It has been remarked already [Footnote: See above, pp. 4-7] that in one important respect the past governmental evolution of England differed from that of France. While both countries in the sixteenth century followed absolutist tendencies, in France the medieval tradition of constitutional limitations upon the power of the king was far weaker than in England, with the result that in the seventeenth century the French accepted and consecrated absolutism while the English gave new force and life to their medieval tradition and practice of constitutional government.
[Sidenote: Restrictions on Royal Power in England: Magna Carta]
The tradition of English restrictions upon royal power centered in the old document of Magna Carta and in an ancient institution called Parliament. Magna Carta dated back, almost four centuries before King James, to the year 1215 when King John had been compelled by his rebellious barons to sign a long list of promises; that list was the "long charter" or Magna Carta, [Footnote: Magna Carta was many times reissued after 1215.] and it was important in three respects. (1) It served as a constant reminder that "the people" of England had once risen in arms to defend their "rights" against a despotic king, although as a matter of fact Magna Carta was more concerned with the rights of the feudal nobles (the barons) and of the clergy than with the rights of the common people. (2) Its most important provisions, by which the king could not levy extraordinary taxes on the nobles without the consent of the Great Council, furnished something of a basis for the idea of self-taxation. (3) Clauses such as "To no man will we sell, or deny, or delay, right or justice," although never effectively enforced, established the idea that justice should not be sold, denied, or delayed.
[Sidenote: Parliament]
Parliament was a more or less representative assembly of clergy, nobility, and commoners, claiming to have powers of taxation and legislation. The beginnings of Parliament are traced back centuries before James I. There had been an advisory body of prelates and lords even before the Norman conquest (1066). After the conquest a somewhat similar assembly of the king's chief feudal vassals—lay and ecclesiastical—had been called the Great Council, and its right to resist unjust taxation had been recognized by Magna Carta. Henceforth it had steadily acquired power. The "Provisions of Oxford" (1258) had provided, in addition, for "twelve honest men" to represent the "commonalty" and to "treat of the wants of the king; and the commonalty shall hold as established that which these men shall do."
[Sidenote: House of Lords and House of Commons]
For the beginnings of the House of Commons we may go back to the thirteenth century. In 1254 the king summoned to Parliament not only the bishops, abbots, earls, and barons, but also two knights from every shire. Then, in an irregular Parliament, convened in 1265 by Simon de Montfort, a great baronial leader against the king, two burgesses from each of twenty-one towns for the first time sat with the others and helped to decide how their liberties were to be protected. These knights and burgesses were the elements from which the House of Commons was subsequently to be formed. Similar bodies met repeatedly in the next thirty years, and in 1295 Edward I called a "model Parliament" of archbishops, bishops, abbots, representative clergy, earls, and barons, two knights from every shire, and two citizens from each privileged city or borough,—more than four hundred in all. For some time after 1295 the clergy, nobility, and commoners [Footnote: I.e., the knights of the shires and the burgesses from the towns.] may have deliberated separately much as did the three "estates" in France. At any rate, early in the fourteenth century the lesser clergy dropped out, the greater prelates and nobles were fused into one body—the House of "Lords spiritual and temporal,"—and the knights joined the burgesses to form the House of Commons. Parliament was henceforth a bicameral body, consisting of a House of Commons and a House of Lords.
[Sidenote: Powers of Parliament: Taxation]
The primary function of Parliament was to give information to the king and to hear and grant his requests for new "subsidies" or direct taxes. The right to refuse grants was gradually assumed and legally recognized. As taxes on the middle class soon exceeded those on the clergy and nobility, it became customary in the fifteenth century for money bills to be introduced in the Commons, approved by the Lords, and signed by the king.
[Sidenote: Legislation]