flourishes more brightly than it does under a righteous King(16). And so it does while that righteous King himself tarries among men. But to win freedom as an heritage for ever there are times when we have more need of the vices of Kings than of their virtues. The tyranny of our Angevin masters woke up English freedom from its momentary grave. Had Richard and John and Henry been Kings like Ælfred and Saint Lewis, the crosier of Stephen Langton, the sword of Robert Fitzwalter, would never have flashed at the head of the Barons and people of England; the heights of Lewes would never have seen the mightiest triumph of her freedom; the pavement of Evesham choir would never have closed over the mangled relics of her noblest champion(17). The career of Simon of Montfort is the most glorious in our later history. Cold must be the heart of every Englishman who does not feel a thrill of reverence and gratitude as he utters that immortal name. But, fully to understand his work, we must go back somewhat before his own time, we must go back and trace how the sway of foreign invaders first made the path ready for the course of the foreign deliverer. I have shown in what state our Constitution stood at the time of the Norman Conquest. In that Constitution, be it ever remembered, the Norman Conquest made no formal change whatever. Nothing has had a more lasting effect on all later English history than the personal character and position of the Norman Conqueror. But it was not in the character of a legislator that the main work of William was done. His greatest work of all was to weld together the still imperfectly united kingdoms of our ancient England into one indivisible body, a body which, since his day, no man has ever dreamed of rending asunder. But this was not the work of any formal legislative enactment; it was the silent result of the compression of foreign conquest. So it was with William’s whole policy and position. He was in truth a Conqueror, King by the edge of the sword, but it was his aim in everything to disguise the fact. He claimed the Crown by legal right; he received it by the formal election of the English people, and he was consecrated to his kingly office by the hands of an English Primate. He professed to rule, not according to his own will, not according to any laws of his own devising, but according to the laws of his predecessor and kinsman King Eadward (18). The great immediate change which was wrought under him was not any formal legislative change; it was the silent revolution implied in the transfer—the wary and gradual transfer—of all the greatest estates and highest offices in England to the hands of foreign holders. The momentary effect was to make Englishmen on their own soil the subjects of foreign conquerors. The lasting effect was to change those foreign conquerors into Englishmen, and to call forth the spirit of English freedom in a more definite and antagonistic shape than it had ever before put on.