THE MOTHER OF PARLIAMENTS
CHAPTER I
PARLIAMENT AND PARTY
It has been asserted that the different social conditions of various peoples have their origin, not so much in climate or parentage, as in the character of their governments. If that be true, there is little doubt that the social conditions of England should compare most favourably with those of sister nations. But the admirable form of Government to which Englishmen have now long been accustomed, did not come into existence in the course of a single night. "The resemblance between the present Constitution and that from which it originally sprang," says an eighteenth-century writer, "is not much nearer than that between the most beautiful fly and the abject worm from which it arose."[1] And the conversion of the chrysalis into the butterfly has been a slow and troublesome process.
Montesquieu, who was an earnest student of the English Constitution, after reading the treatise of Tacitus on the manners of the early Germans, declared that it was from them that England had borrowed her idea of political government. Whether or no this "beautiful system was first invented in the woods,"[2] as he says, it is certain that we owe the primary principles of our existing constitution to German sources. They date back to the earliest days of the first settlements of Teutons on the Kentish shores.
To the word "parliament" many derivations have been assigned. Petyt explains the name as suggesting that every member of the assembly which it designates should parler le ment or speak his mind.[3] Another authority derives it from two Celtic words, signifying to "speak abundantly"—a meaning which is more applicable in these garrulous times than it was in days when debate was often punctuated by lengthy intervals of complete silence.
Whatever its derivation, the word no doubt referred originally to the "deep speech" which the kings of old held with their councillors. The first mention of it, in connexion with a national assembly, occurs in 1246, when it was used by Matthew Prior of a general convocation of English barons. About thirty years later it appears again in the preamble to the First Statute of Westminster. It has now come to be employed entirely to describe that combination of the Three Estates, the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal and the Commons, which with the Crown form the supreme legislative government of the country.
The ancient Britons possessed a Parliament of a kind, called the Commune Concilium. Under the Heptarchy each king in England enjoyed the services of an assembly of wise men—or Witenagemot, as it was called—which advised him upon matters of national importance. The Witan sat as a court of justice, formed the Council of the chiefs, and could impose taxes and even depose the King, though the latter too often took the whole of their powers into his own hands. When the separate kingdoms became united, their different Councils were absorbed into the one great Gemot of Wessex. This, in Anglo-Saxon times, was a small body, consisting of less than a score of Bishops, a number of Ealdormen (or heads of the different shires), and certain vassal members. This senate was undoubtedly the germ of all future systems of Parliamentary government; and though for the first two hundred years after the Conquest there is no historical record of the meeting of any body corresponding to our present Parliament, from the days of the Witenagemot to our own times the continuity of our national assemblies has never been broken.
The parliamentary historian suffers much from the lack of early records. None were kept in Anglo-Saxon times, the judgments of the Witan being only recorded in the memory of the judges themselves. The Rolls of Parliament begin with the year 1278—though the first mention of the Commons does not occur until 1304—and somewhere about Edward III.'s reign was written a volume called the "Vetus Codex" or "Black Book" which contains transcripts of various parliamentary proceedings. At the time of the restoration of Charles II., Prynne, the antiquarian, set himself the task of exhuming old records, and catalogued nearly a hundred parcels of ancient writs, private petitions, and returns. The MSS. which he worked upon were so dirty that he could not induce any one else to clean them, and was forced to labour alone. Wearing a nightcap over his eyes, to keep out the dust, and fortified by continual draughts of ale, he proceeded cheerfully with this laborious undertaking upon which he finally based the book which has made him famous.[4]