Yet all this was considered only as a necessary sacrifice to the clamours of an incensed people. The younger HENRY, we may be sure, had so much of his father in him, or rather so far outdid him in the worst parts of his tyranny, that he could not but look with an eye of favour on the very law he had been constrained to abolish. His great ecclesiastical minister was, no doubt, in the secret of his master’s inclinations, and conducted himself accordingly. Yet the vengeance of the nation pursued and overtook him in good time. They resented his disloyal contempt of the original constitution; and made it one of the articles against this _Roman_ cardinal, “That he endeavoured to subvert _antiquissimas leges hujus regni, universumque hoc regnum_ LEGIBUS IMPERIALIBUS _subjicere_.”
From this time, the study of the civil law was thought to languish in _England_, till it revived with much spirit in the reigns of those unhappy princes who succeeded to the house of TUDOR. Then indeed, by inclination and by pedantry, JAMES I. was led to patronize and encourage it. And the same project was resumed, and carried still further, by his unfortunate son. I speak now from my own experience and observation. The civil lawyers were most welcome at court. They were brought into the Chancery and court of Requests. The minister, another sort of man than WOLSEY, yet a thorough ecclesiastic, and bigoted, if not to the religion; yet to the policy of _Rome_, gave a countenance to this profession above that of the common law. He had found the spirit, and even the forms of it, most convenient for his purpose in the STAR-CHAMBER and HIGH-COMMISSION court, those tribunals of imperial justice, exalted so far above the controul of the common law; and by his good will, therefore, would have brought the same regimen into the other branches of the administration. Great civilians were employed to write elaborate defences of their science; to the manifest exaltation of the prerogative; to the prejudice of the national rights and privileges; and to the disparagement of the common law. The consequence of these proceedings is well known. The most immediate was, that they provoked the jealousy of the common lawyers; and, when the rupture afterwards happened, occasioned many of the most eminent of them to throw themselves into the popular scale[151].