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disappeared, and when the king began to gather a party together, he should side with the more radical section which carried the Grand Remonstrance, and insisted upon a large control over the executive government. And he was the more inclined to this side because he was a Puritan.2 He would have liked to see the church settled by the House of Commons upon a broad Protestant basis. To this solution the supporters of the church of England were wholly opposed. They united with those who were opposed to taking from the king all control over the executive; and consequently, as we shall see, the House of Commons was split into two parties. It was this division of the House of Commons and the country into two parties that made Pym the first Parliamentary statesman of the modern type; for it made him a party leader depending for his power on his tact, his eloquence, his knowledge of Parliamentary procedure, his business-like qualities, and his power both to outline a programme and to enforce upon his party the discipline needed to carry it through.

The first Act of the Long Parliament was, as we have seen, to secure its own safety by impeaching Strafford." Then it fell upon some of the other agents of prerogative rule-Laud, Windebank, Finch, and some of the other judges. Thus it took a long step towards finally settling the doctrine, for which the Parliamentary leaders had always contended, that all ministers were answerable to the law for their illegal acts. While the practice, introduced about this period, that all royal acts must be countersigned by a secretary of state, ensured that, for these acts, there would always be a minister who could be made thus responsible."

Side by side with these prosecutions the constructive work of the Long Parliament was going on; and it is not too much to say that some of the statutes regularly passed by it, that is, some of those statutes which had the assent of all three branches of the legislature, embody some of the most important principles of our modern public law, and still influence the form and contents of that law. One or two other statutes are of a somewhat more temporary importance, and are chiefly interesting as illustrating some of the acts of the crown which were generally regarded as abuses. I shall therefore deal with this legislation under these two heads.

1 Below 119-120.

2 Gardiner, op. cit. vii 36; x 33.

* See the Grand Remonstrance §§ 183-185. 4 Below 121-122, 135-138.

7 S.P. Dom. 1641-1643, Introd. viii.

5 Above 77.

6 Above 101-103.

Statutes of Permanent Importance.

Among these statutes we must place first those which finally secured to the House of Commons the absolute control over taxation direct and indirect. The Act1 which granted tunnage and poundage to the king for two months, enacted and declared, “That it is and hath been the ancient right of the subjects of this realm that no subsidy impost custom or other charge whatsoever ought or may be laid or imposed upon any merchandize exported or imported by subjects denizens or aliens without common consent in Parliament "; and the penalty of a præmunire was imposed on any officer who attempted to collect these duties after the expiry of the period mentioned in the Act. These provisions were repeated in the various Acts which from time to time continued these duties.2

Next in importance comes the Act which abolished the Court of Star Chamber, and the power of the Council of Wales, the Council of the North, the Duchy Court of Lancaster, and the Court of Exchequer of the county Palatine of Chester, to exercise a like jurisdiction. As we have seen, it in effect deprived the Privy Council, and the various courts derived from the Privy Council, of all extraordinary jurisdiction in England. If, as in the case of the Star Chamber and the Council of the North, this extraordinary jurisdiction was all the jurisdiction that the court possessed, the court itself necessarily disappeared; but if, as in the case of the Council of Wales, these courts exercised in addition ordinary common law or equitable jurisdiction, they continued to exist for the purpose of exercising that jurisdiction. Thus the most formidable rivals to the common law courts were removed, and the common law finally asserted its supremacy not only over the private, but also over the public law of the state. This Act further safeguarded the liberty of the subject by reversing the decision in Darnel's Case. It provided that persons imprisoned contrary to the Act should be entitled to their writs of habeas corpus, and that these provisions should apply to persons committed by the command of the king himself or his Council. The Act which abolished the Court of High Commission removed a court which had often used its powers to persecute theological opponents, who were also the political opponents of the royalist theories of government.10 It also deprived the ecclesiastical courts of the power to inflict any penalty or corporal punishment,

116 Charles I. c. 8.

316 Charles II. c. 10 §§ 1 and 2.

5 Ibid 126-127, 515 n. 3.

7 16 Charles I. c. 10 § 6.

9 Ibid c. 11.

2 Ibid cc. 12, 22, 25, 29, 31, 36.

4 Vol. i 515.

6 Above 36-37.

$ Ibid § 7.

10 Vol. i 610-611.

or to administer the ex officio oath. These latter clauses were repealed in 1661; but the Act marks the beginning of the rapid decay of the temporal jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, and the consequent increase of the jurisdiction of the common law courts over many matters in which these courts had formerly exercised a concurrent jurisdiction. Both these Acts expressly prohibited the Crown from setting up courts with a like jurisdiction. Charles spoke truly when he said that these two Acts "altered in a great measure those fundamental laws, ecclesiastical and civil, which many of my best governing predecessors have established."5

8

It was quite obvious that the eleven years of prerogative rule had been made possible by the fact that the king's prerogative to summon, prorogue, or dissolve Parliaments was absolute. To control this prerogative the Triennial Act" was passed. It provided in substance that no longer than three years should elapse between the dissolution of one Parliament and the holding of another; that if a Parliament was continued by prorogation or adjournment for three years, it should be dissolved, and the Chancellor should issue writs for a new Parliament; that if the Chancellor did not issue the writs the sheriffs should hold the elections, and if the sheriffs did not hold the elections the electors should proceed to an election; and that no Parliament was to be dissolved or prorogued within fifty days of its meeting without its own consent. 10 We shall see that this Act was repealed after the Restoration; " but the Act repealing it provided that no longer interval than three years should elapse between the dissolution of one Parliament and the summoning of another. It was not, however, till after the Revolution had finally established the supremacy of Parliament, that the object at which the framers of the Act of 1641 directly aimed was attained less directly but more certainly.

Statutes not of Permanent Importance.

