they have been gaining ever since, though with frequent interruptions and slow progress. The abolishing of villanage, together with the custom introduced (or permitted) among the nobles of selling their lands in the reign of Henry the Seventh, was a mighty addition to the power of the commons: yet think a much greater happened in the time of his successor, at the dissolution of the abbeys; for this turned the clergy wholly out of the scale, who had so long filled it; and placed the commons in their stead; who in a few years became possessed of vast quantities of those and other lands, by grant or purchase. About the middle of queen Elizabeth's reign, I take the power between the nobles and the commons to have been in more equal balance, than it was ever before or since. But then, or soon after, arose a faction in England, which under the name of puritan began to grow popular by moulding up their new schemes of religion with republican principles in government; and gaining upon the prerogative as well as the nobles, under several denominations, for the space of about sixty years, did, at last overthrow the constitution, and, according to the usual course of such revolutions, did introduce a tyranny, first of the people, and then of a single person.
In a short time after, the old government was revived. But the progress of affairs for almost thirty years, under the reigns of two weak princes[1], is a subject of a different nature: when the balance was in danger to be overturned by the hands that held it, which was at last very seasonably prevented
- ↑ Charles II, and James II.
