It would surely be erroneous to conceive, that many acts of government in the four preceding reigns had not appeared at the time arbitrary and unconstitutional. If indeed we are not mistaken in judging them according to the ancient law, they must have been viewed in the same light by contemporaries, who were full as able to try them by that standard. But, to repeat what I have once before said, the extant documents from which we draw our knowledge of constitutional history under those reigns are so scanty, that instances even of a successful parliamentary resistance to measures of the Crown may have left no memorial. The debates of parliament are not preserved, and very little is to be gained from such histories as the age produced. The complete barrenness indeed of Elizabeth's chroniclers, Holingshed and Thin, as to every parliamentary or constitutional information, speaks of itself the jealous tone of her administration. Camden, writing to the next generation, though far from an ingenuous historian, is somewhat less under restraint. This forced silence of history is much more to be suspected after the use of printing and the reformation, than in the ages when monks compiled annals in their convents, reckless of the censure of courts, because independent of their permission. Grosser ignorance of public transactions is undoubtedly found in the chronicles of the middle ages; but far less of that deliberate mendacity, or of that insidious suppression, by which fear, and flattery, and hatred, and the thirst of gain, have, since the invention of printing, corrupted so much of historical literature throughout Europe. We begin however to find in Elizabeth's reign more copious and unquestionable documents for parliamentary history. The regular journals indeed are partly lost; nor would those which remain give us a sufficient insight into the spirit of parliament, without the aid of other sources. But a volume called Sir Simon D'Ewes's journal, part of which is copied from a manuscript of Heywood Townsend, a member of all parliaments from 1580 to 1601, contains minutes of the most interesting debates as well as transactions, and for the first time renders us acquainted with the names of those who swayed an English House of Commons.[400]