Chapter 49, Appendix, Footnote #05
The Parliament as Ornament
``Monarchies'', according to Sir Walter Raleigh, ``are of two sorts, touching their power or authority: viz., 1. Entire, where the whole power of ordering all state matters, both in peace and war, doth by law and custom appertain to the prince, as in the English kingdom; where the prince hath the power to make laws, league, and war; to create magistrates; to pardon life; of appeal, etc. Though, to give a contentment to the other degrees, they have a suffrage in making laws, yet ever subject to the prince's pleasure and negative will. 2. Limited or restrained, that hath no full power in all the points and matters of state, as the military king, that hath not the sovereignty in time of peace, as the making of laws, etc., but in war only, as the Polonian king.''---Maxims of State.
And a little after: ``In every just state, some part of the government is, or ought to be, imparted to the people; as, in a kingdom, a voice and suffrage in making laws; and sometimes also of levying of arms (if the charge be great, and the prince forced to borrow help of his subjects), the matter rightly may be propounded to a Parliament, that the tax may seem to have proceeded from themselves. So consultations and some proceedings in judicial matters may, in part, be referred to them. The reason, lest, seeing themselves to be in no number, nor of reckoning, they mislike the state or government.'' This way of reasoning differs little from that of King James, who considered the privileges of the Parliament as matters of grace and indulgence more than of inheritance. It is remarkable that Raleigh was thought to lean towards the Puritanical party, notwithstanding these positions. But ideas of government change much in different times.
Raleigh's sentiments on this head are still more openly expressed in his Prerogatives of Parliaments, a work not published till after his death. It is a dialogue between a courtier or councillor and a country justice of peace, who represents the party, and defends the highest notions of liberty which the principles of that age would bear. Here is a passage of it: ``Councillor. That which is done by the king with the advice of his private or privy council is done by the king's absolute power, Justice. And by whose power is it done in Parliament but by the king's absolute power? Mistake it not, my lord: the three estates do but advise, as the privy council doth; which advice, if the king embrace, it becomes the king's own act in the one, and the king's law in the other'', etc.
The Earl of Clare, in a private letter to his son-in-law, Sir Thomas Wentworth, afterwards Earl of Strafford, thus expresses himself: ``We live under a prerogative government, where book law submits to lex loquens.'' He spoke from his own and and his ancestors' experience. There was no single instance of power which a King of England might not, at that time, exert on pretence of necessity or expediency; the continuance alone or frequent repetition of arbitrary administration might prove dangerous for want of force to support it. It is remarkable that this letter of the Earl of Clare was written in the first year of Charles's reign, and consequently must be meant of the general genius of the government, not the spirit or temper of the monarch. See Strafford's Letters, vol. i. p. 32. From another letter in the same collection (vol. i. p. 10) it appears that the council sometimes assumed the power of forbidding persons disagreeable to the court to stand in the elections, authority they could exert in some instances; but we are not thence to infer that they could shut the door of that House to every one who was not acceptable to them. The genius of the ancient government reposed more trust in the king than to entertain any such suspicion; and it allowed scattered instances of such a kind as would have been totally destructive of the constitution had they been continued without interruption.
I have not met with any English writer in that age who speaks of England as a limited monarchy, but as an absolute one, where the people have many privileges. That is no contradiction. In all European monarchies the people have privileges; but whether dependent or independent, on the will of the monarch, is a question that, in most governments, it is better to forbear. Surely that question was not determined before the age of James. The rising spirit of the Parliament, together with the king's love of general speculative principles, brought it from its obscurity and made it be commonly canvassed. The strongest testimony that I remember from a writer of James's age in favor of English liberty is in Cardinal Bentivoglio, a foreigner, who mentions the English government as similar to that of the Low Country Provinces under their princes, rather than to that of France or Spain. Englishmen were not so sensible that their prince was limited, because they were sensible that no individual had any security against a stretch of prerogative; but foreigners, by comparison, could perceive that these stretches were at that time, from custom or other causes, less frequent in England than in other monarchies. Philip de Comines, too, remarked the English constitution to be more popular in his time than that of France. But in a paper written by a patriot in 1627, it is remarked that the freedom of speech in Parliament had been lost in England since the days of Comines. See Franklyn, p. 238. Here is a stanza of Malherbe's Ode to Mary de Medicis, the Queen-Regent, written in 1614: