Part 1 — CHAPTER I

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE CONSTITUTION

I. The Importance of Historical Background

1. Political Pre-eminence of Great Britain.—George III. is reported to have pronounced the English constitution the most perfect of human formations. One need hardly concur unreservedly in this dictum to be impressed with the propriety of beginning a survey of the governmental systems of modern Europe with an examination of the political principles, rules, and practices of contemporary Britain. The history of no other European nation, in the first place, exhibits a development of institutions so prolonged, so continuous, and so orderly. The governmental forms and agencies of no other state have been studied with larger interest or imitated with clearer effect. The public policy of no other organized body of men has been more influential in shaping the progress, social and economic as well as political, of the civilized world. For the American student, furthermore, the approach to the institutions of the European continent is likely to be rendered easier and more inviting if made by way of a body of institutions which lies at the root of much that is both American and continental. There are, it is true, not a few respects in which the governmental system of the United States to-day bears closer resemblance to that of France, Germany, Switzerland, or even Italy than to that of Great Britain. The relation, however, between the British and the American is one, in the main, of historical continuity, while that between the French or German and the American is one which arises largely from mere imitation or from accidental resemblance.

2. The Continuity of Institutional History.—No government can be studied adequately apart from the historical development which has made it what it is; and this ordinarily means the tracing of origins and of changes which stretch through a prolonged period of time. Men have sometimes imagined that they were creating a governmental system de novo, and it occasionally happens, as in France in 1791 and in Portugal in 1911, that a régime is instituted which has little apparent connection with the past. History demonstrates, however, in the first place, that such a régime is apt to perpetuate more of the old than is at the time supposed and, in the second place, that unless it is connected vitally with the old, the chances of its achieving stability or permanence are inconsiderable. In Germany, for example, if the institutions of the Empire were essentially new in 1871, the governmental systems of the several federated states, and of the towns and local districts, exhibited numerous elements which in origin were mediæval. In France, if central institutions, and even the political arrangements of the department and of the arrondissement, do not antedate the Revolution, the commune, in which the everyday political activity of the average citizen runs its course, stands essentially as it was in the age of Louis XIV.

II. Anglo-Saxon Beginnings

5. Township, Borough, and Hundred.—By reason of their persistence, and their comparative changelessness from earliest times to the later nineteenth century, the utmost importance attaches to Anglo-Saxon arrangements respecting local government and administration. The smallest governmental unit was the township, comprising normally a village surrounded by arable lands, meadows, and woodland. The town-moot was a primary assembly of the freemen of the village, by which, under the presidency of a reeve, the affairs of the township were administered. A variation of the township was the burgh, or borough, whose population was apt to be larger and whose political independence was greater; but its arrangements for government approximated closely those of the ordinary township. A group of townships comprised a hundred. At the head of the hundred was a hundred-man, ordinarily elected, but not infrequently appointed by a great landowner or prelate to whom the lands of the hundred belonged. Assisting him was a council of twelve or more freemen. In the hundred-moot was introduced the principle of representation, for to the meetings of that body came regularly the reeve, the parish priest, and four "best men" from each of the townships and boroughs comprised within the hundred. The hundred-moot met as often as once a month, and it had as its principal function the adjudication of disputes and the decision of cases, civil, criminal, and ecclesiastical.

III. The Norman-Plantagenet Period

At the coming of William the Conqueror, in 1066, two fundamental principles may be said to have been firmly fixed in the English political system. The first was that of thoroughgoing local self-government. The second was that of the obligation of the king, in all matters of first-rate importance, such as the laying of taxes and the making of laws, to seek the counsel and consent of some portion of his subjects. In the period which was inaugurated by the Conquest neither of these principles was entirely subverted, yet the Norman era stands out distinctly as one in which the powers of government were gathered in the hands of the king and of his immediate agents in a measure unknown at any earlier time. Building in so far as was possible upon foundations already laid, William was able so to manœuver the consequences of the Conquest as to throw the advantages all but wholly upon the side of the crown. Feudalism, land-tenure, military service, taxation, the church—to all was imparted, by force or by craft, such a bent that the will of the sovereign acquired the practical effect of law, and monarchy in England, traditionally weak, was brought to the verge of sheer absolutism.

10. The Great Charter, 1215.—The period of Richard I. (1189-1199) was, in constitutional matters, a continuation of that of Henry II. Richard was absent from the kingdom throughout almost the whole of the reign, but under the guidance of officials trained by Henry the machinery of government operated substantially as before. Under John (1199-1216) came a breakdown, occasioned principally by the sovereign's persistence in evading certain limitations upon the royal authority which already had assumed the character of established rules of the constitution. One of these forbade that the king should impose fresh taxation except with the advice and consent of the Great Council. Another enjoined that a man should not be fined or otherwise despoiled of his property except in virtue of judicial sentence. These and other principles John habitually disregarded, with the consequence that in time he found himself without a party and driven to the alternative of deposition or acceptance of the guarantee of liberties which the barons, the Church, and the people were united in demanding of him. The upshot was the promulgation, June 15, 1215, of Magna Carta.

No instrument in the annals of any nation exceeds in importance the Great Charter. The whole of English constitutional history, once remarked Bishop Stubbs, is but one long commentary upon it. The significance of the Charter arises not simply from the fact that it was wrested from an unwilling sovereign by concerted action of the various orders of society (action such as in France and other continental countries never, in mediæval times, became possible), but principally from the remarkable summary which it embodies of the fundamental principles of English government in so far as those principles had ripened by the thirteenth century. The Charter contained little or nothing that was new. Its authors, the barons, sought merely to gather up within a reasonably brief document those principles and customs which the better kings of England had been wont to observe, but which in the evil days of Richard and John had been persistently evaded. There was no thought of a new form of government, or of a new code of laws, but rather of the redress of present and practical grievances. Not a new constitution, but good government in conformity with the old one, was the essential object. Naturally enough, therefore, the instrument was based, in most of its important provisions, upon the charter granted by Henry I. in 1100, even as that instrument was based, in the main, upon the righteous laws of Edward the Confessor. After like manner, the Charter of 1215 became, in its turn, the foundation to which reassertions of constitutional liberty in subsequent times were apt to return; and, under greater or lesser pressure, the Charter itself was "confirmed" by numerous sovereigns who proved themselves none too much disposed to observe its principles.

IV. The Rise of Parliament

11. Beginnings of the Representative Principle.—The thirteenth century was clearly one of the most important periods in the growth of the English constitution. It was marked not merely by the contest which culminated in the grant of the Great Charter but also by the beginnings, in its essentials, of Parliament. The formative epoch in the history of Parliament may be said to have been, more precisely, the second half of the reign of Henry III. (1216-1272), together with the reign of the legislator-king Edward I. (1272-1307). The creation of Parliament as we know it came about through the signal enlargement of the Norman-Plantagenet Great Council by the introduction of representative elements, followed by the splitting of the heterogeneous mass of members definitely into two co-ordinate chambers. The representative principle was in England no new thing in the thirteenth century. As has appeared, there were important manifestations of it in the local governmental system of Anglo-Saxon times. As brought to bear in the development of Parliament, however, the principle is generally understood to have sprung from the twelfth-century practice of electing assessors to fix the value of real and personal property for purposes of taxation, and of jurors to present criminal matters before the king's justices. Thus, Henry II.'s Saladin Tithe of 1188—the first national imposition upon incomes and movable property—was assessed, at least in part, by juries of neighbors elected by, and in a sense representative of, the taxpayers of the various parishes. By the opening of the thirteenth century the idea was fast taking hold upon the minds of Englishmen, not only that the taxpayer ought to have a voice in the levying of taxes, but that between representation and taxation there was a certain natural and inevitable connection. In the Great Charter, as has been stated, it was stipulated that in the assessment of scutages and of all save the three commonly recognized feudal aids the king should seek the advice of the General Council. The General Council of the earlier thirteenth century was not regularly a representative body, but it was not beyond the range of possibility to impart to it a representative character, and in point of fact that is precisely what was done. To facilitate the process of taxation it was found expedient by the central authorities to carry over into the domain of national affairs that principle of popular representation which already was doing approved service within the sphere of local justice and finance, and from this adaptation arose, step by step, the conversion of the old gathering of feudal magnates into a national parliamentary assembly.

