heard with favour by a popular assembly composed of taxpayers,
but to statesmen and legislators will seem unanswerable.

There can be no doubt that the Sovereign was, by the old polity
of the realm, competent to give or let the domains of the Crown
in such manner as seemed good to him. No statute defined the
length of the term which he might grant, or the amount of the
rent which he must reserve. He might part with the fee simple of
a forest extending over a hundred square miles in consideration
of a tribute of a brace of hawks to be delivered annually to his
falconer, or of a napkin of fine linen to be laid on the royal
table at the coronation banquet. In fact, there had been hardly a
reign since the Conquest, in which great estates had not been
bestowed by our princes on favoured subjects. Anciently, indeed,
what had been lavishly given was not seldom violently taken away.
Several laws for the resumption of Crown lands were passed by the
Parliaments of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Of those
laws the last was that which, in the year 1485, immediately after
the battle of Bosworth, annulled the donations of the kings of
the House of York. More than two hundred years had since elapsed
without any Resumption Act. An estate derived from the royal
liberality had long been universally thought as secure as an
estate which had descended from father to son since the
compilation of Domesday Book. No title was considered as more
perfect than that of the Russells to Woburn, given by Henry the
Eighth to the first Earl of Bedford, or than that of the Cecils
to Hatfield, purchased from the Crown for less than a third of
the real value by the first Earl of Salisbury. The Long
Parliament did not, even in that celebrated instrument of
nineteen articles, which was framed expressly for the purpose of