signed to protect the church's spiritual authority. cation. liffe, moved under his stirring influence not only large sections of the common people, but many among the baronage and the clergy themselves, to break away from the teachings Statutes of and authority of the older dogmatism. The response made Heresy, deby the church to this assault was embodied in the series of statutes, heretofore described as the Statutes of Heresy,1 which were the equivalent paid by Henry IV., after his accession, to the prelates, with Arundel at their head, for their aid and assistance in the revolution which raised to the throne the house of Lancaster. While the clergy by means of these cruel statutes were engaged in crushing out the growing heresy, through which the Lollards were undermining the church's spiritual authority, they were startled by a fresh attack made by the commons upon their temporal posThe church sessions. In the "Unlearned Parliament "2 which met in threatened with confis- 1404, certain knights of the shire ventured to suggest that the land of the clergy be taken into the king's hands for one year as an aid in the prosecution of the war; and in the parliament of 1410, the knights reasserted this suggestion in the shape of a formal petition addressed to the king and lords recommending a sweeping confiscation of the lands of the bishops and religious houses, and a permanent endowment, out of the proceeds, of fifteen earls, fifteen hundred knights, six thousand esquires, and a hundred hospitals, with the further suggestion that £20,000 be reserved for the king.4 This radical proposal, distasteful to the lords, was earnestly opposed by the Prince of Wales and rejected. The wellfounded alarm thus excited in the minds of the clergy by the assaults made in turn upon their spiritual authority and their temporal possessions was naturally deepened and intensified by the general sense of insecurity which oppressed all classes at the end of the civil war. At the end of the struggle the one political force that seemed to have survived, the one force that stood out above the turbulence of the times with power to guarantee protection and order, was embodied in the royal authority. Moved, therefore, by a sense of insecurity, and 1 See above, pp. 537-540. 2 So called from the fact that the king directed in the writs that no lawyers should be summoned. 8 Ann. Henr., pp. 393, 394. 8 the double sought the feet of the com mons. not unmindful of the assistance it had received when as- Alarmed by saulted by heresy on the one hand, and threatened by confis- assault, the cation on the other, the church, which in the charter days had church been the steadfast ally of freedom, turned its back upon its shelter at great traditions, and, upon the accession Edward IV., meekly the monarchy. sought shelter and protection at the feet of the monarchy. In the first chapter devoted to the growth of parliament Decline of the attempt was made to draw out the fact that, from the time of the Conquest down to the establishment of the estate system in the reign of Edward I., all of the great powers of government were centralized in and concentrated around the person of the king acting ordinarily through his continual council, or through that larger body, known as the great council, composed of those tenants-in-chief who won for themselves the right to be personally summoned, and in whom that right became hereditary. Under this highly centralized system the main body of the people, upon whom the burden of government ultimately fell, were sternly excluded from all voice in its administration. Only through the persistent struggles of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries did the main body of the people finally win for themselves the right first to participate in and then to control both the fiscal and political administration of the kingdom, by building up alongside of the older feudal assembly a new chamber composed of elected representatives chosen by freemen organized for government in the shires and towns. The strength of the new body as originally organized lay in the The lower fact that it was truly representative: at the outset the right first a truly to participate in the election of the representative members representawas probably extended to all, or nearly all, of the freemen ceased to embraced in the corporate organizations of the local commu- through nities from which they came. The causes which led to the of the frandecline in the position and influence of the representative body thus built up must be found in the processes through which it ceased to be really representative, through which, in the shires, the franchise, which was the birthright of the many, was finally limited to the few; through which, in the towns, the suffrage was taken away from the main body of townsmen, to whom it had originally belonged, and vested in official oligarchies. house, at tive body, be so limitations chise. Elected knights originally the whole shire community. Franchise fixed upon a broad popular basis by Stat. 7th Henry IV. The weight of authority supports the conclusion that the elected knights were not only representatives of the whole chosen by shire community, but that they were chosen by the whole body of freeholders in full county court. When in the parliament of 1376 the commons, intent upon correcting the evil practices of the sheriffs, petitioned that the knights of the shire might be chosen by common election of the better folk of the shires, and not nominated by the sheriffs without due election, Edward III. replied that the knights should be elected by the common assent of the whole county. When the first statute (7th Hen. IV. c. 15) was passed regulating the election of the knights, a statute which is regarded as simply confirmatory of the then existing custom, - the franchise was fixed upon a broad popular basis by the provision "that all they that be there present [in the county court], as well suitors duly summoned for the same cause as others, shall attend to the election of the knights for the parliament; and then, in full county, they shall proceed to the election, freely and