12. Early Parliaments.—The means by which the transformation was accomplished consisted in the first instance, as has been said, in the introduction into the Council of new and representative elements. The earliest step in this direction was taken in 1213, when King John, harassed by fiscal and political difficulties, addressed to the sheriffs a series of writs commanding that four discreet knights from every county be sent to participate in a deliberative council to be held at Oxford. The practice took root slowly. In 1254 Henry III., in sore need of money for the prosecution of his wars in Gascony, required of the sheriffs that two knights be sent from each county to confer with the barons and clergy relative to the subsidies which should be accorded the crown. The desired vote of supplies was refused and the long-brewing contest between the king and the barons broke in civil war. But during the struggle that ensued the foundations of Parliament were still more securely laid. Following the king's defeat at Lewes, in 1264, Simon de Montfort, leader of the barons, convened a parliament composed of not only barons and clergy but also four knights from each shire, and at London during the following year, he caused again to be assembled, in addition to five earls, eighteen barons, and a large body of clergy, two knights from each of the several shires and two burgesses from each of twenty-one towns known to be friendly to the barons' cause. These proceedings were essentially revolutionary and unauthorized. Even the gathering of 1265, as Stubbs remarks, presented the appearance largely of a party convention, and there is no evidence that its author intended such a body to be regularly or frequently summoned, or even summoned a second time at all. None the less, now for the first time representatives of the towns were brought into political co-operation with the barons, clergy, and knights; and the circumstance was filled with promise. During the ensuing thirty years there were several "parliaments," although the extent to which knights and burgesses participated in them is uncertain. The period was one of experimentation. In 1273 four knights from each shire and four citizens from each town joined the magnates in taking the oath of fealty to the new and absent sovereign, Edward I. The First Statute of Westminster, in 1275, declares itself to have been adopted with the assent of the "commonalty of the realm." In 1283 a parliament was held which almost precisely duplicated that of 1265. In 1290, and again in 1294, there was one, in which, however, representation of the towns was omitted.

The gathering which served to fix the type for all time to come was Edward I.'s so-called Model Parliament of 1295. To this parliament the king summoned severally the two archbishops, all of the bishops, the greater abbots, and the more important earls and barons; while every sheriff was enjoined to see that two knights were chosen from each shire, two citizens from each city, and two burgesses from each borough. Each bishop was authorized, furthermore, to bring with him his prior or the dean of the cathedral chapter, the archdeacons of his diocese, one proctor or agent for his cathedral chapter, and two of his diocesan clergy. In the parliament as actually convened there were 2 archbishops, 18 bishops with their lesser clergy, 66 abbots, 3 heads of religious orders, 9 earls, 41 barons, 63 knights of the shire, and 172 representatives of the cities and boroughs—an aggregate of approximately 400 persons. There were thus present in the assemblage, in person or by deputy, all of the constituent orders of English society, and the irregular device of Simon de Montfort was vested at last with the character of legality. After Edward I. Parliament may be said to have been an established institution of the realm. Its meetings long continued intermittent and infrequent, and its powers from time to time varied enormously, but the place which it filled in the economy of the nation grew ever more important.

