The Three Estates in those days sat in the same Chamber, but did not join in debate. The Lords made the laws, and the Commons looked on or perhaps assented respectfully. The separation of the two Houses took place in the reign of Edward III., when the knights threw in their allegiance with the burgesses, and in 1322 the Lower House56 first met apart.
The power of the Commons increased gradually as time advanced. By the end of the thirteenth century they had secured sufficient authority to ensure that no tax could be imposed without their consent. By the middle of the fourteenth no law could be passed unless they approved. But many centuries were yet to elapse before the chief government of the country passed into their hands.
The expense of sending representatives to Parliament was long considered a burden, many counties and boroughs applying to be discharged from the exercise of so costly a privilege. The electors of those days were apparently less anxious to furnish a Member for the popular assembly than to save the payment of his salary. Indeed, the city of Rochester, in 1411, practised the frugal custom of compelling any stranger who settled within its gates to serve a term in Parliament at his own expense. He was thus permitted to earn his freedom, and the parsimonious citizens saved an annual expenditure of about £9.57
With the gradual growth of parliamentary power the importance of electing members to the House of Commons began to be recognized, and, during the Wars of the Roses, fewer and fewer applications were made by boroughs and cities anxious to be relieved of this duty.
Until Henry VI.'s time, when the modern system of Bills and Statutes began to come into being, legislation was by Petition. The control of Parliament was still very largely in the hands of the Crown, and successive sovereigns took care that their influence over the Commons should be maintained. With this object in view Edward VI. enfranchised some two-and-twenty rotten boroughs, Mary added fourteen more, and in Elizabeth's time sixty-two further members, all under the royal control, were sent to leaven the Commons.
The attendance in the Lower House was still poor, not more than two hundred members ever taking part in the largest divisions, and it was only at the culmination of the conflicts between Parliament and the Stuart Kings that the Commons began to display a real desire for independent power.
If the Revolution of 1688 firmly and finally established the supremacy of Parliament, it was only a supremacy over the Crown. The democratic element to which we are accustomed in a modern House of Commons was still conspicuously lacking. Both Houses remained purely aristocratic in character until long after this. Whigs and Tories might wrangle over political differences; they were at one in their determination to uphold the interests of a single privileged class. "This House is not the representative of the people of Great Britain," said Pitt in the Commons in 1783; "it is the representative of nominal boroughs, of ruined and exterminated towns, of noble families, of wealthy individuals, of foreign potentates." Eight members of Parliament were then nominated by the Nabob of Arcot, and in 1793 the Duke of Norfolk's nominees in the House numbered eleven. The Crown, the Church, and the aristocracy governed the country. The Commons were an insignificant body, open to bribery, dependent upon rich patrons or upon electors whose corruption was notorious. Prior to 1832, only 170 out of some 658 members of Parliament were independent; the remainder were nominated by wealthy individuals. The Reform Bill of 1832, however, brought about a mighty change for the better. The electorate of the country was raised from 300,000 to 1,370,000. Fifty-six corrupt boroughs were disfranchised, thirty-one were deprived of one member each, and two others were reduced; and the hitherto inadequate representation of other towns and boroughs was rectified.
The Reformed Parliament that met in the following year differed in many respects from its predecessors. Sir Robert Peel was much struck by the alteration in tone, character, and appearance of the new House of Commons. "There was an asperity, a rudeness, a vulgar assumption of independence, combined with a fawning reference to the people out of doors, expressed by many of the new members, which" (as he told his friend Raikes) "was highly disgusting."58 The Duke of Wellington, who had gone to the Peers' Gallery of the House of Commons to inspect the new Parliament, expressed his opinion more tersely. "I never saw so many shocking bad hats in my life!" he said. The spirit of democracy had crept in, but it was still an unwelcome visitor. For many years the aristocracy maintained a great preponderance in the House of Commons – in 1868 that assembly comprised 45 heirs of peerages, 65 younger sons of peers, and 57 baronets59– but its power decreased year by year, though even now it cannot be said to be wholly extinct.
By the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 the franchise qualifications were once more extended, and three and a half million names added to the register. With the election, in 1874, of the first Labour candidates – of whom one, at least, was a genuine working-man – the Commons gradually began to assume that representative appearance which it now presents.
During the last three centuries the Lower House has increased very considerably in size as well as in importance. It numbered 300 in the reign of Henry VI., and 506 at the time of the Long Parliament. In 1832, by which time the Acts of Union had added 45 Scottish and 100 Irish members,60 the numbers had risen to 658, and to-day some 670 members sit in Parliament.
The House of Commons has long ago shaken off the shackles of the Crown, and will perhaps some day be almost as wholly emancipated from the influence of the aristocracy. Its power is increasing yearly, owing mainly to the fact that it has gained the confidence of the country, and it is now generally felt that when any great question arises, the House will solve it, as Disraeli said some fifty years ago, "not merely by the present thought and intelligence of its members, but by the accumulated wisdom of the eminent men who have preceded them."61
To appreciate the exact nature of those inducements which tempt a man to enter Parliament must often prove perplexing to the lay mind. To Charles James Fox the pleasures of patronage seemed the circumstances which chiefly rendered desirable the possession of political power. But the patronage in the hands of a private member to-day is of too insignificant a nature to prove an irresistible temptation, and political power of an appreciable kind is reserved for the very few.
The life of the modern legislator is a strenuous and an expensive one; it cannot be successfully undertaken by a poor or an idle man. Before a candidate may stand for Parliament at all he must deposit a substantial sum with the Returning Officer, and the mere expenses of election vary from £350 to £900 in boroughs, and from £650 to as much as £1800 in counties.62 Add to this the annual sum – variously computed at from £200 to £500 – which a member spends in subscriptions within his constituency, and it can readily be imagined that the parliamentary life is not open to all. There would, indeed, seem to be some justification for the criticism of that cynical member who said that he had often heard the House of Commons called "the best club in London," and supposed that it was so termed because it demanded the largest entrance fee.63 A few fortunate candidates have their election expenses paid by a party or by Trades Unions, but these are in the minority, and the comparatively large cost of entering Parliament