oughly represented in the idea that the ruler had a right to rule as a
voter has a right to vote. He might govern wrong, but unless he governed
horribly and extravagantly wrong, he retained his position of right; as
a private man retains his right to marriage and locomotion unless he
goes horribly and extravagantly off his head. It was not really even so
simple as this; for the Middle Ages were not, as it is often the fashion
to fancy, under a single and steely discipline. They were very
controversial and therefore very complex; and it is easy, by isolating
items whether about _jus divinum_ or _primus inter pares_, to maintain
that the mediaevals were almost anything; it has been seriously
maintained that they were all Germans. But it is true that the influence
of the Church, though by no means of all the great churchmen,
encouraged the sense of a sort of sacrament of government, which was
meant to make the monarch terrible and therefore often made the man
tyrannical. The disadvantage of such despotism is obvious enough. The
precise nature of its advantage must be better understood than it is,
not for its own sake so much as for the story we have now to tell.

The advantage of "divine right," or irremovable legitimacy, is this;
that there is a limit to the ambitions of the rich. "_Roi ne puis_"; the
royal power, whether it was or was not the power of heaven, was in one
respect like the power of heaven. It was not for sale. Constitutional
moralists have often implied that a tyrant and a rabble have the same
vices. It has perhaps been less noticed that a tyrant and a rabble most
emphatically have the same virtues. And one virtue which they very
markedly share is that neither tyrants nor rabbles are snobs; they do
not care a button what they do to wealthy people. It is true that
tyranny was sometimes treated as coming from the heavens almost in the
lesser and more literal sense of coming from the sky; a man no more
expected to be the king than to be the west wind or the morning star.
But at least no wicked miller can chain the wind to turn only his own
mill; no pedantic scholar can trim the morning star to be his own
reading-lamp. Yet something very like this is what really happened to
England in the later Middle Ages; and the first sign of it, I fancy, was
the fall of Richard II.

Shakespeare's historical plays are something truer than historical;
they are traditional; the living memory of many things lingered, though
th