Читать книгу The Governments of Europe - Frederic Austin Ogg - Страница 10

11. Beginnings of the Representative Principle.—The thirteenth century was clearly one of the most important periods in the growth of the English constitution. It was marked not merely by the contest which culminated in the grant of the Great Charter but also by the beginnings, in its essentials, of Parliament. The formative epoch in the history of Parliament may be said to have been, more precisely, the second half of the reign of Henry III. (1216–1272), together with the reign of the legislator-king Edward I. (1272–1307). The creation of Parliament as we know it came about through the signal enlargement of the Norman-Plantagenet Great Council by the introduction of representative elements, followed by the splitting of the heterogeneous mass of members definitely into two co-ordinate chambers. The representative principle was in England no new thing in the thirteenth century. As has appeared, there were important manifestations of it in the local governmental system of Anglo-Saxon times. As brought to bear in the development of Parliament, however, the principle is generally understood to have sprung from the twelfth-century practice of electing assessors to fix the value of real and personal property for purposes of taxation, and of jurors to present criminal matters before the king's justices. Thus, Henry II.'s Saladin Tithe of 1188—the first national imposition upon incomes and movable property—was assessed, at least in part, by juries of neighbors elected by, and in a sense representative of, the taxpayers of the various parishes. By the opening of the thirteenth century the idea was fast taking hold upon the minds of Englishmen, not only that the taxpayer ought to have a voice in the levying of taxes, but that between representation and taxation there was a certain natural and inevitable connection. In the Great Charter, as has been stated, it was stipulated that in the assessment of scutages and of all save the three commonly recognized feudal aids the king should seek the advice of the General Council. The General Council of the earlier thirteenth century was not regularly a representative body, but it was not beyond the range of possibility to impart to it a representative character, and in point of fact that is precisely what was done. To facilitate the process of taxation it was found expedient by the central authorities to carry over into the domain of national affairs that principle of popular representation which already was doing approved service within the sphere of local justice and finance, and from this adaptation arose, step by step, the conversion of the old gathering of feudal magnates into a national parliamentary assembly.

12. Early Parliaments.—The means by which the transformation was accomplished consisted in the first instance, as has been said, in the introduction into the Council of new and representative elements. The earliest step in this direction was taken in 1213, when King John, harassed by fiscal and political difficulties, addressed to the sheriffs a series of writs commanding that four discreet knights from every county be sent to participate in a deliberative council to be held at Oxford. The practice took root slowly. In 1254 Henry III., in sore need of money for the prosecution of his wars in Gascony, required of the sheriffs that two knights be sent from each county to confer with the barons and clergy relative to the subsidies which should be accorded the crown. The desired vote of supplies was refused and the long-brewing contest between the king and the barons broke in civil war. But during the struggle that ensued the foundations of Parliament were still more securely laid. Following the king's defeat at Lewes, in 1264, Simon de Montfort, leader of the barons, convened a parliament composed of not only barons and clergy but also four knights from each shire, and at London during the following year, he caused again to be assembled, in addition to five earls, eighteen barons, and a large body of clergy, two knights from each of the several shires and two burgesses from each of twenty-one towns known to be friendly to the barons' cause. These proceedings were essentially revolutionary and unauthorized. Even the gathering of 1265, as Stubbs remarks, presented the appearance largely of a party convention, and there is no evidence that its author intended such a body to be regularly or frequently summoned, or even summoned a second time at all. None the less, now for the first time representatives of the towns were brought into political co-operation with the barons, clergy, and knights; and the circumstance was filled with promise. During the ensuing thirty years there were several "parliaments," although the extent to which knights and burgesses participated in them is uncertain. The period was one of experimentation. In 1273 four knights from each shire and four citizens from each town joined the magnates in taking the oath of fealty to the new and absent sovereign, Edward I. The First Statute of Westminster, in 1275, declares itself to have been adopted with the assent of the "commonalty of the realm." In 1283 a parliament was held which almost precisely duplicated that of 1265. In 1290, and again in 1294, there was one, in which, however, representation of the towns was omitted.

The gathering which served to fix the type for all time to come was Edward I.'s so-called Model Parliament of 1295. To this parliament the king summoned severally the two archbishops, all of the bishops, the greater abbots, and the more important earls and barons; while every sheriff was enjoined to see that two knights were chosen from each shire, two citizens from each city, and two burgesses from each borough. Each bishop was authorized, furthermore, to bring with him his prior or the dean of the cathedral chapter, the archdeacons of his diocese, one proctor or agent for his cathedral chapter, and two of his diocesan clergy. In the parliament as actually convened there were 2 archbishops, 18 bishops with their lesser clergy, 66 abbots, 3 heads of religious orders, 9 earls, 41 barons, 63 knights of the shire, and 172 representatives of the cities and boroughs—an aggregate of approximately 400 persons. There were thus present in the assemblage, in person or by deputy, all of the constituent orders of English society, and the irregular device of Simon de Montfort was vested at last with the character of legality. After Edward I. Parliament may be said to have been an established institution of the realm. Its meetings long continued intermittent and infrequent, and its powers from time to time varied enormously, but the place which it filled in the economy of the nation grew ever more important.

13. Establishment of the Bicameral System.—Like its counterpart in France, the Estates-General, the English Parliament comprised the three great estates or orders—nobility, clergy, and commons—of which, aside from the peasantry, mediæval society in all western European countries was composed. In the working out of its internal structure, however, two chambers resulted, rather than, as in France, three. Originally the three estates sat separately. Their primary business was the voting of supplies and, the principle being that a tax ought to be conceded by those who would be called upon to pay it, the natural course was for the lords to grant their scutages and aids, the commoners their tenths and fifteenths, and the clergy their subsidies, apart. Indeed there is reason to believe that at times even the knights and the burgesses deliberated separately. Gradually, however, there appeared certain affiliations of interest which operated to modify the original practice. In the first place, the lesser clergy, inconvenienced by attendance and preferring to vote their contributions in the special ecclesiastical assemblages known as the convocations of Canterbury and York, contrived to throw off entirely their obligation of membership. The greater clergy and the greater barons, in the next place, developed sufficiently large interests in common to be amalgamated with ease in one body. Similarly, the lesser barons found their interests essentially identical with those of the country freeholders, represented by the knights of the shire, and with those of the burgesses. The upshot was a gradual alignment of the aggregate membership in two great groups, the one of which became historically the House of Lords, the other the House of Commons. At the beginning of the reign of Edward III. (1327–1377) the three estates still sat separately, but before the close of this period the bicameral arrangement seems definitely to have been established. There is no evidence that at any stage of their history the three groups ever sat as a single body. It need hardly be emphasized that the entire course of English history since the fourteenth century has been affected profoundly by the fact that the national assembly took the form of two houses rather than of one, as did the Scotch, of three as did the French, or of four as did the Swedish. But for the withdrawal of the lesser clergy, the number might very possibly have been three.