13. Establishment of the Bicameral System.—Like its counterpart in France, the Estates-General, the English Parliament comprised the three great estates or orders—nobility, clergy, and commons—of which, aside from the peasantry, mediæval society in all western European countries was composed. In the working out of its internal structure, however, two chambers resulted, rather than, as in France, three. Originally the three estates sat separately. Their primary business was the voting of supplies and, the principle being that a tax ought to be conceded by those who would be called upon to pay it, the natural course was for the lords to grant their scutages and aids, the commoners their tenths and fifteenths, and the clergy their subsidies, apart. Indeed there is reason to believe that at times even the knights and the burgesses deliberated separately. Gradually, however, there appeared certain affiliations of interest which operated to modify the original practice. In the first place, the lesser clergy, inconvenienced by attendance and preferring to vote their contributions in the special ecclesiastical assemblages known as the convocations of Canterbury and York, contrived to throw off entirely their obligation of membership. The greater clergy and the greater barons, in the next place, developed sufficiently large interests in common to be amalgamated with ease in one body. Similarly, the lesser barons found their interests essentially identical with those of the country freeholders, represented by the knights of the shire, and with those of the burgesses. The upshot was a gradual alignment of the aggregate membership in two great groups, the one of which became historically the House of Lords, the other the House of Commons. At the beginning of the reign of Edward III. (1327-1377) the three estates still sat separately, but before the close of this period the bicameral arrangement seems definitely to have been established. There is no evidence that at any stage of their history the three groups ever sat as a single body. It need hardly be emphasized that the entire course of English history since the fourteenth century has been affected profoundly by the fact that the national assembly took the form of two houses rather than of one, as did the Scotch, of three as did the French, or of four as did the Swedish. But for the withdrawal of the lesser clergy, the number might very possibly have been three.

14. Powers of Finance and Legislation.—Structurally, the English Parliament is a creation of the Middle Ages; politically, it is a product of modern times, and, in no small measure, of the past hundred years. Before the close of the Middle Ages, however, it had acquired a sum total of authority which at least gave promise of its development into a great co-ordinate, if not a preponderating, power in the state. In the first place, it had forced the establishment of the twin principles of public finance (1) that the right to levy taxes of every sort lay within its hands and (2) that the crown might impose no direct tax without its assent, nor any indirect tax save such as might be justified under the customs recognized in Magna Carta. When Edward I. confirmed the Charter, in 1297, he agreed that no tallages or aids should thereafter be taken without the assent of the archbishops, bishops, earls, barons, knights, burgesses, and other freemen of the land. A statute of 1340 reiterated the principle still more specifically. In 1395 appeared the formula employed to this day in the making of parliamentary grants, "by the Commons with the advice and assent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal." And in 1407 Henry IV. extended the royal approval to the principle that money grants should be initiated in the Commons, assented to by the Lords, and only thereafter reported to the king. For the ancient theory of taxation by estates was substituted, slowly but inevitably, the modern doctrine of the fiscal pre-eminence of the Commons.

The second point at which Parliament made decisive advance before the close of the mediæval period was in respect to powers of ordinary legislation. Originally, Parliament was not conceived of as, in the strict sense, a law-making body at all. The magnates who composed the General Council had exercised the right to advise the crown in legislative matters, and their successors in Parliament continued to do the same, but the commoners who in the thirteenth century were brought in were present, in theory, for fiscal rather than legislative purposes. The distinction, however, was difficult to maintain, and with the continued growth of the parliamentary body the legislative character was recognized eventually to be inherent in the whole of it. At the opening of the fourteenth century laws were made, technically, by the king with the assent of the magnates at the request of the commoners. The knights and burgesses were recognized as petitioners for laws, rather than as legislators. They could ask for the enactment of a statute, or for a clearer definition of law, but it was for the king and his councillors to determine finally whether legislation was required and what form it should assume. Even when a law which was requested was promised it not infrequently happened that the intent of the Commons was thwarted, for the text of the measure was not drawn up, normally, until after the parliament was dissolved, both form and content were determined arbitrarily by the crown and council, and between petition and statute there might be, and often was, gross discrepancy.

V. Administrative and Judicial Development

16. The Permanent Council.—One line, thus, along which were laid the foundations of the English governmental system of to-day comprised the transformation of the Norman Great Council into the semi-aristocratic, semi-democratic assemblage known as Parliament. A parallel line was the development from the Great Council of a body designated after the thirteenth century as the Permanent, after the fifteenth as the Privy, Council, and likewise of the four principal courts of law. By a very gradual process those members of the original Council who were attached in some immediate manner to the court or to the administrative system acquired a status which was different from that of their colleagues. The Great Council met irregularly and infrequently. So likewise did Parliament. But the services of the court and the business of government must go on continuously, and for the care of these things there grew up a body which at first comprised essentially a standing commission, an inner circle, of the Council, but which in time acquired a virtually independent position and was designated, for purposes of distinction, as the Permanent Council. The composition of this body varied from time to time. Certain functionaries were included regularly, while the remaining members owed their places to special summons of the crown. Its powers were enormous, being at the same time administrative, judicial, and financial, and the mass of business to which it was required to give attention was increasingly great.

