ad broken out of the Tower, where he
was confined on a charge of treason. This was a capital felony at common
law; and the chief irregularity seems to have consisted in having
recourse to parliament in order to attaint him of treason, when he had
already forfeited his life by another crime.

I would not willingly attribute to the prevalence of Tory dispositions
what may be explained otherwise, the progress which Mr. Hume's
historical theory as to our constitution has been gradually making since
its publication. The tide of opinion, which since the Revolution, and
indeed since the reign of James I., had been flowing so strongly in
favour of the antiquity of our liberties, now seems, among the higher
and more literary classes, to set pretty decidedly the other way. Though
we may still sometimes hear a demagogue chattering about the
witenagemot, it is far more usual to find sensible and liberal men who
look on Magna Charta itself as the result of an uninteresting squabble
between the king and his barons. Acts of force and injustice, which
strike the cursory inquirer, especially if he derives his knowledge from
modern compilations, more than the average tenor of events, are selected
and displayed as fair samples of the law and of its administration. We
are deceived by the comparatively perfect state of our present
liberties, and forget that our superior security is far less owing to
positive law than to the control which is exercised over government by
public opinion through the general use of printing, and to the diffusion
of liberal principles in policy through the same means. Thus disgusted
at a contrast which it was hardly candid to institute, we turn away from
the records that attest the real, though imperfect, freedom of our
ancestors; and are willing to be persuaded that the whole scheme of
English polity, till the commons took on themselves to assert their
natural rights against James I., was at best but a mockery of popular
privileges, hardly recognised in theory, and never regarded in
effect.[380]

This system, when stripped of those slavish inferences that Brady and
Carte attempted to build upon it, admits perhaps of no essential
objection but its want of historical truth. God forbid that our rights
to just and free government should be tried by a jury of antiquaries!
Yet it is a generous pride that intertwines the consciousness of
hereditary freedom with the memory of our ancestors; and no trifling
argument ag