Note (21) — Chapter III
Reading edition
See the discussion on the famous vote of the Convention Parliament in Hallam, Constitutional History, ii. 260-263. Macaulay, ii. 623. Hallam remarks that “the word ‘forfeiture’ might better have answered this purpose than ‘abdication’ or ‘desertion,’” and he adds, “they proceeded not by the stated rules of the English government, but by the general rights of mankind. They looked not so much to Magna Charta as the original compact of society, and rejected Coke and Hale for Hooker and Harrington.” My position is that there is no need to go to what Hallam calls “higher constitutional laws” for the justification of the doings of the Convention, but that they were fully justified by the precedents of English History from the eighth century to the fourteenth.
The Scottish Estates, it should be remembered, did not shrink from using the word “forfeited.” Macaulay, iii. 285.