Constitutional History.
[chap.
mentary theory under Lancaster.—365. Fortescue’s scheme of govern-
ment.—366. Practical illustration of constitutional working.—367.
The Council.—368. Elections to the House of Commons.—369. Free-
dom of debate in the House of Commons.—370. Money grants.—371.
Interference with tlɪe Royal Household.—372. Want of governance.
—373. Case for and against the House of York as rulers.
The fifteenth 299. If the only object of Constitutional History were the
century not . .. ... π. j .
a period of investigation of the origin and powers of Parliament, the study
tɪonai de- of the subject might be suspended at the deposition of Kichard II,
Ielopment. f0 p,θ resumed under the Tudors. Duringagoodportionofthe
intervening period the history of England contains little else
than the details of foreign wars and domestic struggles, in
which parliamentary institutions play no prominent part ; and,
upon a superficial view, their continued existence may seem to
be a result of their insignificance among the ruder expedients
of arms, the more stormy and spontaneous forces of personal,
political, and religious passion. Yet the parliament has a his-
tory of its own throughout the period of turmoil. It does not
indeed develope any new powers, or invent any new mechanism ;
its special history is either a monotonous detail of formal pro-
ceedings, or a record of asserted privilege. Under the mono-
tonous detail there is going on a process of hardening and
sharpening, a second almost imperceptible stage of definition,
which, when new life is infused into the mechanism, will have
no small effect in determining the ways in which that new life
will work. In the record of asserted privilege may be traced
the flashes of a consciousness that show the forms of national
action to be no mere forms, and illustrate the continuity of
a sense of earlier greatness and of an instinctive looking
towards a greater destiny. And this is nearly all. The
parliamentary constitution lives through the epoch, but its
machinery and its functions do not much expand ; the weapons
which are used by the politicians of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries are taken, with little attempt at improvement
or adaptation, from the armoury of the fourteenth. The inter-
vening age has rather conserved than multiplied them or
extended their usefulness.
Close of the Middle Ages.
xvι∏∙]
γet the interval witnessed a series of changes in national Vast hɪsto-
life, mind, and character, in the relations of classes, and in the ance of the
balance of political forces, far greater tlɪan the English race t∏m⅛on.
has gone through since the Norman conquest, greater in some
respects than it has experienced since it became a consolidated,
Christian nation. Of these changes the Reformation, with its
attendant measures, was the greatest ; but there were others
which led to and resulted from the religious change. Such
was that recovered strength of the monarchic principle, which,
in England as on the Continent, marked the opening of a new
era, and which, although in England it resulted from causes
peculiar to England, from the exhaustion of all energies except
those of the crown, whilst abroad it resulted from the concen-
tration of great territorial possessions in the hands of a few
great kings, seemed almost a necessary antecedent to the new
conformation of European politics, and to the share which
England was to take in them. Such again was the liberation
of internal forces, political as well as religious, which followed
the disruption of ecclesiastical unity, and which is perhaps the
most important of all the phenomena which distinguish modern
from medieval history. Such was the transformation of the
baronage of early England into the nobility of later times,
a transformation attended by changes in personal and political
relations which make it more difficult to trace the identity of
the peerage than the continuous life of clergy or commons.
The altered position of the church, apart from Reformation
influences, is another mark of a new period; the estate of the
clergy, deprived of the help of the older baronage, which is now
almost extinguished, and set in antagonism to the new nobility
that is founded upon the spoils of the church, tends ever more
and more to lean upon the royal power, which tends ever more
and more to use the church for its own ends, and to weaken
the hold of the church upon the commons, whenever the in-
terests of the commons and of the crown are seen to be in
0Pposition. Partly parallel to these, partly resulting from
them, partly also arising from a fresh impulse of its own
liberated and directed by these causes, is the changed position
в 2