There is, however, another feature of this reign which ought never to be overlooked. To frame good laws is a great merit in a ruler; but it is a still higher merit to devise and to create a legislature. And this is, in fact, the principal achievement of this sagacious and high‐minded sovereign.
Until his time the nation, at least for centuries, had known no such thing as a law‐making, still less a representative, body. Under the Norman kings, from A.D. 1066 to 1216, every now and then, “great councils” were held. The military despot who sat upon the throne, often found it convenient and necessary to summon together his barons, the great captains of his Norman soldiery, to ask an aid or contribution from them. But nothing like the construction of a law is ever heard of in these assemblies. At last, towards the end of the reign of John, “Magna Charta” is extracted from him; but this is not so much a statute as a treaty, dictated at the sword’s point by his armed barons.
Then followed the fifty‐six years of Henry’s reign. In the first forty years of this reign, several “great councils” were held, usually, as in Norman times, to consult about “granting the king an aid.” Once in 1236, we find “The provisions of Merton,” which commences “It was provided in the court of our lord the king.” In the same year we find a “royal ordinance” concerning Ireland; and twenty years later, in 1256, “a provision for leap year,” also a “royal ordinance.”
About this time the chroniclers begin to borrow the term “parliament” from France, and we hear that “a parliament was held at Oxford,” at which the barons dictated to the king certain “provisions,” which were afterwards cancelled and set aside by king Louis of France.
Seven years after this, earl Simon, in the king’s name, summonses a meeting in Westminster, and, as many of the nobles kept aloof from him, so that only five earls and seventeen barons were called to this “concilium,” he orders the sheriffs to send knights from the counties, and burgesses from certain towns, so as to form a sufficiently numerous body. But the earl’s object was merely to dictate certain terms to the king. No such thought as that of a legislature—an assembly for agreeing upon necessary laws—is anywhere to be perceived.
After the death of earl Simon, we hear of “a concilium” at Kenilworth; which, like earl Simon’s parliament, is only a council for agreeing upon certain terms, between the king on the one part and the barons on the other. These terms are embodied in “the Dictum of Kenilworth.”
But at last the realm is quieted; king Henry is once more at peace upon his throne, and his son, now arrived at the full manhood of his twenty‐eighth year, is naturally the guide as well as the protector of his weak though well‐meaning father. And now, in the year 1267, all enemies and all perils having vanished, and the king and the prince being left to their own free will, we hear, doubtless from Edward’s lips, words, which for two centuries at least, had never been used in this realm of England. The first document we possess, bearing the name of a “Statute,” is “the Statute of Marlborough,” and of this, the opening sentences run thus:—
“Our lord the king, providing for the better estate of his realm of England, and for the more speedy ministration of justice, as belongeth to the office of a king; the more discreet men of the realm being called together, as well of the higher as of the lower degree; it was provided, agreed, and ordained,” etc.
Here we have the first rough sketch or outline of what we now call “the British Constitution.” This constitution, we are often told, was wrung from the unwilling hands of successive sovereigns by the urgent demands of the people, in times of royal exigency. With respect to some later details, this may be true; but not less true is it, that the main and general outline was freely given to the people by the “legislative mind” of Edward, aided by his great chancellor, Robert Burnel.
Four hundred years after Edward’s day we had a philosopher in England, John Locke, who had read and pondered much, and who explained to us that the very nature of a civilized and free society is “to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it.” The very object, he adds, “of civil society is to authorize a legislature to make laws for us, as the public good shall require.” These principles, as we have said, arose in John Locke’s mind, in the course of study and cogitation. But several centuries before this, the same thoughts had occurred to an English prince, to whom “study,” as we understand the word, was impossible, and who must have owed these conclusions, in a large measure, to that sagacity and true nobility of soul with which God had endowed him. Yet we ought not to overlook the fact, that in Edward’s youth one of the earliest of our great lawyers, Bracton, had thus written:—