These Acts were directed against the abuse of certain old prerogatives to which the king had had recourse in his efforts to get money. Among them we may mention the Act declaring ship money illegal, annulling the judgment in the Case of Ship

116 Charles I. c. 11 § 2.

2 Below 165; vol. i 611.

3 Ibid 620-621.

16 Charles I. c. 10 § 2; ibid c. 11 § 4; for the Act dealing with the Stannary courts, ibid c. 15, see vol. i 162.

5 The king's speech in the House of Lords when he gave his consent to these two bills, S. P. Dom. 1641-1643 44, cccclxxxii 17. 8 Ibid.

616 Charles I. c. 1.

9 Ibid §§ 4 and 5.

11 16 Charles II. c. 1; below 166.

VOL. VI.-8

7 Ibid § 2.

10 Ibid § 6.

Money, and ordering the Petition of Right to be put in execution; the Act settling the boundaries of the Forests; and the Act abolishing distraints of knighthood.3

None of these statutes can be described as revolutionary. They were measures which were obviously necessary, either to strengthen the position of Parliament, or to guard against admitted abuses; and they commanded the general assent of the nation. There was one statute, however, which proved to be distinctly revolutionary in character. That was the Act which provided that the Parliament then sitting should not be dissolved or prorogued except by Act of Parliament, nor should either House be adjourned except by Act of Parliament or by its own order. The reasons for passing it were partly the difficulty of raising money on credit if there was no security for the continuance of the Parliament, partly the fear, induced by the discovery of the Army Plot, that it might be dissolved before peace was made with Scotland, justice executed on delinquents, and grievances redressed. These considerations were so pressing that the essentially revolutionary character of the Act was not sufficiently perceived."

It was during the first year of this Parliament's life, when the House of Commons was practically unanimous, that it enacted the statutes which have proved to be of permanent importance. At the end of the August, 1641, the House of Commons adjourned. Its resolution to adjourn was, as Gardiner has pointed out, the last time that it acted as a united whole. Consequently, in the ensuing sessions, its legislative output was much diminished. The only statute calling for notice is that which deprived the archbishops and bishops of their seats in the House of Lords, and prohibited persons in Holy Orders from being members of Parliament, privy councillors, justices of the peace, of oyer and terminer and of gaol delivery, or of exercising any temporal authority. The reason for passing the Act was partly the unpopularity of the church of England as administered by Laud, partly the manner in which he had introduced churchmen into high offices of state. 10 A bill to the same effect had previously been rejected

116 Charles I. c. 14.

16 Charles I. c. 20.

2 Ibid c. 16; vol. i 105.
4 Ibid c. 7.

5 Below 116.

6 See the preamble to the Act; and cp. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas 106; it may be noted, however, that the House of Lords tried in vain to limit the duration of the Act to two years, Firth, The House of Lords during the Civil War 91. 9 Below 132-133.

8 16 Charles I. c. 27.

7 Op. cit. x 10, II. 10 A Clergyman-G. Garrard,-writing to Strafford in 1636, after the appointment of Juxon as Lord Treasurer, says, "The clergy are so high here since the joining of the white sleeves with the white staff, that there is much talk of having a Secretary, a Bishop, Dr. Wren Bishop of Norwich, and a chancellor of the Exchequer, Dr.

by the House of Lords; and, though the House ultimately passed this bill it certainly did not command anything like universal assent. It was repealed in 1661.3

We shall see that when this Act was passed religious differences had divided the House of Commons into two parties.* This division rendered all constructive legislation impossible, and led in no long period to the outbreak of civil law. It was necessarily fatal to the realization of the aspirations of the majority of the House of Commons to guide the policy of the state, by acquiring, in a constitutional way, a control over the appointment of the king's ministers.

(iii) The Parliamentary claim to guide the policy of the state by controlling the appointment of the king's ministers.

The leaders of the Long Parliament, while pursuing their work of prosecuting the king's ministers, and passing the legislation designed to secure their own position and that of future Parliaments, were constantly being alarmed by projects, and rumours of projects, to break up their sessions by violence, or to override their authority by similar means. We have seen that Strafford had intended to make the relations maintained by the leaders of the Parliamentary opposition with the Scotch the basis for a charge of high treason against these leaders; and that they had only parried this blow by getting in their own blow at Strafford first. Charles himself would not have been averse to using foreign help against his own subjects if it could have been procured. There was an Irish army in existence, suspected by the Commons of being largely Papist in character, which had been got together to subdue the Scotch, who were the natural allies of the Parliament, the cause for its assembly, and the best security for its continuance; and this army the king refused to disband. The queen was negotiating with the Pope for foreign

"

Bancroft Bishop of Oxford; but this comes only from the young fry of the clergy, little credit is given to it, but it is observed they swarm mightily about the Court,' Strafford's Letters ii 2; May, History of the Long Parliament, Bk. i c. 2 pp. 23-24, says, "Archbishop Laud, who was now growne into great favour with the king, made use of it especially to advance the pompe and temporall honour of the clergy, procuring the lord treasurer's place for Dr. Juxon. inasmuch as the people merrily, when they saw that treasurer with the other bishops riding to Westminster, called it the church triumphant: doctors and parsons of parishes were made everywhere justices of peace, to the great grievance of the country in civill affaires, and depriving them of their spirituall edification."

1 Gardiner, op. cit. ix 382-383; below 136.

2 Ibid x 37-38; below 140; the queen persuaded the king to assent to the bill largely that time might be gained; it was a matter of indifference to her whether or not the bishops sat in the House of Lords so long as the king retained his control over the militia, ibid 165-166.

3 13 Charles II. St. I c. 2; below 165.

4 Below 121-122, 137-138.

6 Gardiner, op. cit. ix 257.

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