was usual in favour of educated men, the utmost strictness was used in suppressing that light infantry of literature, the smart and vigorous pamphlets with which the two parties arrayed against the church assaulted her opposite flanks.386 Stowe, the well-known chronicler of England, who lay under suspicion of an attachment to popery, had his library searched by warrant, and his unlawful books taken away; several of which were but materials for his history.387 Whitgift, in this, as in every other respect, aggravated the rigour of preceding times. At his instigation, the star-chamber, in 1585, published ordinances for the regulation of the press. The preface of these recites enormities and abuses of disorderly persons professing the art of printing and selling books to have more and more increased in spite of the ordinances made against them, which it attributes to the inadequacy of the penalties hitherto inflicted. Every printer therefore is enjoined to certify his presses to the Stationers' Company, on pain of having them defaced, and suffering a year's imprisonment. None to print at all, under similar penalties, except in London, and one in each of the two universities. No printer who has only set up his trade within six months to exercise it any longer, nor any to begin it in future, until the excessive multitude of printers be diminished, and brought to such a number as the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London for the time being shall think convenient; but, whenever any addition to the number of master printers shall be required, the Stationers' Company shall select proper persons to use that calling with the approbation of the ecclesiastical commissioners. None to print any book, matter, or thing whatsoever, until it shall have been first seen, perused, and allowed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, or Bishop of London, except the queen's printer, to be appointed for some special service, or law-printers, who shall require the licence only of the chief justices. Every one selling books printed contrary to the intent of this ordinance, to suffer three months' imprisonment. The Stationers' Company empowered to search houses and shops of printers and booksellers, and to seize all books printed in contravention of this ordinance, to destroy and deface the presses, and to arrest and bring before the council those who shall have offended therein.388
The forms of English law, however inadequate to defend the subject in state prosecutions, imposed a degree of seeming restraint on the Crown, and wounded that pride which is commonly a yet stronger sentiment than the lust of power, with princes and their counsellors. It was possible that juries might absolve a prisoner; it was always necessary that they should be the arbiters of his fate. Delays too were interposed by the regular process; not such, perhaps, as the life of man should require, yet enough to weaken the terrors of summary punishment. Kings love to display the divinity with which their flatterers invest them, in nothing so much as the instantaneous execution of their will; and to stand revealed, as it were, in the storm and thunderbolt, when their power breaks through the operation of secondary causes, and awes a prostrate nation without the intervention of law. There may indeed be times of pressing danger, when the conservation of all demands the sacrifice of the legal rights of a few; there may be circumstances that not only justify, but compel, the temporary abandonment of constitutional forms. It has been usual for all governments, during an actual rebellion, to proclaim martial law, or the suspension of civil jurisdiction. And this anomaly, I must admit, is very far from being less indispensable at such unhappy seasons, in countries where the ordinary mode of trial is by jury, than where the right of decision resides in the judge. But it is of high importance to watch with extreme jealousy the disposition, towards which most governments are prone, to introduce too soon, to extend too far, to retain too long, so perilous a remedy. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the court of the constable and marshal, whose jurisdiction was considered as of a military nature, and whose proceedings were not according to the course of the common law, sometimes tried offenders by what was called martial law, but only, I believe, either during, or not long after, a serious rebellion. This tribunal fell into disuse under the Tudors. But Mary had executed some of those taken in Wyatt's insurrection without regular process, though their leader had his trial by a jury. Elizabeth, always hasty in passion and quick to punish, would have resorted to this summary course on a slighter occasion. One Pete Burchell, a fanatical puritan, and perhaps insane, conceiving that Sir Christopher Hatton was an enemy to true religion, determined to assassinate him. But by mistake he wounded instead a famous seaman, Captain Hawkins. For this ordinary crime, the queen could hardly be prevented from directing him to be tried instantly by martial law. Her council, however (and this it is important to observe), resisted this illegal proposition with spirit and success.389 We have indeed a proclamation some years afterwards, declaring that such as brought into the kingdom or dispersed papal bulls, or traitorous libels against the queen, should with all severity be proceeded against by her majesty's lieutenants or their deputies, by martial law, and suffer such pains and penalties as they should inflict; and that none of her said lieutenants or their deputies be any wise impeached, in body, lands, or goods, at any time hereafter, for anything to be done or executed in the punishment of any such offender, according to the said martial law, and the tenor of this proclamation, any law or statute to the contrary in any wise notwithstanding.390 This measure, though by no means constitutional, finds an apology in the circumstances of the time. It bears date the 1st of July 1588, when within the lapse of a few days the vast armament of Spain might effect a landing upon our coasts; and prospectively to a crisis, when the nation, struggling for life against an invader's grasp, could not afford the protection of law to domestic traitors. But it is an unhappy consequence of all deviations from the even course of law, that the forced acts of over-ruling necessity come to be distorted into precedents to serve the purposes of arbitrary power.
Martial law.—No other measure of Elizabeth's reign can be compared, in point of violence and illegality, to a commission in July 1595, directed to Sir Thomas Wilford; whereby upon no other allegation than that there had been of late sundry great unlawful assemblies of a number of base people in riotous sort, both in the city of London and the suburbs, for the suppression whereof (for that the insolency of many desperate offenders is such, that they care not for any ordinary punishment by imprisonment), it was found necessary to have some such notable rebellious persons to be speedily suppressed by execution to death, according to the justice of martial law, he is appointed provost-marshal, with authority, on notice by the magistrates, to attach and seize such notable rebellious and incorrigible offenders, and in the presence of the magistrates to execute them openly on the gallows. The commission empowers him also "to repair to all common highways near to the city, which any vagrant persons do haunt, and, with the assistance of justices and constables, to apprehend all such vagrant and suspected persons, and them to deliver to the said justices, by them to be committed and examined of the causes of their wandering, and finding them notoriously culpable in their unlawful manner of life, as incorrigible, and so certified by the said justices, to cause to be executed upon the gallows or gibbet some of them that are so found most notorious and incorrigible offenders; and some such also of them as have manifestly broken the peace, since they have been adjudged and condemned to death for former offences, and had the queen's pardon for the same."391
This peremptory style of superseding the common law was a stretch of prerogative without an adequate parallel, so far as I know, in any former period. It is to be remarked, that no tumults had taken place of any political character or of serious importance, some riotous apprentices only having committed a few disorders.392 But rather more than usual suspicion had been excited about the same time by the intrigues of the jesuits in favour of Spain, and the queen's advanced age had begun to renew men's doubts as to the succession. The rapid increase of London gave evident uneasiness, as the proclamations against new buildings show, to a very cautious administration, environed by bold and inveterate enemies, and entirely destitute of regular troops to withstand a sudden insurrection. Circumstances of which we are ignorant, I do not question, gave rise to this extraordinary commission. The executive government in modern times has been invested with a degree of coercive power to maintain obedience, of which our ancestors, in the most arbitrary reigns, had no practical experience. If we reflect upon the multitude of statutes enacted since the days of Elizabeth in order to restrain and suppress disorder, and above all on the prompt and certain aid that a disciplined army affords to our civil authorities, we may be inclined to think that it was rather the weakness than the vigour of her government which led to its inquisitorial watchfulness and harsh measures of prevention. We find in an earlier part of her reign an act of state somewhat of the same character, though not perhaps illegal. Letters were written to the sheriffs and justices of divers counties in 1569,