Yet, to see the uniformity of the views of tyranny, and the direct opposition which it never fails to encounter from the _English_ law, no sooner had a set of violent men usurped the liberties of their country, and with the sword in their hands determined to rule despotically and in defiance of the constitution, than the same jealousy of the common law, and the same contempt of it, revived. Nay, to such an extreme was the new tyranny carried, that the very game of EMPSON and DUDLEY was played over again. The trial of an _Englishman_ by his peers was disgraced and rejected; and (I speak from what I felt) the person imprisoned and persecuted, who dared appeal, though in his own case[152], to the ancient essential forms of the constitution. Under such a state of things, it is not to be wondered that much pains was taken to depreciate a law which these mighty men were determined not to regard. Invectives against the professors of the _English_ laws were the usual and favoured topics of parliamentary eloquence. These were sometimes so indecent, and pushed to that provoking length, that WHITLOCKE himself, who paced it with them through all changes, was forced in the end to hazard his reputation with his masters, by standing on the necessary defence of himself and his profession[153].
I need not, I suppose, descend lower. Ye have both seen with your own eyes the occurrences of the late reign. Ye have heard the common language of the time. The practice was but conformable to such doctrines as were current at court, where it was generally maintained, that the king’s power of dispensing with law, was LAW; by which if these doctors did not intend the _imperial_ or _civil law_, the insult was almost too gross to deserve a confutation, It must be owned, and to the eternal shame of those who were capable of such baseness, there were not wanting some even of the common lawyers that joined in this insult.
I but touch these things slightly; for I consider to whom I speak. But if, to these examples of the nation’s fondness for their laws, you add, what appears in the tenor of our histories, the constant language of the _coronation-oaths_, of the _oaths of our judges_, and, above all, of the _several great charters_; in all which express mention is made of the LEX TERRÆ, in opposition to every foreign, but especially the Cæsarean, law; you will conclude with me, “That, as certainly as the CÆSAREAN LAW is founded in the principles of slavery, our ENGLISH LAW, and the constitution to which it refers, hath its foundation in freedom, and, as such, deserved the care with which it hath been transmitted down to us from the earliest ages.”