this? To declare that it is not in England so dangerous a matter to have a woman ruler, as men take it to be. For first it is not she that ruleth, but the laws, the executors whereof be her judges appointed by her, her justices and such other officers. Secondly, she maketh no statutes or laws, but the honourable court of parliament; she breaketh none, but it must be she and they together, or else not. If on the other part the regiment were such as all hanged on the king's or queen's will, and not upon the laws written; if she might decree and make laws alone without her senate; if she judged offences according to her wisdom, and not by limitation of statutes and laws; if she might dispose alone of war and peace; if, to be short, she were a mere monarch, and not a mixed ruler, you might peradventure make me to fear the matter the more, and the less to defend the cause."[460] This passage, notwithstanding some slight mistakes it contains, affords a proof of the doctrine current among Englishmen in 1559, and may perhaps be the less suspected, as it does not proceed from a skilful pen. And the quotations I have made in the last chapter from Hooker are evidence still more satisfactory, on account of the gravity and judiciousness of the writer, that they continued to be the orthodox faith in the later period of Elizabeth's reign. It may be observed, that those who speak of the limitations of the sovereign's power, and of the acknowledged liberties of the subject, use a distinct and intelligible language; while the opposite tenets are insinuated by means of vague and obscure generalities, as in the sentence above quoted from Raleigh. Sir Thomas Smith, secretary of state to Elizabeth, has bequeathed us a valuable legacy in his treatise on the commonwealth of England. But undoubtedly he evades, as far as possible, all great constitutional principles, and treats them, if at all, with a vagueness and timidity very different from the tone of Fortescue. He thus concludes his chapter on the parliament: "This is the order and form of the highest and most authentical court of England, by virtue whereof all these things be established whereof I spoke before, and no other means accounted available to make any new _forfeiture of life, members, or lands_, of any Englishman, where there was no law ordered for it before."[461] This leaves no small latitude for the authority of royal proclamations, which the phrase, I make no question, was studiously adopted in order to preserve.