2Z INTRODUCTORY. 



forfeiture on the part of the lessor. But the government, 

 advised by the lawyers of the time, easily discovered in the 

 two-handed engine of parliamentary attainder a sharp and 

 effectual surgery. Once used, it was the most potent instru- 

 ment of despotism, and the unlucky nobles of the war of suc- 

 cession, when this expedient was once generally adopted, were 

 made the most timid and powerless slaves of government. 

 Every one knows how Henry the Eighth wielded this weapon 

 against those who incurred his resentment or his suspicions, 

 even after he had made entails liable to forfeiture for treason. 

 I know nothing which illustrates the irony of history so 

 curiously as the fact that this prodigious weapon, which effec- 

 tually tamed the most turbulent aristocracy in Europe, which 

 gave Henry the Eighth all the powers of a Tiberius, under 

 the formal sanction of legislative deliberation, was used for 

 the last time in order to effect the execution of a broken 

 bully and insignificant plotter, who had been foolish enough 

 to insult Mary the wife of William the Third, and still more 

 foolish, in denouncing Marlborough's treasons, when it was 

 not convenient for William the Third to have them published 

 Sir John Fenwick. 



It was an act of great sagacity on the part of Edward the 

 Fourth, that when he thought, as he reasonably might have 

 thought, that his difficulties with England were over, he re- 

 quired his lawyers to find a remedy against entails by some 

 legal device. Lawyers are aware, at least such lawyers as 

 know anything about the history of English law, that this 

 was indirectly effected by an obiter dictum in Taltarum's 1 

 case. The fiction of a common recovery is the triumph of 

 legal chicanery, of fictions which balance and neutralise other 

 fictions. It is only to be regretted that after such a discovery, 

 which conveyancers merely made the means for the creation 

 of other and more tortuous fictions, the remedy of Henry the 

 Eighth had not been applied simultaneously, and the hideous 

 machinery of parliamentary attainder had not been declared 



1 Taltarum's case may be found fully reported in Reports Ed. IV. annoxii. Mich. Term. 



