The Man Who Laughs


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against their kings in the tenderest point, that of venery. Every lord,  
passing through a royal park, had the right to kill a deer: in the house  
of the king the peer was at home; in the Tower of London the scale of  
allowance for the king was no more than that for a peer--namely, twelve  
pounds sterling per week. This was the House of Lords' doing.  
Yet more. We owe to it the deposition of kings. The Lords ousted John  
Lackland, degraded Edward II., deposed Richard II., broke the power of  
Henry VI., and made Cromwell a possibility. What a Louis XIV. there was  
in Charles I.! Thanks to Cromwell, it remained latent. By-the-bye, we  
may here observe that Cromwell himself, though no historian seems to  
have noticed the fact, aspired to the peerage. This was why he married  
Elizabeth Bouchier, descendant and heiress of a Cromwell, Lord Bouchier,  
whose peerage became extinct in 1471, and of a Bouchier, Lord Robesart,  
another peerage extinct in 1429. Carried on with the formidable increase  
of important events, he found the suppression of a king a shorter way to  
power than the recovery of a peerage. A ceremonial of the Lords, at  
times ominous, could reach even to the king. Two men-at-arms from the  
Tower, with their axes on their shoulders, between whom an accused peer  
stood at the bar of the house, might have been there in like attendance  
on the king as on any other nobleman. For five centuries the House of  
Lords acted on a system, and carried it out with determination. They had  
their days of idleness and weakness, as, for instance, that strange time  
when they allowed themselves to be seduced by the vessels loaded with  
cheeses, hams, and Greek wines sent them by Julius II. The English  
aristocracy was restless, haughty, ungovernable, watchful, and  
patriotically mistrustful. It was that aristocracy which, at the end of  
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