Although most of this control over the colonies was still far in the future, the power exercised by the council over England's nearest dependency, Ireland, may fairly be taken as anticipatory of it. Irish matters during the later years of Queen Elizabeth and the early years of James I. demanded much attention and time from the Privy Council, notwithstanding the existence of an Irish Parliament, a lord deputy, various provincial officials, and the whole framework of a subordinate government in Ireland. All the variety of cases that came before the council from England were duplicated from Ireland. In fact, Ireland was treated much as if it were an English county, or better, perhaps, one of those regions of England, like the marches of Wales, which had a somewhat peculiar jurisdiction.
The most important form of oversight of Ireland exercised by the Privy Council was that based upon "Poynings's Act" of 1495. Sir Edward Poynings, a type of that class of vigorous officials of middle rank which were such useful instruments of the Tudor government, was sent, in 1494, to Ireland as lord deputy; the next year he called a parliament at Drogheda and obtained its assent to a number of statutes designed to introduce order into that disturbed country, and to make real the power of English government by diminishing that of the turbulent lords of the Pale. [Footnote: Morris, Hist. of Ireland, 1496- 1868, pp. 58-63.] As a means of reaching the latter object, the Irish Parliament, which had long been under their control and which had lately made some assertion of its right of independent action, [Footnote: Irish Statutes, 37 Henry VI.] was to be curbed, and that by its own ordinance.
It was therefore enacted that in the future no bill should be introduced into the Irish Parliament unless its heads had first been submitted to the English Privy Council and obtained the approval of that body and of the king. [Footnote: Irish Statutes, 10 Henry VII., chap. iv.] Moreover, this approval must be given before Parliament met. This reduced the Irish Parliament to a mere registering body for royal enactments. In 1556 an explanatory act was passed [Footnote: Irish Statutes, 3 and 4 Philip and Mary, chap. iv.] amending Poynings's Act so far as to make it allowable for the Irish Parliament to pass any bills which had received the approval of the crown and of the English Privy Council at any time during its session. The regular practice of Irish legislation under these acts was as follows: any member of either house of the Irish Parliament might bring in heads of a bill, which, if approved by both houses, were submitted to the viceroy, who referred them to the Irish Privy Council; that body sent them, altered or unaltered, to the king, who referred them to the English Privy Council; this body then approved, rejected, or modified them; and they were returned, through the viceroy, to the Irish Parliament in the form of a bill, to be accepted or rejected as a whole, but not to be further modified. [Footnote: Walpole, Kingdom of Ireland, 253, 254.]
By this cumbrous method only could the Irish Parliament legislate. It was, moreover, subject not only to the English Privy Council, but to the English Parliament. One of the clauses of Poynings's Act had provided that all statutes which up to that time had been passed by the English Parliament should bind Ireland also. [Footnote: Irish Statutes, 10 Henry VII., chap. xxii.] Many laws were subsequently passed by the English Parliament for Ireland, thus ignoring the Irish Parliament; but it was not till later than the period we are considering that a claim of the superiority of the English Parliament was definitely made. In the eighteenth century a member of the Irish Parliament published a book called The Case of Ireland Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England Stated. This was formally condemned by the English Parliament and ordered to be burned by the common hangman. [Footnote: Walpole, Kingdom of Ireland, 252.] When still later the Irish House of Lords protested against the reversal of one of its judgments, on appeal, by the English House of Lords, the English Parliament, in 1720, passed an act depriving the Irish House of Lords of any appellate jurisdiction, and declaring that "the English Parliament had, hath, and of right ought to have full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the people of Ireland" [Footnote: 6 George I., chap, v.]—a precedent of portentous applicability to the American colonies when a similar question came up in regard to them a half-century later. The power of Parliament over external dependencies was destined to come into greater prominence in the future. The question at issue at the beginning of the seventeenth century was the extent of its power over England itself. Was it, like the Privy Council, the law-courts, and other such bodies, merely a creation and dependency of the crown? Or was it, although in form an assembly of royal councillors, meeting only when the king summoned it and ceasing to exist when he ordered its dissolution, a branch of the government co-ordinate with or even in certain relations superior to him?
