ferred itself to Westminster. No politician can venture to disregard the importance of historic and settled association. In theory the king could summon Parliament to what place he chose, but in the eyes of the nation the Parliament at Westminster was the Parliament, the Parliament at Oxford a palpable sham1. And so the House at Westminster, around which the first opposition to the king had gathered, found it possible to absorb one department of public business after another. The difficulty of substituting collective for personal control of the departments it solved by the appointment of endless committees. There were committees for the army and the navy, for finance, for the plantations, for trade, and for religion. How these committees worked we must enquire later on. At present it is sufficient to point out that with its most active members searching into, arranging, and reporting upon every nook and corner of the Statemachinery, the House of Commons speedily learnt the secrets of government. And that knowledge it never lost. The corporate consciousness of a great body like the House of Commons is superior to the shocks of dissolutions and intermissions. Records, traditions, recollections, survive, and are handed on from one generation to another. That the Housetook greedily to the business of government is abundantly clear from the reluctance which it manifested when called upon by Cromwell to resign it.

66

1 This seems also to have been the view of Charles himself. He spoke of the Oxford assemblage as one mongrel Parliament." (Letter to the Queen, quoted in Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, 11. 135.)

The sovereignty of the House of Commons as an established fact, had to wait long for its realization. As a possibility, it was settled by the departure of the king from London in 1642.

modern

But, secondly, the period was a storehouse of (2) the political ideas. The outburst of pamphlet literature birth of which was the popular side of Elizabethan culture political thought. had spread from theology to politics. And in the pamphlets of the period was mooted almost every idea which has made a mark in the political world of later days. The disestablishment of the church and the removal of religious disabilities, a single-chamber Republic, the sovereignty of the people, equal electoral districts, female suffrage, the abolition of rotten boroughs, the ballot, local government, law reform, freedom of the press, freedom of trade, the establishment of a national bank, are but a few of the schemes advocated. That none of these schemes were immediately realized is admitted, but it is hardly necessary to insist upon the immense importance of such a crop of ideas, regarded as an element in constitutional history. It may, however, be permissible to point out the extreme rarity of such periods of fruitfulness. There is a saying attributed to a great historian, that English Constitutional History ceases with the reign of Edward I. It is perhaps rather a bold way of putting the truth. But the scarcity of political ideas in English popular history since that date cannot fail to strike every one. The period of the Civil War and the Commonwealth is the great exception to the rule, and these years have furnished the materials with which later gene

rations have built. The thought of the Commonwealth has become the history of Constitutional Monarchy. There is a microcosm in politics as well as a macrocosm. And so it is that the apparent failure of the Commonwealth politicians is only apparent, after

all.

With this apology for choice of subject we may begin to consider the period.

There might be some question raised as to whether
the
year 1649 really marks an epoch in history. The
king had ceased to govern, if not to reign, long
before his death. The House of Lords had dwindled
by slow degrees, till in December 1648 its average
attendance was a fraction over five1. Even before
the great Purge, the House of Commons, by expulsion
and death, had lost many of its members. The hier-
archy was gone. But the condition of things is too
uncertain to afford a satisfactory subject of analysis.
Till 1647 and the Second Civil War, it was really
impossible to say that the king would not return.
Even the treaty of Newport was popular with a
The fine irony

large number of influential men.
with which the House of Commons voted supplies
to the king to be used against himself was not mere
pedantry. Till the autumn of 1648 the nominal
government of the country was in the hands of men
who wished to amend, not to sweep away, the old
constitution.

But with the execution of the king the irrevocable step was taken, and a new order began. If only in self-defence, the regicides were bound to

1 Journals of House of Lords.

situation

form a new government, founded on revolutionary King the principles, and entrusted to men pledged to the is revolution. The statutes of the spring of 1649 doubtful. cleave a great gulf between past and present. It is in February 1649, therefore, that the new era really begins, and we must attempt to draw some picture of the constitution at that date.

stitution

pearance

organs of

The gaps in the fabric were many. The removal The Conof the king alone meant the rending asunder rather in Februthan the decapitation of the constitution, for the ary 1649. Tudor policy had made the monarchy organic, and its Disapoverthrow paralyzed the body politic by destroying of the many of its most active members. "The title of monarchy, king," said one of the regicides, "is not only by an original common consent, but that consent also proved and confirmed, and the law fitted thereunto and that fitted to the laws, by the experience and industry of many ages, and many hundreds of years together1." So that the removal of the king's name well-nigh produced a deadlock in the administrative machinery, and the destruction of the organs of royalty left a vast amount of business adrift. For the with the Crown had gone the Councils-the Star- Councils, Chamber, the Court of High Commission, the Councils of the North and of Wales,—and the Lord and the Lieutenants of the Counties, leaving the justices of tenants. the peace, whose duties the dissolution of the monas- Position teries and the general policy of the Tudors had vastly Justices, of the increased, in a state of nervous collapse. "Really a justice of the peace shall from the most be wondered at, as an owl, if he go but one step out of the ordinary

1 Somers Tracts, vi. 386.

Lord Lieu

and the Sheriffs.

The Upper

House.

course of his fellow-justices," said Cromwell1 in later days, and his experience of country life was great. The justices of the peace seem to have been docile on the whole", but not of much power. The nomination of the Sheriffs was immediately taken in hand by the House, and a definite assertion of its claim was registered two years later. Over the various municipal corporations, which had been a special point of attack with Charles, Parliament also kept a firm hand, never scrupling to interfere with elections when it thought fit, but generally allowing municipal government to take its ordinary course. In spite of some outbreaks, the corporations too seem to have been tractable.

The disappearance, for it can hardly be called abolition, of the Upper House of the Parliament seems to have been very little felt. Probably the House of Lords had been of small weight as a political body since the Wars of the Roses. The havoc caused by the Wars had been completed by the Tudors, whose steady policy it had been to depress the nobility, both as a body and as individuals, by the employment of "base blood" in the Council and by the chary bestowal of titles. The House of Lords gained rather than lost by the Civil War. It returned at the Restoration with an immensely in

1 Somers Tracts, vi. p. 398.

2 See however Whitelock (ed. 1682), pp. 380 and 424.

3 Journals, Nov. 7, 1649.

4 Whitelock, 489.

5 The Lord Mayor of London was regularly presented for approval to the House on his election. Whitelock, pp. 381, 461.