he has had a nobility, and could bring
them to his party has thrown the people, as in France and Spain; or
the people, where they have had no nobility, or could get them to be of
their party, have thrown the King, as in Holland, and of later times in
Oceana.

But they came not to this strength, but by such approaches and degrees
as remain to be further opened. For whereas the barons by writ, as the
sixty-four abbots and thirty-six priors that were so called, were but
pro temp ore, Dicotome, being the twelfth king from the Conquest, began
to make barons by letters-patent, with the addition of honorary pensions
for the maintenance of their dignities to them and their heirs; so that
they were hands in the King's purse and had no shoulders for his throne.
Of these, when the house of peers came once to be full, as will be seen
hereafter, there was nothing more empty. But for the present, the throne
having other supports, they did not hurt that so much as they did
the King; for the old barons, taking Dicotome's prodigality to such
creatures so ill that they deposed him, got the trick of it, and never
gave over setting up and pulling down their kings according to their
various interests, and that faction of the White and Red, into which
they have been thenceforth divided, till Panurgus, the eighteenth king
from the Conquest, was more by their favor than his right advanced to
the crown. This King, through his natural subtlety, reflecting at once
upon the greatness of their power, and the inconstancy of their favor,
began to find another flaw in this kind of government, which is also
noted by Machiavel namely, that a throne supported by a nobility is not
so hard to be ascended as kept warm. Wherefore his secret jealousy, lest
the dissension of the nobility, as it brought him in might throw him
out, made him travel in ways undiscovered by them, to ends as little
foreseen by himself, while to establish his own safety, he, by mixing
water with their wine, first began to open those sluices that have since
overwhelmed not the King only, but the throne. For whereas a nobility
strikes not at the throne, without which they cannot subsist, but at
some king that they do not like, popular power strikes through the King
at the throne, as that which is incompatible with it. Now that Panurgus,
in abating the power of the nobility, was the cause whence it came to
fall into the hands of the people, appears by those several statutes
that were ma