John Pym died on December 8th, 1643, and his body was buried in Westminster Abbey—only to be turned out at the Restoration and removed to St. Margaret’s churchyard.
With Pym and Hampden gone, henceforth the conduct of parliament was in other hands, and the day of moderate statesmanship had passed.
The war undertaken to preserve the liberties and establish the supremacy of the House of Commons was to bring in its train not only the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, but the suppression of the House of Commons itself.
Important to the nation as the issues at stake were, most people in England took hardly any more part or interest in the great civil war than they had done in the Wars of the Roses. “A very large number of persons regarded the struggle with indifference.... In one case, the inhabitants of an entire county pledged themselves to remain neutral. Many quietly changed with the times (as people changed with the varying fortunes of York and Lancaster). That this sentiment of neutrality was common to the greater mass of the working classes is obvious from the simultaneous appearance of the club men in different parts of the country, with their motto, ‘If you take our cattle, we will give you battle.’”[113]
How could it be otherwise? Supremacy of King, or supremacy of Commons,—seed time and harvest remain, and the labourer and the artizan must needs do their day’s work.
Not till the deposing of the Stuarts—forty-five years after John Hampden’s death—is the supremacy of parliament over the crown arrived at by general consent, to become a recognized and settled thing in British politics. By the middle of the nineteenth century the House of Commons is unmistakably the ruling power in the constitution, and the labours of Eliot, Hampden and Pym are vindicated.
In our own day changes in the balance of constitutional power may be noted. The supremacy of the House of Commons is quietly disappearing before the growing popularity of the crown, the reawakened activity of the House of Lords, and the steady gathering of the reins of power into the hands of the Cabinet and Executive. As the crown in the last twenty years has increased in popular esteem, so the influence and importance of the Commons has waned in the country; and this waning influence of the Lower House has been further diminished by the frequent rejection and revision of its measures by the House of Lords.
The power of the Executive has also been obtained at the expense of the power of the Commons. The Cabinet, rather than the House of Commons, holds the supremacy to-day, and the direction of foreign policy, and the making of international treaties are no more within the authority of the House of Commons than are the administration of Egypt and India. Pym and Hampden fought and gave their lives for the right of the House of Commons to control the ministers of the crown and to order the policy of these ministers. By its own consent, and not from pressure from without, the House of Commons has silently surrendered this right, and has agreed that the policy of its Foreign Minister for the time being—whether he be Liberal or Conservative—must not be subject to reproof, still less to correction. In home affairs administrative order steadily supersedes statute law.
In theory ministers are still subject to the House of Commons. In actual practice they can rely on not being interfered with as long as their party has a majority in the House. When the price of effective interference with the conduct of affairs is a defeat of the Cabinet and a consequent dissolution, the payment is more than members of parliament are prepared to make.
Given the sense of security of social order and of the administration of justice, the nation, generally, no more heeds the passing of the supremacy from the House of Commons, than it heeded the winning of that supremacy.