History of the Origin of Representative Government in Europe

by François Guizot

Common deliberation on common affairs is the principle, as well as the most simple form, of political liberty. This principle fully obtained at the infancy of modern nations. The national assembly was the great council in which public affairs of every kind were transacted. The king, the natural head of this council, was required to convoke it, and to follow its advice.

By the dispersion of the nation over an extended territory, the great national council became dispersed, and could not be assembled: for some time, however, it retained its ancient form, and the full extent of its ancient rights; but power is attached to continual presence, and the great council became of rare occurrence. Its numbers rapidly thinned; and it was very soon composed of great landowners alone, whom wealth, political importance, and that ambition which increases with the growth of power, frequently assembled round the king. The government, which formerly resided in the great national council, now resided only in this new council, formed of the king and the great barons, who became daily further separated from the body of the nation. The same words continued to be employed: the king always governed with his great council; but this was no longer the same assembly; the government and the body of the nation had become disjoined.

The king endeavoured to free himself from the great barons, and to govern alone; they resisted; and in the struggle in which they engaged for the defence of their liberties or the preservation of their influence in the central government, they were compelled to seek support from the body of the nation, the freeholders and the burgesses.

Admission Of The Commons.

The issue of this struggle was favourable to liberty; the freeholders and the burgesses, who were become almost strangers to the central government, renewed their connection with it by the formation of Parliament; and this great council of the king, which for two centuries had been continually contracting, once more began to extend.

But at their return, the new citizens were very far from taking the same place which their ancestors had occupied. The development of inequality is always the first result of the progress of the social state. Royalty had extended and fortified its power; it now existed by itself, powerful and independent, and claiming distinct rights proportionate to its own strength. It was the same with the great barons, who also were strong and independent in themselves. If it had been possible to congregate in a single assembly all the descendants of those ancient Saxons or Normans who had originally formed the great common council, a very different spectacle would have been presented. Instead of finding an assembly of warriors, not enjoying perfect equality, certainly, but sufficiently equal for each to preserve his personal importance, and to consider himself in a condition to defend it; instead of seeing a chief at their head, too little distinguished from the principal men among them to be powerful without their adherence,—there would have been a king invested with great wealth and power, mighty barons followed by a multitude of retainers almost entirely dependent upon them, and a body of citizens obliged to unite and act collectively for the recovery of some influence over those measures which interested them most directly. In this new composition of society and of the national assembly, the deputies of the counties and boroughs were very far from pretending to associate themselves with the government properly so called, or from thinking to control or direct the central power in all public affairs; several centuries necessarily elapsed before their ideas could acquire so much generality, and their interference in Parliament became so comprehensive. They assembled there for the sole purpose of defending themselves, and those whom they represented, against the most crying abuses of power, against the violent and arbitrary invasion of their persons and their possessions.

Vicissitudes Of The Parliament.

Discussing the demands for supplies that were addressed to them, and presenting their complaints to the government against the most perilous acts of injustice of the agents of the king or of the great nobles, constituted the whole of their mission, and, in their own opinion, the full extent of their rights. Their personal importance was too trivial, and their intellectual activity too limited, for them to imagine themselves called to discuss and regulate the general affairs of the State. They resisted power when it directly attacked them, or required great sacrifices from them; but royalty and its prerogatives, the ordinary council of the king, and his measures in regard to legislation, peace and war, or general politics, in a word, the government properly so called, were entirely beyond their interference. They had not the power, or even the wish, to meddle with such matters; it was all discussed and decided between the king, his ministers, and the great nobles who were naturally called to take part therein by the elevation and importance of their social position.