Note (Back) — Chapter I

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.