in a free and plentiful manner, became a more excellent infantry,
but such a one upon which the lords had so little power, that
from henceforth they may be computed to have been disarmed.
And as they had lost their infantry after this manner, so
their cavalry and commanders were cut off by the statute of
retainers; for whereas it was the custom of the nobility to have
younger brothers of good houses, mettled fellows, and such as
were knowing in the feats of arms about them, they who were
longer followed with so dangerous a train, escaped not such
punishments as made them take up.
Henceforth the country lives and great tables of the
nobility, which no longer nourished veins that would bleed for
them, were fruitless and loathsome till they changed the air, and
of princes became courtiers; where their revenues, never to have
been exhausted by beef and mutton, were found narrow, whence
followed racking of rents, and at length sale of lands, the
riddance through the statute of alienations being rendered far
more quick and facile than formerly it had been through the new
invention of entails.
To this it happened that Coraunus, the successor of that
King, dissolving the abbeys, brought, with the declining state of
the nobility, so vast a prey to the industry of the people, that
the balance of the commonwealth was too apparently in the popular
party to be unseen by the wise Council of Queen Parthenia, who,
converting her reign through the perpetual love tricks that
passed between her and her people into a kind of romance, wholly
neglected the nobility. And by these degrees came the House of
Commons to raise that head, which since has been so high and
formidable to their princes that they have looked pale upon those
assemblies. Nor was there anything now wanting to the destruction
of the throne, but that the people, not apt to see their own
strength, should be put to feel it; when a prince, as stiff in
disputes as the nerve of monarchy was grown slack, received that
unhappy encouragement from his clergy which became his utter
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