The Commons, on the other hand, a week later, placed this protestation on their minutes: "That the liberties, privileges, and jurisdictions of Parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England, and that the arduous and urgent affairs concerning the king, state, and defence of the realm, and of the church of England and the maintenance and making of laws, and redress of mischiefs and grievances which daily happen within this realm, are proper subjects and matters of counsel and debate in Parliament; and that in the handling and proceeding of those businesses every member of the House of Parliament hath and of right ought to have freedom of speech to propound, treat, reason, and bring to conclusion the same." [Footnote: Rushworth, Historical Collections, I., 53.] It is true that James sent for the Journal and tore this page from its records, but he could not tear the belief in its statements from the hearts of a great part of the people of England.
King and Parliament held diametrically opposite views of their relative powers, and both appealed to the past in justification of their opinions. But England's past was a long story, and its successive chapters read very variously. James appealed to the immediate past to justify his possession of the "inseparable rights and prerogatives annexed to our imperial crown, whereof, not only in the times of other our progenitors, but in the blessed reign of our late predecessor, that renowned queen Elizabeth, we found our crown actually possessed." [Footnote: King's proclamation on dissolving Parliament, January 6,1622.] The leaders of the House of Commons, on the other hand, were looking back to a more remote past, the birth-time and period of acknowledgment by the crown of the parliamentary privileges and English liberties which now seemed to them endangered.
As a matter of fact, Parliament, like all other political institutions in England, had grown up around the monarchy. Primarily, the Houses were a body of advisers of the king, summoned by him to give their counsel in matters in which he needed the advice of the various classes of his subjects; and to give their consent to taxation, which would require sacrifice on the part of the people. Once organized, however, Parliament gathered into itself all the shadowy survivals of self- government coming down from a still earlier period; it reflected the local independence of the towns and counties which sent members to the House of Commons, and the corporate rights of the church and individual privileges of the nobility, which constituted its upper house; it served as the instrument by which the nation at various times protected itself against bad government; it embodied the fifteenth-century ideal of a government conjointly by king and estates of the realm.
Moreover, Parliament gained by repeated use and acknowledgment an established procedure and powers, well-understood rights, and precedents frequently invoked. The four fundamental privileges of members of Parliament were: (1) freedom of elections: (2) freedom from arrest during the sessions; (3) freedom of speech in debate; (4) freedom of access to the sovereign for their speaker, if not for all individually. These were frequently acknowledged by the sovereign at the opening of Parliament and enrolled upon its records, and still more frequently asserted in the House. [Footnote: D'Ewes, Journals, 65, 66, 175, 236, 259, 411, 460, etc; Petyt, Jus Parliamentarium, 227-243, quoted in Prothero, Select Statutes, 289; Commons Journals, I., 431, etc.] The powers of Parliament were less clearly defined than its privileges; but its control over taxation and legislation, its right to impeach the king's ministers and to discuss all matters of interest to the nation, were frequently asserted, and usually conceded. [Footnote: Gneist, Hist. of the English Constitution, chaps. v., xxxii.] Thus Parliament was much more than a royal council; it was a body with claims to co-ordinate powers of government. How far, at any one time, these privileges and powers were conceded, how far they were denied or encroached upon by the crown, was largely dependent on circumstances. These circumstances during Tudor times had been such as to put the initiative and much of the actual power of government in the hands of the king, and parliamentary powers were largely in abeyance. Parliament during this time was a conservative body; the monarchy was the innovating element of the state.
Circumstances changed with the closing years of the sixteenth century and favored an increase of parliamentary participation in government. With all her prestige the old queen herself had to feel it. [Footnote: D'Ewes, Journals, 602.] With the accession of the half-foreign Stuarts, with the cessation of danger of invasion from abroad, with the increasing weight of exactions of an unwise and unpopular personal government, with the growing interest of the seventeenth century in matters of politics, and, above all, with the development of Puritanism, individualistic and self-assertive in its very essence, Parliament was sure to reassert all the powers which it had ever possessed, and likely to seek to extend them. The king was now the conservative element, while Parliament, if recent conditions be taken as the standard, was the innovating party.
It was exactly at this period of contest and of unsettled balance of powers that the early settlements were made in America. The colonists represented almost without exception what might be called the parliamentarian view. It was not the king, the—courtiers, the nobles, the judges, the higher clergy, the official classes, and the fellows of the universities that emigrated. Among these the royalist spirit was strong, but they remained in England. It was rather from the middle and lower classes, from those who were on poor terms with the king, whatever their position in society, from the persecuted, the dissatisfied, the restless, that the great body of colonists was drawn; and among these classes the views upheld by the House of Commons were wide-spread. The same thing was true of those companies which, remaining in England, yet had so much influence over the destinies of the American colonies. The most influential elements in the Virginia Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, and other similar bodies were distinctly opposed to the high claims of the king. Yet unanimity did not exist even among those who, left England; and strong as the predilection was among the founders of America for self-government and representative institutions, the Old-World differences of view were transferred to the colonies and played a part in local struggles there.
Much of the disputation between James and the House of Commons concerned the privileges of Parliament, and might be suspected of being largely the natural jealousy of its own rights felt and asserted by an ancient corporation. But Parliament was waging war for larger objects than the rights of its own body; it felt itself to be defending in its own privileges the personal rights of all Englishmen. In the contested election case of 1604 a member declared that "the case of Sir John Fortescue and Sir Francis Goodwin has become the case of the whole kingdom." [Footnote: Commons Journals, I, 159, March 30, 1604] "The rights and liberties of your subjects of England and the privileges of this House," is a formula that appears frequently in the documents of the time, and combines the two objects of the contest, in which the latter were upheld largely because they supported and protected the former.
These ancient rights of the people were less definite than either the privileges or the powers of Parliament. They were, perhaps, attractive and valued somewhat in proportion to their vagueness. They certainly included right of freedom from arrest or imprisonment except on a definite charge and by due process of law; they included exemption from taxation except after consent of Parliament, [Footnote: Hakewell's argument in the Bates case of 1610 (State Trials, ed 1779, XI); Petition of Right of 1628] they included protection against violence and injustice; they included the right of petition to the king against any grievance, [Footnote: Coke's speech on Petition of Right (Parliamentary History, VIII., 104). VOL 1—19] and in general a right to have the laws enforced, yet to have nothing done to their disadvantage which was not in the law. It was the spirit rather than the letter of Magna Carta that was valued by the English people. As time passed and under Charles I. the conflict between the parliamentary and the royal claims became more intense, the upholders of the former fell back more and more on the ancient rights and liberties of the people, and relatively less is said of parliamentary privileges. In the Petition of Right of 1629, Parliament appeals to the Great Charter, to the Confirmation of the Charters, and to other early statements of personal liberties. Pym declared that "the liberties of this House are inferior to the liberties of this kingdom." When the civil war was actually imminent, in December, 1641, the Grand Remonstrance was issued as a statement of the contentions of the leaders in Parliament. In this document "the people," "the liberties of subjects," "rights of the nation," and other popular expressions are constantly used or implied. [Footnote: Grand Remonstrance, SS 11, 19, 28, 40, 53, 57, 98, 130, etc., in Rushworth, Historical Collections, IV., 438.]
Ultimately, as a result of the struggles of the later years of the seventeenth century, the more important of such rights were formulated in the Bill of Rights of 1689. Thus the heritage of civil freedom which the people of England had traditionally enjoyed was neither taken from them by the strong monarchy of the sixteenth century nor forgotten in the struggle of Parliament for its own privileges in the seventeenth. It was reasserted with constantly new insistence in England, and was carried to America by the colonists as an acknowledged and valued possession.