24. The House of Commons in 1485.—The House of Commons at the beginning of the Tudor period was a body of some 300 members. It contained 74 knights of the shire, representing all but three of the forty English counties, together with a fluctuating number of representatives of cities and boroughs. In the Model Parliament of 1295 the number of urban districts represented was 166, but as time went on the number declined, in part because of the discrimination exercised from time to time in the selection of boroughs to be represented, and in part by reason of the fact that in times when representation did not appear to yield tangible results the borough taxpayers begrudged the two shillings per day paid their representatives, in some instances sufficiently to be induced to abandon altogether the sending of members. By the time of Edward IV. (1399–1413) the number of represented towns had fallen to 111. At the beginning of the fifteenth century county members were elected by the body of freeholders present at the county court, but by statute of 1429 the electoral privilege was restricted to freeholders resident in the county and holding land of the yearly rental value of forty shillings, equivalent, perhaps, to some £30 to £40 in present values. This rule, adopted originally with the express purpose of disfranchising "the very great and outrageous number of people either of small substance or of no value" who had been claiming an electoral equality with the "worthy knights and squires," continued in operation without amendment until 1832. The electoral systems prevailing in the boroughs exhibited at all times the widest variation, and never prior to 1832 was there serious attempt to establish uniformity of practice. In some places (the so-called "scot and lot" boroughs) the suffrage was exercised by all rate-payers; in others, by the holders of particular tenements ("burgage" franchise); in others (the "potwalloper" boroughs) by all citizens who had hearths of their own; in many, by the municipal corporation, or by the members of a guild, or even by neighboring landholders. Borough electoral arrangements ran the full gamut from thoroughgoing democracy to the narrowest kind of oligarchy.
25. Development under the Tudors: Composition.—During the Tudor period the composition of the two chambers underwent important change. In the Lords the principal modification was the substitution of temporal for spiritual preponderance. This was brought about in two ways. The first was the increase numerically of the hereditary peers from thirty-six at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII. to about eighty at the accession of James I. The second was the dropping out of twenty-eight abbots, incident to the closing of the monasteries by Henry VIII. and only partially compensated by the creation at the time of six new bishoprics. In 1509 the number of lords spiritual was forty-eight; in 1603, it was but twenty-six. The House of Commons under the Tudors was virtually doubled in size. The final incorporation of Wales in 1535 meant the adding of twenty-five members. In 1536 and 1543 the counties of Monmouth and Chester were admitted to representation. There followed the enfranchisement of a number of boroughs, and by the end of the reign of Henry VIII. the representation of counties had been increased from 74 to 90, and that of the boroughs had been brought up to 252, giving the House an aggregate membership of 342. During the reign of Edward VI. twenty new constituencies were created, and during that of Mary twenty-one. But the most notable increase was that which took place in the reign of Elizabeth, the net result of which was the bringing in of 62 new borough representatives, in some cases from boroughs which now acquired for the first time the right of representation, in others from boroughs which once had possessed the right but through disuse had been construed to have forfeited it. The total increase of the Commons in numerical strength during the Tudor period was 166. There can be little question that in a few instances parliamentary representation was extended with the specific purpose of influencing the political complexion of the popular chamber. But, on the whole, the reason for the notable increase, especially of borough members, is to be found in the growing prosperity of the country and in the reliance which the Tudors were accustomed to place upon the commercial and industrial classes of the population.
26. Other Developments.—A second point at which Parliament in the Tudor era underwent modification was in respect to permanence and sittings. Prior to Henry VIII. the life of a parliament was confined, as a rule, to a single session, and sessions were brief. But parliaments now ceased to be meetings to be broken up as soon as some specific piece of business should have been completed, and many were brought together in several succeeding sessions. Henry VIII.'s Reformation Parliament lasted seven years. During the forty-five years of Elizabeth there were ten parliaments and thirteen sessions. One of these parliaments lasted eleven years, although it met but three times. It is true that the parliaments of Elizabeth were in session, in the aggregate, somewhat less than three years, an average for the reign of but little more than three weeks a year. But the point is that, slowly but effectually, Parliament as an institution was acquiring a recognized position in the political system of the nation. In 1589 Thomas Smith, a court secretary, published a book entitled "The Commonwealth of England and the Manner of Government Thereof," in which was laid down the fundamental proposition that "the most high and absolute power of the realm of England consisteth in the parliament"; and there is no record that the proclamation of this doctrine, even by a court official, elicited serious protest or difference of opinion. It was in the Tudor period, further, that both houses instituted the keeping of journals and that the appointment of committees and numerous other aspects of modern parliamentary procedure had their beginnings.
Finally, the Elizabethan portion of the period was an epoch during which there took place a very real growth in independence of sentiment and an equally notable advance in consciousness of power on the part of the popular chamber. Even before the death of Elizabeth there were ill-repressed manifestations of the feeling that the Tudor monarchy had done its work and that the time for a larger amount of parliamentary control had arrived. Nothing was clearer in 1603 than the fact that the sovereign who should expect to get on agreeably with his Commons must be both liberal and tactful. That the Stuarts possessed the first of these qualities in only a very limited measure and the second one not at all is a fact upon which turns an entire chapter of English constitutional history.[21]
VIII. The Stuarts: Crown and Parliament
27. Absolutism Becomes Impracticable.—Throughout the larger portion of the seventeenth century the principal interest in English politics centers in the contest which was waged between the nation represented in Parliament and the sovereigns of the Stuart dynasty. The question, as one writer has put it, was "at first whether government should be by the king or by the king in parliament, afterwards whether the king should govern or whether parliament should govern."[22] The Stuart sovereigns brought with them to the English throne no political principles that were new. When James I., in a speech before Parliament March 21, 1610, declared that monarchy "is the supremest thing upon earth," and that, "as to dispute what God may do is blasphemy, … so is it sedition in subjects to dispute what a King may do in the height