of the English constitution, not that they appear to have preferred it to the other after a ripe examination, because they all forget to place at the head of their constitutional history the great fact of a territorial conquest. The conquest is the common source of all the political powers which have continued to exist in England ever since the twelfth century: we must keep our attention to this primitive fact, before following its progressive alterations down to the present time. We will endeavour to apply this method to the history of royalty, the Parliament, and the elective system in England.