VI. The Tudor Monarchy

18. Popular Absolutism.—The salient fact of the Tudor period of English history (1485-1603) is the vigor and dominance of the monarchy. From the Wars of the Roses the nation emerged in need, above all other things, of discipline and repose. It was the part of the Tudors to enforce relentlessly the one and to foster systematically the other. The period was one in which aristocratic turbulence was repressed, extraordinary tribunals were erected to bring to justice powerful offenders, vagrancy was punished, labor was found for the unemployed, trade was stimulated, the navy was organized on a permanent basis, the diffusion of wealth and of education was encouraged, the growth of a strong middle class was promoted—in short, one in which out of chaos was brought order and out of weakness strength. These things were the work of a government which was strongly paternal, even sheerly despotic, and, for a time at least, the evolution of parliamentary machinery was utterly arrested. But it should be observed that the question in sixteenth-century England was not between strong monarchy on the one hand and parliamentary government on the other. The alternatives were, rather, strong monarchy and baronial anarchy. This the nation clearly perceived, and, of the two, it much preferred the former.

VII. Parliament under the Tudors

21. Control by the Crown.—By the Tudors generally, and especially Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, Parliament was regarded as a tool to be used by the crown, rather than as in any sense an independent, co-ordinate power in the state. When innovations were to be introduced, such as those carried through by Henry VIII., it was Tudor policy to clothe them with the vestments of parliamentarism, to the end that they might be given the appearance and the sanction of popular measures; and when subsidies were to be obtained, it was recognized to be expedient to impart to them, in similar manner, the semblance of voluntary gifts on the part of the nation. It was no part of Tudor intent, however, that Parliament should be permitted to initiate measures, or even to exercise any actual discretion in the adoption, amendment, or rejection of proposals submitted by the Government. There were several means by which the crown contrived to impede the rise of Parliament above the subordinate position which that body occupied at the accession of Henry VII. One was the practice of convening Parliament irregularly and infrequently and of bringing its sessions to an early close. Another, employed especially during Thomas Cromwell's ministry under Henry VIII. and during the reign of Elizabeth, was that of tampering with the freedom of borough and county elections. A third was the habit, also notorious under Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, of dictating and directing in all that was essential in the proceedings of the chambers. Henry VIII. bullied his parliaments systematically; Elizabeth, by cajolery, flattery, deceit, and other arts of which she was mistress, attained through less boisterous methods the same general end. Measures were thrust upon the chambers accompanied by peremptory demand for their enactment; objectionable projects originated by private members were stifled; and the fundamental parliamentary privileges of free speech, freedom from arrest, and access to the sovereign were arbitrarily suspended or otherwise flagrantly violated.

22. The Independence of the Crown.—Finally must be mentioned certain devices by which the crown was enabled to evade limitations theoretically imposed by Parliament's recognized authority. One of these was the issuing of proclamations. In the sixteenth century it was generally maintained that the sovereign, acting alone or with the advice of the Council, could issue proclamations controlling the liberty of the subject, so long as such edicts did not violate statute or common law. As a corollary, it was maintained also that the crown could dispense with the action of law in individual cases and at times of crisis. The range covered by these prerogatives was broad and undefined, and in the hands of an aggressive monarch they constituted a serious invasion of the powers of legislation nominally vested in Parliament. It is true that the act of 1539 imparting to royal proclamations the force of law was repealed in 1547; but proclamations continued, especially under Elizabeth and James I., not only to be numerous, but to be enforced relentlessly by penalties inflicted through the Star Chamber. The most important power of Parliament in the sixteenth century was still that of voting supplies. But in respect to finance, as in respect to legislation, the crown possessed effective means of evading parliamentary control. In the first place, the sovereign possessed large revenues, arising from crown lands, feudal rights, profits of jurisdiction, and ecclesiastical payments, with which Parliament had nothing whatever to do. In the second place, the great indirect taxes—customs duties and tonnage and poundage—were, in the sixteenth century, voted at the accession of a sovereign for the whole of the reign. It was only in respect to extraordinary taxes—"subsidies" and "tenths and fifteenths"—that Parliament was in a position effectually to make or mar the fiscal fortunes of the Government; except that, of course, it was always open to Parliament to criticise the financial expedients of the crown, such as the sale of monopolies, the levy of "impositions," and the collection of benevolences, and to influence, if it could, the policy pursued in relation to these matters.