indifferently, notwithstanding any request or command to the contrary." This statute- under which the right of suffrage reached its highest point by being recognized as the privilege of all freemen present in the county court, whether freeholders or not - was followed in the eighth year of Henry the first dis VI. by the first disfranchising statute of which there is any franchising record in English history. By the terms of this statute the suffrage was not only limited to the freeholders, but to such only of them as "have free land or tenement to the value of forty shillings by the year at least, above all charges." Thus before the fall of the house of Lancaster the parliament itself, impelled by the reactionary spirit of the times, consented to the weakening of its own constitution by authorizing a measure that must have resulted in a wide disfranchisement. When the difference in the value of money is taken into account, the forty shillings qualification was equivalent to a modern real property qualification of from thirty to forty pounds annual value. Stat. 8th Henry VI. statute English history. The same general tendency which, before the close of the 1 See above, pp. 466, 467. 2 Rot. Parl., ii. p. 355. See above, P. 527. 88 Hen. VI. c. 7. in the appropriate chises the birth middle ages, must have brought about the disfranchisement Tendency of the landless freemen and the lesser freeholders within the towns for shires, likewise pervaded the municipal electoral systems and the few to brought about a still more sweeping restriction of the fran- the franchise in the cities and towns. In the effort heretofore made which were to ascertain who were the electors of borough representa- right of the tives, the general conclusion was reached that the electors in many. a city were the citizens, in a borough the burgesses. Who were citizens and who were burgesses seems to have depended everywhere upon local custom, and such custom was only uniform in its tendency to take away the suffrage from the main body of townsmen and vest it either in a self-elected governing body, - generally known as the mayor and common council, or in a still smaller circle of "selectmen," nominated and controlled by them.1 This general tendency both in the higher and lower ranges of government has been thus happily described: "While the aristocracy was encroaching upon popular power in the government of the state, it was making advances, no less sure, in local institutions. The few were gradually appropriating the franchises which were the birthright of the many. . . . The common law, in its grand simplicity, recognized the right of all rated parishioners to assemble in vestry and administer parochial affairs. But in many parishes the popular principle gradually fell into disuse; and a few inhabitants - self-elected and irresponsible-claimed the right of imposing taxes, administering the parochial funds, and exercising all local authority. This usurpation, long acquiesced in, grew into a custom which the courts recognized as a legal exception from the common law." 2 That kind of usurpation, consecrated by custom, which secured the government of parishes to select vestries, likewise took away the government of the towns from the main body of townsmen and vested it in self-elected governing bodies, who gradually assumed the exercise of the electoral rights which had originally belonged to the whole community. In the charters of incorporation which began to be issued to the municipalities after the accession of the house of Tudor,3 1 See above, pp. 473, 474. 2 Sir Thomas Erskine May, Const. Hist., vol. ii. pp. 460, 461. The policy of the Tudors was con tinued by the Stuarts. See Hallam, Revival of the monarchy under the right of electing representatives in parliament was generally vested in the municipal governing body usually styled the mayor and common council. When the fact is remembered that these governing bodies were, as a rule, nominated by the crown in the first instance, and then perpetuated by self-election, it is quite possible to understand how the electoral rights of many boroughs passed under royal control, or under that of the local magnates known as high stewards, in whom the royal or aristocratic influence finally came to be vested. As the parliamentary system was the outcome of the estate system, the collapse of the one naturally followed the Edward IV. collapse of the other. The attempt has now been made to draw out in some detail the processes of disintegration and decay which, by the end of the civil war, had not only undermined the corporate vitality of each of the three estates, but which had also broken that spirit of union and interdependence which in the earlier days had bound them to each other. In the process of disfranchisement, which gradually withdrew the suffrage from the main body of freemen in the shires and towns, can be discovered the chief cause which undermined the growing strength of the house of commons; in the decay of the baronage, and in the weakening of the prelacy, can be found the causes which broke the power of the house of lords. Only in this way can be explained how it was that the parliamentary system, which had reached its highest point of authority at the accession of the house of Lancaster, touched its lowest point of impotency and exhaustion at the close of the dynastic struggle which ended in its overthrow. Under the favorable conditions then presented, by the paralysis of the constitutional forces by which it had been so long held in check, the monarchy, upon the accession of Edward IV., lifted up its head, and casting off the fetters by which it had been bound by the parliamentary system on the one hand, and by the system of legal administration on the other, entered upon a fresh career of autocracy which was not destined to be broken until the days of the Stuart kings. And yet the new system of absolutism thus reëstablished by the house of York, and perpetuated by that of Tudor, did not aim at the abolition of the older forms of legal and constitutional life by which the monarchy had been over Forms of the older constitu tional life retained. |