357

CHAPTER XII.

WE proceed to an inquiry, not devoid of interest or amusement, into the many changes which have been wrought by time in the internal economy of the grand inquest of the nation; to consider the physiognomie morale of this great assembly, and to pause awhile from the history of penal vengeance, that we may glance at the persons of those who inflict it. The pleasure of the investigation is not dissimilar to that with which, in the days of reading Homer, we turned from his description of battles and slaughter to the open empyrean, where sat the wielders of the thunderbolts, and gazed into the recesses of their penetralia, as they joined in high debate. Of the poetry indeed which attended that search there is none; but our scrutiny relates to as august a presence, and, even though prosaic, may be rendered more complete.

The numbers of the assembly were long in constant fluctuation. Two hundred citizens and burgesses sat in the parliament which Edward I. held in his twentythird year, together with seventy-four knights, to whom they were far inferior in weight and authority,

The

notwithstanding the numerical disproportion." dignity of ancient lineage, the importance attached to territorial wealth, and the reverence paid to the military above the civil character, in times when the feudal spirit had scarcely waned and chivalry was in its zenith, made these burgesses vail their heads to the landed aristocracy.b It is manifest from our old

chroniclers that the knights bore the brunt of the battle against the Crown and peers, doubtless with some support from the representatives of towns, but irregularly rendered, and not highly prized.

The House consisted, in Fortescue's time, and under the Plantagenets, of three hundred members, though the precise number was constantly changing. To the middle of the fifteenth century, the numbers were rather diminished than augmented, petty towns feeling more acutely the burden than the benefit of burgesses, and seeking any excuse to evade the payment of their wages. Richard II. granted as a boon to the borough of Colchester, towards defraying the expenses of fortifying the town with stone and lime, that for five years they should be discharged from finding or sending any burgesses to parliament. The county of Northumberland obtained a similar exemption from Edward III., on the plea that they were so harried by the Scots, that they had no money to pay two knights for setting out on their journey. The gallant town of Newcastle-upon-Tyne sent no burgesses, for the still better reason that the safety of the city was too much perilled for them to spare a single citizen who could man the walls. The sheriff of Lancashire, for several successive parliaments, implored the clemency • Burgh's Disquisitions. b Hallam's Middle Ages.

с

Prynne's Ancient Writs.

of his liege for the places summoned to return members in his bailiwick, that they could not return any citizen or burgess, on account of their impotence and poverty.

But when the council of the nation had obtained higher consideration, and began to interfere with more boldness in affairs of state, a dim conviction slowly dawned upon the minds of the constituency, that the privilege was at least commensurate with the cost. Henry VIII. conceded to the Principality the boon of returning twelve members to represent the Welsh marches; and, on their petition, added four members to the county palatine and city of Chester, hitherto unrepresented. The sovereign, by virtue of the prerogative, never questioned till its final exercise by Charles II., granted the franchise to new boroughs or restored it to the old. In Cornwall alone, Edward VI. added twelve members, Queen Mary four, and Elizabeth ten. Twenty-four boroughs had the privilege of sending members restored to them by James I., and must have been willing to incur the charge; for as many as fifty-one boroughs never recovered the right which they had voluntarily abandoned, giving up their birthright, with Esau-like rapacity, for a mess of pottage. From the reign of Henry VIII. to the accession of Charles, the House had received an addition, by writs from the Crown, of fifty-seven members.

The House claimed for itself and exerted a similar privilege. Prynne complains that gentlemen, overambitious of being elected members of parliament, failing in their attempts upon their own county, and having good friends in the Commons, have obtained a favourable report for some forgotten borough, which

had ceased to return burgesses for one or two hundred years; and, with the connivance of the House, procured fresh writs with a view to their own election. "How valid such elections are in law," says our antiquary, "revivals of obsolete returns upon one or two precedents at most, without a special licence from the king, after so many years' discontinuance, I shall refer to the consideration of those whom it

most concerns. If any borough became so poor and impotent as to be unable to pay the expenses of representatives, they actually lost, and ought to lose, their privilege. If these petty places were put to pay expenses to their burgesses, as they ought by law, and not feasted, courted, rewarded by them for their voices, as of late degenerate times, they would make petition, as Coryton did, to be discharged from that burden, instead of procuring charters or writs to elect them."

The terror of a call upon their purse becoming each generation more remote, and king and Commons uniting in their desire to multiply returns, they rose gradually to the number of 493, the total amount when Coke presided as Speaker. That pedantic lawyer boasts of the number as contrasted with the early Roman senate.d "Romulus had but one hundred senators. When there is least appearance there is least success in parliament. In the seventh of Henry IV., holden before the Duke of Bedford, of the lords spiritual and temporal appeared but thirty-one in all, at which Parliament there was but one act passed, and that of no great weight." Between the years 1601 and 1640, the House received an accession of twenty-six members: the first Parliament of

d Coke's Institutes.

James I. containing 470, his last Parliament 478, and the Long Parliament 506. None effected more good, but with considerable diminution in numbers, in a short space of time, than the Convention which established the Revolution, and was composed of all who had sat in Charles the Second's parliaments, and thought proper to attend, 160 in all.

When Charles II., by virtue of his prerogative, added two members to Newark, the House looked coldly upon strangers indebted for their seats to the favour of the Crown. In consequence of this growing jealousy of the prerogative, that sagacious monarch waved all further additions to a body for which he had no paternal fondness. He would much rather have decimated their ranks, and changed a host of mutineers into an army of martyrs. The only two occasions on which the number of the representatives was afterwards multiplied was on the union of the two sister countries, when there came not relays of two or three, but whole battalions; in 1706, forty-five Scottish, and in 1800 no fewer than one hundred Irish members. The Scottish recruits acquitted themselves for the most part cannily, and proved an effective, though silent, ministerial cohort. The Irish, on the contrary, have added far beyond their relative proportion to the length and frequency, not less than to the eloquence and fervour, of debates. Reversing all methods of former computation, eight out of ten have actually proved speaking members. The number still preserved of 658 would be far too unwieldy for deliberation and debate, were there à constant and punctual attendance, and might form a fair excuse for those worthy gentlemen, accustomed de pedibus ire in

'Lord J. Russell's English Constitution.