Henry M. Baird · 25 of 379

CHAPTER I · Abuses in the administration of justice.

Not that either the Parliament of Paris or the provincial parliaments were free of grave defects deserving the severe animadversion of impartial observers. It was probably no worse with the Parliament of Bordeaux than with its sister courts; yet, when Charles the Ninth visited that city in 1564, honest Chancellor L'Hospital seized the opportunity to tell the judges some of their failings. The royal ordinances were not observed. Parliamentary decisions ranked above commands of the king. There were divisions and violence. In the civil war some judges had made themselves captains. Many of them were avaricious, timid, lazy and inattentive to their duties. Their behavior and their dress were "dissolute." They had become negligent in judging, and had thrown the burden of prosecuting offences upon the shoulders of the king's attorney, originally appointed merely to look after the royal domain. They had become the servants of the nobility for hire. There was not a lord within the jurisdiction of the Parliament of Bordeaux but had his own chancellor in the court to look after his interests. It was sufficiently characteristic that the same judicial body of which such things were said to its face (and which neither denied their truth nor grew indignant), should have been so solicitous for its dignity as to send the monarch, upon his approach to the city, an earnest petition that its members should not be constrained to kneel when his Majesty entered their court-room! To which the latter dryly responded, "their genuflexion would not make him any less a king than he already was."