23. The House of Lords in 1485.—Despite the numerous strictures that have been mentioned, Parliament in the Tudor period by no means stood still. The enormous power and independence exhibited by the chambers, especially the Commons, in the seventeenth century was the product of substantial, if more or less hidden, growth during the previous one hundred and fifty years. The composition of the two houses at the accession of Henry VII. was not clearly defined. The House of Lords was but a small body. It comprised simply those lords, temporal and spiritual, who were entitled to receive from the king, when a parliament was to be held, a special writ, i.e., an individual summons. The number of these was indeterminate. The right of the archbishops, the bishops, and the abbots to be summoned was immemorial and indisputable, although the abbots in practice evaded their obligation of attendance, save in cases in which it could be shown that as military tenants of the crown they were obligated to perform parliamentary duty. Among the lay nobility the selection of individuals for summons seems originally to have been dependent upon the royal pleasure. Eventually, however, the principle became fixed that a man once summoned must be summoned whenever occasion should arise, and that, furthermore, his eldest son after him must be summoned in similar manner. What was at the outset an obligation became in time a privilege and a distinction, and by the day when it did so the rule had become legally established that the king could not withhold a writ of summons from the heir of a person who had been once summoned and had obeyed the summons by taking his seat. During the fourteenth century the aggregate membership of the chamber fluctuated in the neighborhood of 150. By reason of the withdrawal of some of the abbots and the decline of the baronage, in the fifteenth century the body was yet smaller. The number of temporal lords summoned to the first parliament of Henry VII. was but 29.

24. The House of Commons in 1485.—The House of Commons at the beginning of the Tudor period was a body of some 300 members. It contained 74 knights of the shire, representing all but three of the forty English counties, together with a fluctuating number of representatives of cities and boroughs. In the Model Parliament of 1295 the number of urban districts represented was 166, but as time went on the number declined, in part because of the discrimination exercised from time to time in the selection of boroughs to be represented, and in part by reason of the fact that in times when representation did not appear to yield tangible results the borough taxpayers begrudged the two shillings per day paid their representatives, in some instances sufficiently to be induced to abandon altogether the sending of members. By the time of Edward IV. (1399-1413) the number of represented towns had fallen to 111. At the beginning of the fifteenth century county members were elected by the body of freeholders present at the county court, but by statute of 1429 the electoral privilege was restricted to freeholders resident in the county and holding land of the yearly rental value of forty shillings, equivalent, perhaps, to some £30 to £40 in present values. This rule, adopted originally with the express purpose of disfranchising "the very great and outrageous number of people either of small substance or of no value" who had been claiming an electoral equality with the "worthy knights and squires," continued in operation without amendment until 1832. The electoral systems prevailing in the boroughs exhibited at all times the widest variation, and never prior to 1832 was there serious attempt to establish uniformity of practice. In some places (the so-called "scot and lot" boroughs) the suffrage was exercised by all rate-payers; in others, by the holders of particular tenements ("burgage" franchise); in others (the "potwalloper" boroughs) by all citizens who had hearths of their own; in many, by the municipal corporation, or by the members of a guild, or even by neighboring landholders. Borough electoral arrangements ran the full gamut from thoroughgoing democracy to the narrowest kind of oligarchy.

