1589 Thomas Smith, a court secretary, published a book entitled "The Commonwealth of England and the Manner of Government Thereof," in which was laid down the fundamental proposition that "the most high and absolute power of the realm of England consisteth in the parliament"; and there is no record that the proclamation of this doctrine, even by a court official, elicited serious protest or difference of opinion. It was in the Tudor period, further, that both houses instituted the keeping of journals and that the appointment of committees and numerous other aspects of modern parliamentary procedure had their beginnings.
Finally, the Elizabethan portion of the period was an epoch during which there took place a very real growth in independence of sentiment and an equally notable advance in consciousness of power on the part of the popular chamber. Even before the death of Elizabeth there were ill-repressed manifestations of the feeling that the Tudor monarchy had done its work and that the time for a larger amount of parliamentary control had arrived. Nothing was clearer in 1603 than the fact that the sovereign who should expect to get on agreeably with his Commons must be both liberal and tactful. That the Stuarts possessed the first of these qualities in only a very limited measure and the second one not at all is a fact upon which turns an entire chapter of English constitutional history.[21]
VIII. The Stuarts: Crown and Parliament
27. Absolutism Becomes Impracticable.—Throughout the larger portion of the seventeenth century the principal interest in English politics centers in the contest which was waged between the nation represented in Parliament and the sovereigns of the Stuart dynasty. The question, as one writer has put it, was "at first whether government should be by the king or by the king in parliament, afterwards whether the king should govern or whether parliament should govern."[22] The Stuart sovereigns brought with them to the English throne no political principles that were new. When James I., in a speech before Parliament March 21, 1610, declared that monarchy "is the supremest thing upon earth," and that, "as to dispute what God may do is blasphemy, … so is it sedition in subjects to dispute what a King may do in the height of his power,"[23] he was but giving expression to a conception of the royal prerogative which had been lodged in the mind of every Tudor, but which no Tudor had been so tactless as publicly to avow. The first two Stuarts confidently expected to maintain the same measure of absolutism which their Tudor predecessors had maintained—nothing more, nothing less. There were, however, several reasons why, for them, this was an impossibility. The first arose from their own temperament. The bluntness, the lack of perception of the public will, and the disposition perpetually to insist upon the minutest definitions of prerogative, which so pre-eminently characterized the members of the Stuart house must have operated to alienate seventeenth-century Englishmen under even the most favorable of circumstances. A second consideration is the fact, of which the nation was fully cognizant, that under the changed conditions that had arisen there was no longer the need of strong monarchy that once there had been. Law and order had long since been secured; all danger of a feudal reaction had been effectually removed; foreign invasion was no more to be feared. Strong monarchy had served an invaluable purpose, but that purpose had been fulfilled.
28. The Rights of the Commons Asserted.—Finally there was the fact of the enormous growth of Parliament as an organ of the public will. The rapidity of that development in the days of Elizabeth is, and was at the time, much obscured by the disposition of the nation to permit the Queen to live out her days without being seriously crossed in her purposes. But the magnitude of it becomes apparent enough after 1603. In a remarkable document known as the Apology of the Commons, under date of June 20, 1604, the popular chamber stated respectfully but frankly to the new sovereign what it considered to be its rights and, through it, the rights of the nation. "What cause we your poor Commons have," runs the address, "to watch over our privileges, is manifest in itself to all men. The prerogatives of princes may easily, and do daily, grow; the privileges of the subject are for the most part at an everlasting stand. They may be by good providence and care preserved, but being once lost are not recovered but with much disquiet. The rights and liberties of the Commons of England consisteth chiefly in these three things: first, that the shires, cities, and boroughs of England, by representation to be present, have free choice of such persons as they shall put in trust to represent them; secondly, that the persons chosen, during the time of the parliament, as also of their access and recess, be free from restraint, arrest, and imprisonment: thirdly, that in parliament they may speak freely their consciences without check and controlment, doing the same with due reverence to the sovereign court of parliament, that is, to your Majesty and both the Houses, who all in this case make but one politic body, whereof your Highness is the head."[24] The shrewdness of the political philosophy with which this passage opens is matched only by the terseness with which the fundamental rights of the Commons as a body are enumerated. To the enumeration should be added, historically, an item contained in a petition of the Commons, May 23, 1610, which reads as follows: "We hold it an ancient, general, and undoubted right of Parliament to debate freely all matters which do properly concern the subject and his right or state; which freedom of debate being once foreclosed, the essence of the liberty of Parliament is withal dissolved."[25] The occasion for this last-mentioned assertion of right arose from the king's habitual assumption that there were various important matters of state, e.g., the laying of impositions and the conduct of foreign relations, which Parliament possessed no right so much as to discuss.
29. The Parliaments of James I. and Charles I.—The tyranny of James I. and Charles I. assumed the form, principally, of the issue of proclamations without the warrant of statute and the exaction of taxes without the assent of Parliament. Parliament, during the period 1603–1640, was convened but seldom, and it was repeatedly prorogued or dissolved to terminate its inquiries, thwart its protests, or subvert its projected measures. Under the disadvantage of recurrent interruption the Commons contrived, however, to carry on a contest with the crown which was essentially continuous. During the reign of James I. (1603–1625) there were four parliaments. The first, extending from 1604 to 1611, was called in session six times. It sorely displeased the king by remonstrating against his measures, and especially by the persistency with which it withheld subsidies pending a redress of grievances. The second, summoned in 1614, vainly reiterated the complaints of its predecessor and was dissolved without having enacted a single measure. The third, in 1621, revived the power of impeachment (dormant since the days of Henry VII.), reasserted the right of the chambers to debate foreign relations, and avenged by a fresh protestation of liberties the arrest of one of its members. The fourth, in 1624, abolished monopolies and renewed the attack upon proclamations. The first parliament of Charles I., convoked in 1625, criticised the policy of the new sovereign and was dissolved. The second, in 1626, was dissolved to prevent the impeachment of the king's favorite minister, the Duke of Buckingham. The third, in 1628–1629, drew up the memorable Petition of Right, to which the king gave reluctant assent, and in which arbitrary imprisonment, the billeting of soldiers, the establishment of martial law in time of peace, and the imposition of gifts, loans, benevolences, or taxes without the consent of Parliament were specifically prohibited.[26] The fourth of Charles's parliaments, the so-called Short Parliament of 1640, followed a period of eleven years of personal government and showed no disposition to surrender the rights that had been asserted. The fifth—the Long Parliament, convoked also in 1640—imprisoned and executed the king's principal advisers, abolished the Star Chamber and the several other special courts and councils of Tudor origin, pronounced illegal the levy of ship-money and of tonnage and poundage without parliamentary assent, made provision for the assembling of a parliament within three years of the dissolution of the present one, and forced the king into a position where he was obliged to yield or to resort to war.
30. The Commonwealth and the Protectorate.—Between the political theory maintained by the Stuart kings and that maintained by the parliamentary majority it was found impossible to arrive at a compromise. The Civil War was waged, in the last analysis, to determine which of the two theories should prevail. It should be emphasized that the parliamentarians entered upon the contest with no intent to establish a government by Parliament alone, in form or in fact. It is sufficiently clear from the Grand Remonstrance of 164127] that what they contemplated was merely the imposing of constitutional