In the organization of Parliament there were several grave deficiencies, if it were to be considered an independent body. It was a composite assembly of two ill-related parts. The House of Lords, which consisted at this time of some fifty members, [Footnote: D'Ewes, Journals, 599] had an existence as a royal council quite apart from the House of Commons, and there were still many evidences that it was the original body and the House of Commons a later accretion. In 1601, when Elizabeth appeared in the House of Lords to open her last Parliament, the Commons, who were waiting in their own chamber, did not hear of her presence promptly, and when they hastened to the Lords' chamber the door was closed and they could not obtain admission, so they "returned back again into their own House much discontented." [Footnote: Ibid, 620.] The Lords had various privileges and constitutional rights of their own: as individuals, of trial by peers, of being represented by proxies, of entering individual protests, of audience with the sovereign, of certain advantages of procedure in the courts of common law; as a body, of trying impeachments brought by the House of Commons, and of acting as a final court of appeal for all lower courts whether of law or equity. [Footnote: Pike, Constitutional History of the House of Lords, chaps. ix., xi.-xiv.]
The House of Commons was composed of two knights or gentlemen elected for each shire; and one or two representatives for each of nearly three hundred cities and boroughs. The system of representation was crude and antiquated. The knights of the shire were elected by the "forty- shilling freeholders"—that is to say, by all who had a tenure approaching ownership in lands whose annual rental value reached that sum. This was an electorate that reached far down in the social scale, but it was limited by the tendency of English land to remain in the hands of large owners, and by the influence, legitimate and illegitimate, of the gentry, the great county noble families, and the crown. The knights of the shire, therefore, as a matter of fact, not only belonged to, but were elected by and reflected the interests and feelings of, the great body of rural gentry; while the yeomen exercised little influence in Parliament, as the laboring classes certainly exercised none at all.
There were vast differences in the system of election by the towns which were represented in Parliament, varying all the way from appointment by patrons, in some towns, down through divers grades of extension of the franchise to an almost universal suffrage in a few. Nevertheless, from the towns, as from the counties, it was representatives of the upper and middle classes that sat in the Commons. There was no approach to equality in the constituencies represented in the House of Commons; members were elected often by outside influence and always by a narrow constituency, and no control was possessed by the electors over their representatives.
Yet these defects were more apparent than real. The special powers of the House of Lords were becoming shadowy, and almost the only real significance of the peerage was when it was united with the House of Commons and made a part of the larger whole of Parliament. [Footnote: 36 and 37 Henry VIII., f. 60 (Dyer, Reports, pt. i, 327).]
In the House of Commons was the real source of power of Parliament. Whatever the imperfections in the method of election, whatever the irregularity of constituencies, whatever the crudity of the idea of representation, the five hundred or more knights, country gentlemen, lawyers, and merchants who made up the Commons at this time [Footnote: Names of Members Returned to Serve in Parliament, pt. i., 442-448.] were convinced that in some way they stood for the whole nation. When Parliament had been once summoned and organized, it became a body with three hundred years of precedent back of it; and in the days of the Stuarts it confronted the king with claims to a very different position and power from those he was inclined to concede to it. So far from assimilating their position to that of the law-courts, Privy Council, and other such bodies, at the very opening of the reign of James the Commons declared "there is not the highest standing court in this land that ought to enter into competency either for dignity or authority with this high court of Parliament which with your Majesty's royal assent gives laws to other courts, but from other courts receives neither laws nor orders." [Footnote: Apology of the Commons, 1604; Petyt, Jus Parliamentarium, 227-247.]
The course of time intensified this difference of opinion. "Set chairs for the ambassadors," James cried, mockingly, when the deputies from the House of Commons visited him with a petition during the dispute of 1621. To the king Parliament seemed to be making a claim to sovereignty against which the only proper argument was a jest. Shortly afterwards he wrote to the speaker of the House of Commons, "These are, therefore, to command you to make known in our name unto the House that none therein shall presume henceforth to meddle with anything concerning our government or deep matters of state." He insisted that "these are unfit things to be handled in Parliament except your king requires it of you. "As to the privileges of Parliament James wrote, "We cannot allow of the style calling it your ancient and undoubted right and inheritance, but could rather have wished that ye had said that your privileges were derived from the grace and permission of our ancestors and us." [Footnote: Letter of the king to the House of Commons, December 10,1621.]