25. Development under the Tudors: Composition.—During the Tudor period the composition of the two chambers underwent important change. In the Lords the principal modification was the substitution of temporal for spiritual preponderance. This was brought about in two ways. The first was the increase numerically of the hereditary peers from thirty-six at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII. to about eighty at the accession of James I. The second was the dropping out of twenty-eight abbots, incident to the closing of the monasteries by Henry VIII. and only partially compensated by the creation at the time of six new bishoprics. In 1509 the number of lords spiritual was forty-eight; in 1603, it was but twenty-six. The House of Commons under the Tudors was virtually doubled in size. The final incorporation of Wales in 1535 meant the adding of twenty-five members. In 1536 and 1543 the counties of Monmouth and Chester were admitted to representation. There followed the enfranchisement of a number of boroughs, and by the end of the reign of Henry VIII. the representation of counties had been increased from 74 to 90, and that of the boroughs had been brought up to 252, giving the House an aggregate membership of 342. During the reign of Edward VI. twenty new constituencies were created, and during that of Mary twenty-one. But the most notable increase was that which took place in the reign of Elizabeth, the net result of which was the bringing in of 62 new borough representatives, in some cases from boroughs which now acquired for the first time the right of representation, in others from boroughs which once had possessed the right but through disuse had been construed to have forfeited it. The total increase of the Commons in numerical strength during the Tudor period was 166. There can be little question that in a few instances parliamentary representation was extended with the specific purpose of influencing the political complexion of the popular chamber. But, on the whole, the reason for the notable increase, especially of borough members, is to be found in the growing prosperity of the country and in the reliance which the Tudors were accustomed to place upon the commercial and industrial classes of the population.

26. Other Developments.—A second point at which Parliament in the Tudor era underwent modification was in respect to permanence and sittings. Prior to Henry VIII. the life of a parliament was confined, as a rule, to a single session, and sessions were brief. But parliaments now ceased to be meetings to be broken up as soon as some specific piece of business should have been completed, and many were brought together in several succeeding sessions. Henry VIII.'s Reformation Parliament lasted seven years. During the forty-five years of Elizabeth there were ten parliaments and thirteen sessions. One of these parliaments lasted eleven years, although it met but three times. It is true that the parliaments of Elizabeth were in session, in the aggregate, somewhat less than three years, an average for the reign of but little more than three weeks a year. But the point is that, slowly but effectually, Parliament as an institution was acquiring a recognized position in the political system of the nation. In 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.

VIII. The Stuarts: Crown and Parliament

IX. The Later Stuarts: the Revolution of 1688-1689

31. Charles II. and James II.—Throughout the period 1660-1689 there was enacted a final grand experiment to determine whether a Stuart could, or would, govern constitutionally. The constitution in accordance with which Charles II. and James II. were expected to govern was that which had been built up during preceding centuries, amended by the important reforms effected by the Long Parliament in 1641. The settlement of 1660 was a restoration no less of Parliament than of the monarchy, in respect both to structure and to functions. The two chambers were re-established upon their earlier foundations, and in them was vested the power to enact all legislation and to sanction all taxation. The spirit, if not the letter, of the agreement in accordance with which the Stuart house was restored forbade the further imposition of taxes by the arbitrary decree of the crown and all exercise of the legislative power by the crown singly, whether positively through proclamation or negatively through dispensation. It required that henceforth the nature and amount of public expenditures should, upon inquiry, be made known to the two houses, and that ministers might regularly be held to account for their acts and those of the sovereign. The easy-going Charles II. (1660-1685) contrived most of the time to keep fairly within the bounds that were prescribed for him. He disliked the religious measures of his first parliament, but he recognized that a fresh election might be expected to result in the choice of a House of Commons still less to his taste, and, accordingly, the Cavalier Parliament was kept in existence throughout the entire period 1661-1679. The parliamentary history of the closing years of the reign centered about the question of the exclusion of the king's Catholic brother, James, from the throne, and was given special interest by the conflict of groups foreshadowing political parties; but Charles maintained unfailingly an attitude which, at the least, did not endanger his own tenure of the throne.