Note 257 — Chapter VII

The following passage from a letter which Gardiner wrote to the Protector Somerset in the reign of Edward VI. gives a slightly different account of the origin of the Act about Proclamations:—

‘Whether the King may command against the Common Law or an Act of Parliament there is never a Judge, or other man in the realm, ought to know more by experience of that the Lawyers have said, than I . . . being of the Council, when many Proclamations were devised against the Carriers out of Corn; when it came to punishing the Offenders the Judges would answer, it might not be by the Laws, because the Act of Parliament gave liberty, Wheat being under a price: wherupon at the last followed the Act of Proclamations, in the passing whereof were many large words.’

It will be noticed that this account of the origin of the Act is in many ways similar to that contained in Cromwell’s letter: the chief difference being that according to the latter the measure was adopted to prevent the export of coin, while Gardiner informs us that the statute was devised to prevent the export of corn. It is possible that the Bishop of Winchester, writing so many years later, had forgotten the exact circumstances, and was really referring to the same incident as that described by Cromwell. Burnet has printed Gardiner’s letter in full (Collection of Records and Original Papers, &c., part ii, book i, no. 14), but he does not seem to have made use of the information it contains; for in another part of his work (part i, book iii, p. 423) he asserts that the Act about Proclamations was the result of the great exceptions made to the legality of the King’s proceedings in the articles about religion and other injunctions published by his authority, which were complained of as contrary to law. Hallam (vol. i. p. 35 n.) apparently agrees with Burnet in this last statement, and ignores the evidence supplied by the letter of the Bishop of Winchester. It is probable that both writers have gone astray in this matter. The opposition aroused by the King’s ecclesiastical proclamations may have hastened the passage of the Act, but they can scarcely be regarded as its origin in the face of the testimony of Cromwell and Gardiner. Burnet and Hallam were perhaps led to ascribe the source of the statute to religious matters, by the fact that the Act was passed almost simultaneously with the Six Articles, and by the special provision which it contained concerning heretics.