979. There were, no doubt, persons who held that the Sovereign of England possessed, in a sense more or less strict, Absolute Power; and the opposition between these persons, and the asserters of constitutional government, became more and more marked under the Stuarts. James I. had dissensions with his parliaments, which lasted during his reign: and these led to the famous Protestation of the Commons of December 10th, 1621, which is to the following effect; its various clauses referring to controversies with the crown which had occurred at various times: "That the liberties, franchises, privileges, and jurisdictions of parliament, are the undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England:"(this was in opposition to the doctrine asserted by the King, that they proceeded from the royal grace :) "That the arduous and urgent affairs concerning the King, State, and defence of the realm, and of the Church of England; the making and maintenance of laws, and redress of mischief and grievances, are proper subjects and matters of counsel and debate in parliament: That in the handling and proceeding of those businesses, every member of the house hath, and of right ought to have, freedom of speech, to propound, treat, reason, and bring to conclusion, the same:" with other clauses of the like nature.*

980. Charles I. was in conflict with his parliament from the beginning of his reign; but in 1628, he gave his assent to the Petition of Right, which embodies many of the most important parts of the Constitution. This Statute recites the various laws which had established certain essential privileges of the Subject, and enumerates violations of them which had recently occurred in the points of illegal exactions, arbitrary commitments, quartering of soldiers

*Hallam, Eng. Const, 1., 501.

or sailors, and infliction of punishment by martial law; and then prays the King, "That no man hereafter be compelled to make or yield any gift, loan, benevolence, tax, or such like charge, without common consent by Act of Parliament; and that no freeman in such manner as is before-mentioned be imprisoned or detained; and that your majesty would be pleased to remove the said soldiers and marines; and that your people may not be so burthened in time to come; and that the aforesaid Commissions for proceeding by martial law may be revoked and annulled; and that hereafter no Commission of the like nature may issue forth to any person or persons to be executed as aforesaid, lest by colour of them any of your majesty's subjects be destroyed or put to death contrary to the laws and franchises of the land." Proceedings inconsistent with this law were resisted; as in the Case of Ship-money, in which Hampden refused payment of the illegal exaction. And though the decision of the majority of the judges was against him, this judgment was annulled by the Parliament as soon as it was allowed to meet.

981. But the Parliament, which had so long been the defender, now became the assailant of the Constitution; and from this time, through the diseased and troubled period of the Civil War and the Usurpation of Cromwell, the public acts, both of Government and of Parliament, no longer express the national judgment of what was just, right, and constitutional; and have been repudiated by subsequent acts of the nation. Yet even in this time of conflict, we see the reverence with which the forms of the Constitution were retained. The parliament employed the name of the King, even in acting against him; and the King assembled a Parliament at Oxford, denying the name to that which sat at Westminster. Even when Cromwell had, by the aid of the army, usurped the power of the Government, he retained the general forms of the constitu

tion; a Parliament elected by and representing the nation; and a House of Lords. And he was constantly told by the lawyers,-that his authority could never be truly valid till he assumed the Title of King; which was, to use their words, a wheel on which the whole body of the law was carried; which stood not on the top, but ran through the whole veins and life of the law :-That the nation had ever been a lover of monarchy, and of monarchy under the title of a King-That, in short, this title of King was the title of the supreme magistrate which the law could take notice of, and no other.

982. The restoration of the Stuart line in Charles II., introduced no change in the principles of the Constitution: for Charles assumed the throne as King of England by law; and therefore, as bound by all the laws which preceding Parliaments had made, till they were repealed. The Convention Parliament which restored him, not having been called together by royal authority, the validity of its acts was doubtful, till they were confirmed by the succeeding parliament; but from this time, the monarchy resumed its ancient course. The frequent session of parliament, and its high estimate of its own privileges, furnished a security against illegal taxation; and from this time we have no more of that grievance, hitherto so common. The power of the Commons to impeach a minister, even for acts performed by the King's command, was established in the case of the Treasurer Danby; and this led to the decision of several important points, respecting the effect of such impeachment. In this reign, also, the ancient Right to a writ of Habeas Corpus, by which Englishmen are protected from illegal or arbitrary imprisonment, was invested with new securities and facilities. The encroachments on the legislative supremacy of parliament, and on the personal right of the subject, by means of Proclamations issued from the Privy Council, which had been fre

quent under former princes both of the Tudor and of the Stuart families, fell with the odious tribunal, the Star Chamber, by which they had been enforced.

983. It is true, that some persons still held that the Royal Power was absolute, and could not be limited by opposite acts or length of usage. But these doctrines were not those of the Parliament; the attempts to exclude James II. from the throne, showed how large a portion of the sovereign power was held to reside in other branches of the govern ment. And the Revolution, which placed William the Third on the throne, involved a complete repudiation, on the part of the nation, of the doctrines of the Absolute Power, and the indefeasible and imprescriptible Rights, of the King of England. Yet the asserters of the liberty of England, even in this extreme case, attempted to divest their act, as much as possible, of the aspect of violence. The great vote of Jan. 28, 1689, was to the effect that King James II. had "abdicated the government, and that the throne was vacant.' In this, it was not pretended that the word abdicated was used in its ordinary sense, to denote a voluntary resignation of the crown. was a somewhat gentler term than "forfeited," which was the notion really intended. But the national act, in this case, went beyond even the meaning of forfeiture; for it disregarded the rights of James's Heirs, and appointed another Sovereign. The modern constitutional writer whom we have mainly followed in our historical survey, says, on this occasion,* “ It was only by recurring to a kind of paramount, and what I may call hyper-constitutional law; a mixture of force, and regard to the national good, which is the best sanction of what is done in revolutions; that the vote of the Commons could be defended. They proceeded, not by the stated rules of the English

VOL. II.

*Hallam, Eng. Const., 11., 134.

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It

Government, but the general rights of mankind. They looked not so much to Magna Charta, as the original compact of society, and rejected Coke and Hall for Hooker and Grotius." As we have said (895), Revolutions cannot be justified by stated Rules of Government, but must be defended as Cases of Necessity. The defence of the Revolution of 1688 was, that the constitutional liberty and rational independence in matters of religion, which by the historical education of Englishmen were become necessary to their moral agency and moral progress, could not subsist under princes whose views of the national constitution and national religion were those of the Stuarts: and the proof of this incompatibility, which had been gaining strength ever since the accession of James I., was completed by the last acts of James II. A Revolution of which this is the true defence, conducted calmly, resolutely, and peaceably to its object, may very fitly be called Glorious.

984. This great occasion of the assertion of the liberty of England was signalized by the Declaration of Rights, which gave judgment on the past, and maxims for the future acts of the crown. It contains a recital of the arbitrary acts which James had committed, and a condemnation of them as illegal. In this important act, it is declared: "That the pretended power of suspending laws, and the execution of laws, by royal authority without consent of parliament, is illegal: That the pretended power of dispensing with laws by royal authority, without consent of parliament is illegal: That the Commission for creating the late Court of Commissioners for ecclesiastical causes, and all other commissions and courts of the like kind, are illegal and pernicious: That levying of money for or to the use of the crown by pretence of prerogative without grant of parliament, or for longer time, or in other manner than the same