Both the Roman imperial law and the Roman imperial constitution were useful models for kings of the New Monarchy; the Roman Empire was a despotism; _quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem_ ran the fundamental principle of Roman Empire.[66] Nor was this all; Roman emperors were habitually deified, and men in the sixteenth century seemed to pay to their kings while alive the Divine honours which Romans paid to their emperors when dead.

"Le nouveau Messie," says Michelet, "est le roi."[67] [Footnote 66: The conclusion of the maxim _utpote cum lege regia quae de imperio ejus lata est, populus ei et in eum omne suum imperium et potestatem conferat_ (Ulpian, _Digest_, I., iv., 1), was conveniently forgotten by apologists for absolutism, though the Tudors respected it in practice.] [Footnote 67: _Hist.

de France_, ed.

1879, ix., 301.] Nowhere was the king more emphatically the saviour of society than in England.

The sixty years of Lancastrian rule were in the seventeenth century represented as the golden age of parliamentary government, a sort of time before the fall to which popular orators appealed when they wished to paint in vivid colours the evils of Stuart tyranny.