Note 457 — Chapter V

Raleigh's Dedication of his Prerogative of Parliaments to James I. contains terrible things. "The bonds of subjects to their kings should always be wrought out of iron, the bonds of kings unto subjects but with cobwebs."—"All binding of a king by law upon the advantage of his necessity, makes the breach itself lawful in a king; his charters and all other instruments being no other than the surviving witnesses of his unconstrained will." The object, however, of the book, is to persuade the king to call a parliament (about 1613), and we are not to suppose that Raleigh meant what he said. He was never very scrupulous about truth. In another of his tracts, entitled The Prince; or, Thesaurus of State, he holds, though not without flattery towards James, a more reasonable language. "In every just state some part of the government is or ought to be impartial to the people; as in a kingdom, a voice or suffrage in making laws: and sometimes also in levying of arms, if the charge be great and the prince be forced to borrow help of his subjects, the matter rightly may be propounded to a parliament, that the tax may seem to have proceeded from themselves.