uncertain and at best intermittent. But it must not therefore be supposed that the king was free to do as he would either in the determination of general policy or in the details of administration, or that the only check upon him was the need of a reference to Parliament when money was wanted. The Feudal King. ual charac Feudal royalty did not possess the indelible sacredness which came to be attached to the kingly office in the seventeenth century. The liabilities of allegiance might be renounced Contractas they were in the case of Edward II, or the right to ter of allegiance resigned as it was by Richard II. Feudalism was based upon contract, and a hopeless failure in performance of his part by the king was held to discharge his subjects from their corresponding duties. Feudalism. cil a check upon the Crown. But there was a closer and more effective check upon the The Counaction of the king than this last appeal to the contractual or quasi-contractual relation of sovereign and subject. The executive was not the king but the king in council, and the Council were the great officers of state. Although it might be difficult for Parliament to keep an adequate control over the king's choice of ministers, or over the action of the ministers whom he chose, such ministers were themselves powerful representatives of two estates of the realm, the baronage and the clergy. The nobles and bishops who, for the most part, composed the Council could influence the royal policy in other ways than by their knowledge of the business of state. The nobles by their great estates and local influence could treat with the king on an independent footing; the bishops could speak for the clergy, who were taxed separately from the laity, and often on a larger scale. The Council therefore was a strong check on the power of the Crown, unless the king was a man of exceptional vigour and capacity, who could seize a policy in which he would have the nation at his back and carry it out with a skill and firmness which would secure the obedience of the Council. Nor did the Council hesitate to control the Sources of Tudor power. Political action of the Crown in details. The history of the royal seals shows the care taken that no official expression of the royal pleasure should be unauthenticated by an officer of state. Elsewhere I have described the position of the feudal king. He was an essential part of the mechanism of state; he enacted laws in Parliament, issued writs, granted patents, commanded armies and yet the part he played might be real or formal as the king might be strong or weak, the Council vigorous or disunited, the Parliament interested or apathetic. And the possible checks upon his power throughout the middle ages were such as to reduce it at times to little but a form. The Reformation and the Tudor Monarchy. Under the Tudor monarchy all this was changed. The Wars of the Roses left the baronage reduced alike in numbers and in power, the Commons exhausted and anxious only for a rule strong enough to give them peace, the Crown rich with the forfeited lands of those barons who had taken the wrong side in the dynastic quarrels of York and Lancaster. The Church was the only great power in the State which could cope with the Crown; and the reform of the Church, whether it was to take place from without or from within, was now imminent. The Reformation in England was the result of many conthe Refor- flicting currents of interest. But we must look at the matter effect of mation. from the point of view of Parliamentary history. By the dissolution of the monasteries the Church lost much besides wealth; it lost social influence, for the monasteries had been the great educational centres and the great dispensers of charitable relief; it lost political influence when the mitred abbots no longer formed, as they had previously formed, a large number of the House of Lords. Thus many things combined to enhance the power of the Crown. The destruction of the baronage not only freed the king from a serious check upon his independent action, but enabled him to fill the great offices of state with new men. The Council was changed in composition; the great nobles bore a small proportion to the officials on their promotion; it was changed in its mode of working, split into departments with special business assigned to them; it ceased to be a check upon royal power; it became instead a formidable instrument in the hands of the Crown. The breach with Rome placed the king at the head of the national church, and the spoils of the monasteries gave him an immense accession of wealth. ance of tional And yet in other ways the growing importance of Parlia- Maintenment was noticeable. The two great Tudor monarchs, Henry constituVIII and Elizabeth, showed their statesmanship in nothing forms by more conspicuously than in their acceptance of all the forms the Tudors. of the constitution. When Henry VIII obtained for his Proclamations the force of law, and was permitted to devise the Crown by will, these extraordinary powers were in each case conferred by Parliament and in statutory form. When Elizabeth desired to control the growing interest of the House of Commons in public affairs she packed the House with subservient members, representing small boroughs upon which she had conferred the franchise in order that they might return persons who would be under the influence of the court or its ministers. The Tudors were content with the substance of power, and left to Parliament everything but the reality of control over legislation and policy. The issues between the Stuarts and Parliament. of them But this expedient for harmonising the wishes of the Disregard House of Commons with the action of the executive is of by the itself an indication that a new struggle was beginning on Stuarts. the old ground. The Commons had begun to demand a voice in the general policy of the country, and to criticise the action of the executive in modern fashion. The first two Stuarts chafed at constitutional forms, and were incapable of a generous acceptance of a policy they disliked. The practical issue between the Crown and the Commons and the Star Ship money came to this, that the Crown claimed to tax without consent of Parliament, and to administer justice without the forms of chamber. law. Both parties appealed to the letter of old statutes, and neither seemed to see that with the change of times, and after the long lapse of political interest under the Tudors, the mediaeval constitution needed to be restated, or even recast, if the Commons were to resume their old place in political life. 1628. The Petition of Right was the first attempt to restate the rules of constitutional liberty laid down in the Great Charter, but in defiance of its provisions Charles tried to dispense with Parliament in matters of taxation, and with the Courts of Law in matters of criminal justice. The Star Chamber, which acquired the coercive judicial powers of the Privy Council, had once been a useful means of bringing great offenders within the reach of the law by the strong arm of the executive. It now became an instrument of political and ecclesiastical tyranny, enabling the king to dispense with the forms of law where they were inconvenient, and to get the course of criminal justice into his hands. Want of money brought the king back to Parliament at last, and the first acts of the Long Parliament were to sweep away the criminal jurisdiction of the Privy Council, and to close every avenue against the raising of money by the Crown without the consent of the Commons. But the executive and the representative parts of the constitution had by this time drifted too far apart, and the monarchical policy of the first Stuarts ended in the catastrophe of the Civil War and the premature reforms of the Commonwealth. Relations of Crown and Parliament, 1660-1688. The Restoration did not give back what the Long Parliament had taken away-the criminal jurisdiction of the Privy Council; nor did it revive what the Long Parliament had set at rest the right of the Crown to raise money, whether by direct or by indirect taxation, without Parliamentary grant. The executive was weakened for the purposes of conflict with the legislature, but nothing was done to bring the ministers of the Crown into closer relation with the power which was fast becoming paramount in the constitution, the House of Commons. In the reigns of the last two Stuarts one may summarise the relations of Parliament and the Crown somewhat as follows. of the Crown in The king could set up no claim to raise money without Revenues consent of Parliament: he possessed a revenue roughly calculated at £1,250,000 a year arising from the crown-lands 1660. and the proceeds of certain duties; he employed such ministers as he pleased, subject to the risk of their being impeached by the House of Commons if they and the House came to hopeless variance; and he conducted the business of government in concert with an inner circle of the Privy Council, consisting of such persons as he might think likely to promote the despatch or enliven the progress of business. Any increase in the productive power of the sources of the revenue went to the benefit of the Crown, which might to that extent become independent of Parliament. Any increase in the Appropriliabilities of government beyond the ordinary revenue had to be met by a subsidy, or extraordinary grant, from the Commons, and such grants were for the first time in the reign of Charles II appropriated to the specific purposes for which they were made; that is to say, their use was limited to such purposes, and the money granted was not issued except under precautions that it should be so used. The Commons drew closer their control upon the action of the executive, but the periodical catastrophes of Charles the Second's reign-the exile of Clarendon, the impeachment of Danby-show how easy it was for a minister and a House of Commons to drift so far apart that no means were left for settling their disputes except recourse to violent measures. ation of supplies. The abortive Privy Council scheme of Sir William Temple Attempt in 1679 showed some consciousness of the risk arising from monise to har |