Such a task could not fail to be a welcome one; and COTTON found no lack of pertinent evidence. The bent and habit of his mind were always methodical. He begins his abstract of the records by tabulating his argument. Precedency, he says, must have respect either to the nation or to the ruler of the nation. A kingdom must rank either (1) according to its antiquity, or (2) according to ‘the eminency of the throne royal,’ by which phrase he means the complete unity of the dominion under one supreme ruler. On the first title to precedency he observes that it may be based either upon the date of national independence, or upon that of the national recognition of Christianity. He claims for England that it was a monarchy at least four hundred and sixty years before Castile became one; that Christianity had then been established in it, without break or interruption, for a thousand years; [Sidenote: _Cottoni Posthuma_, pp. 76, 77.] whereas in Spain Christianity was ‘defaced with Moorish Mahumetisme,’ until the expulsion of the Moors by FERDINAND, little more than a century before the time at which he was writing. His assertion of the greater ‘eminency of the throne royal’ in England than in Spain is mainly founded on the union in the English sovereignty alone of supreme ecclesiastical with supreme civil power; and on the lineal descent of the then sovereign ‘from Christian princes for 800 years,’ whereas the descent of the Kings of Spain ‘is chiefly from the Earls of Castilia, about 500 years since,’ and the then King of Spain was ‘yet in the infancy of his kingdom.’ Two minor and ancillary arguments in this tract are also notable: The Spanish throne, says COTTON, hath not, as hath the English and French, ‘that virtue to endow the king therein invested with the power to heal the king’s evil; for into France do yearly come multitudes of Spaniards to be healed thereof.’ And he further alleges that ‘absolute power of the King of England, which in other kingdoms is much restrained.’ The time was to come when the close friend and fellow-combatant of ELIOT and the other framers of the great ‘Petition of Right’ would rank himself with the foremost in ‘much restraining’ the kingly power in England, and would discover ample warrant in ancient precedents for every step of the process. But, as yet, that time was afar off. [Sidenote: MS. Cott. Vesp. C. xiii, ff. 158; 160, seqq. (B. M.)]