t though almost exaggerated phrases set its
omnipotence face to face with the growing despotism of the Crown. The
policy of Cromwell fell in with this revival of the two Houses. The
daring of his temper led him not to dread and suppress national
institutions, but to seize them and master them, and to turn them into
means of enhancing the royal power. As he saw in the Church a means of
raising the king into the spiritual ruler of the faith and consciences
of his people, so he saw in the Parliament a means of shrouding the
boldest aggressions of the monarchy under the veil of popular assent,
and of giving to the most ruthless acts of despotism the stamp and
semblance of law. He saw nothing to fear in a House of Lords whose
nobles cowered helpless before the might of the Crown, and whose
spiritual members his policy was degrading into mere tools of the royal
will. Nor could he find anything to dread in a House of Commons which
was crowded with members directly or indirectly nominated by the royal
Council. With a Parliament such as this Cromwell might well trust to
make the nation itself through its very representatives an accomplice in
the work of absolutism.

[Sidenote: Growth of Parliamentary power.]

His trust seemed more than justified by the conduct of the Houses. It
was by parliamentary statutes that the Church was prostrated at the feet
of the Monarchy. It was by bills of attainder that great nobles were
brought to the block. It was under constitutional forms that freedom was
gagged with new treasons and oaths and questionings. One of the first
bills of Cromwell's Parliaments freed Henry from the need of paying his
debts, one of the last gave his proclamations the force of laws. In the
action of the two Houses the Crown seemed to have discovered a means of
carrying its power into regions from which a bare despotism has often
had to shrink. Henry might have dared single-handed to break with Rome
or to send Sir Thomas More to the block. But without Parliament to back
him he could hardly have ventured on such an enormous confiscation of
property as was involved in the suppression of the monasteries or on
such changes in the national religion as were brought about by the Ten
Articles and the Six. It was this discovery of the use to which the
Houses could be turned that accounts for the immense developement of
their powers, the immense widening of their range of action, which they
owe to Cromwell. Now that the great eng