Reaction which followed Richard's usurpation crown and his life. tween Nor folk and Hereford. Henry of exiled, and his estates confiscated. Although this daring usurpation, through which the king struck down the power of parliament, and secured for himself a revenue for life, was not at the moment resisted, the reaccost him his tion which followed it led directly to his deposition, and to the transfer of the crown to the house of Lancaster. The opportunity for the counter-revolution grew out of a quarrel Quarrel be- which occurred in December, 1397, between the Duke of Norfolk and the son of John of Gaunt, Henry of Lancaster, now Duke of Hereford. The settlement of the quarrel was referred by a committee of parliament1 to a court of chivalry, which met in April, 1398, and in which it was decided that the quarrel between the two dukes should be settled by single combat at Coventry in the following September. When at the time appointed the dukes entered the lists, Richard forbade the combat, and sentenced Norfolk to banishment for life, and Henry of Lancaster to exile for six years. The exile thus forced upon the heir of Lancaster was soon followed by an act of confiscation. In January, 1399, John of Gaunt died, and although special leave had been given Henry to receive his inheritance on the death of his father, Richard, under an ordinance passed by the parliamentary committee, annulled the permission and seized the Lancastrian estates. Two months after that event the king left the realm in charge of his uncle, Edmund, Duke of York, as regent, and went to Ireland for the purpose of reducing it to complete subjection. An opportunity was thus promptly offered to the exiled and disinherited Henry not only to redress his own wrongs, but to become the leader of the counter-revolution through which the nation was to reestablish, more firmly than ever before, the supremacy of parliament. On the 4th of July, 1399, Henry landed in Yorkshire, Yorkshire and as he marched rapidly to the south, with an army that July, 1399. grew at every step, all show of resistance broke down, the forces gathered by the regent refusing to oppose him. By the first of August, Henry was so completely in possession of the realm that when Richard landed in Wales all chance for a struggle was over. On the 2d of September the king was brought to London and placed in the Tower, and on the 30th Henry lands in on the 4th 1 Rot. Parl., iii. p. 383. 2 Ibid., iii. p. 372; Rymer, viii. pp. 49, 51; Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. ii. pp. 500, 501. upon the II. tion of the succession. of that month the parliament met in which his fate was to be decided. The procedure which was now employed was a substantial reproduction of that which seventy-two years before had attended the deposition of Edward II. On the Procedure day before the parliament met, Richard was required to sign a deposition deed of resignation in which he fully renounced his right to the of Richard crown, and absolved his people from their oaths of homage and fealty.1 The parliament not only accepted the resignation, but in addition thereto pronounced a judgment of deposition, upon written articles presented against the king in which he was formally charged with every possible act of illegality and malversation.2 The throne having thus been made vacant, not only by Richard's own act, but by the act of parliament, the all-important question of the succession remained to be determined. If that question had depended The quesonly on the strict rule of hereditary descent which the feudal lawyers applied to the succession of estates, the crown would have now passed to Edmund Mortimer, the infant son of Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, son of Phillippa, the daughter and heiress of Lionel of Clarence, the third son of Edward III. But the strict rule of hereditary descent had not yet Strict rule received positive and formal recognition in the case of the of heredicrown; it had not yet superseded the immemorial right of not yet apthe national council to choose, in the presence of a great crown. emergency, that member of the royal household whom it deemed most competent to govern.3 And yet the notion that the right to the throne depended upon the hereditary principle had sufficiently advanced to prompt Henry, when he stood forth before the parliament to challenge the crown, to claim it "as that I am descended by right line of blood coming from the good lord king Henry III."4 But this shadowy Henry's claim, which depended upon a false tradition, was too flimsy the result to conceal the patent fact that the new monarch had been of a parlia raised to the throne through a parliamentary revolution, revolution. parliament to choose in such a case a successor among any other members of the royal house." -Green, Hist. of the Eng. People, vol. i. p. 521. 1 Ann. Ricardi, pp. 252, 255 seq.; Mon. Evesh., pp. 157 seq. On the next day the resignation was accepted. Rot. Parl., iii. p. 416 seq. 2 Rot. Parl., iii. pp. 416–424. 8 "The strict rule of hereditary descent had never received any formal recognition in the case of the crown, and precedent suggested a right of 4 See what Mr. Freeman has to say as to the growth of the hereditary doctrine, in Enc. Brit., 9th ed. vol. viii. p. 320. tary descent plied to the elevation mentary that the royal authority was for the future to rest upon a parliamentary title. And so it came to pass that the audacious attempt made by Richard to subvert the constitution, by rendering the crown independent of the assembly of estates, not only became abortive the moment the nation under a competent leader was aroused to action, but it also fell out, as a consequence of the struggle, that the crown was placed in such a position of dependence upon the two houses as to render all such future attempts doubly perilous. Authority Through the results of the counter-revolution, the authority of parliament reached the limit of its growth when, after a struggle of scarcely two months' duration, it deposed the ruling sovereign; and then, after ignoring the pretensions of the claimant who really represented the hereditary title, the revolu- awarded the throne to another member of the royal house, whom it deemed more competent to govern.1 of parlia ment reached the limit of its growth through the results of tion. CHAPTER II. HISTORY OF PARLIAMENT FROM HENRY IV. TO HENRY VII. the growth ment from accession of I. A POINT has now been reached from which it is possible Review of to review the general advance made by the parliament during of parlia the period which intervenes between the Norman conquest the Con and the end of the fourteenth century. During that period quest to the the feudal councils which gathered around the Norman and Henry IV. Angevin kings, with authority too vague and shadowy for precise definition, are gradually transformed into an assembly of estates which wins not only the right to participate in taxation and legislation, but to supervise and control the entire system of national administration. At the beginning of the period all of the great powers of government are centralized in the person of the king, acting ordinarily through his continual council composed of the officers of state and of the household, from which body emanated all the important acts of government, whether administrative, legislative, judicial, fiscal, or political. At the end of the period we find The sum of that the sum of governmental power originally vested in the mental king in council has been vastly reduced through the opera-nally tion of two distinct processes of subtraction. In the first vested in place, by the growth out of the continual council-which soon council recame to be known as the curia regis1 of the common law double procourts of king's bench, common pleas, and exchequer, the cess of subgreater part of the judicial work of the council was permanently transferred to three distinct tribunals, each devoted to Greater the hearing of a definite class of causes. And when at a judicial later day, out of the residuum of judicial power retained by council the council, was developed the equitable jurisdiction of the transferred chancellor, the judicial functions of the crown were confined courts of within a still narrower circle. By the transfer thus brought equity. 1 The term curia regis, which for a long time after the Conquest was ap plied not only to the continual but to the national council, finally became the exclusive designation of the court of king's bench, after the final division into three distinct courts - which took govern power orig the king in duced by a traction. part of the work of the to the law and Due process of law defined. about of the greater part of the judicial business originally dispatched by the king in council to the great courts of law and equity, the central administration, in its judicial aspect, was transformed into a government of law as distinguished from a government of functionaries.1 In this way the principle became settled that judicial controversies should no longer be determined by the mere force of royal authority, but by due process of law, - that is, by law administered in fixed tribunals by trained judges governed by principles and precedents drawn from the Old-English code of customary law as modified by Norman innovation. That the judicial work of the kingdom should be thus conducted was as late as the reign of Henry IV. made the subject of a special demand in parliament: in 1406 the commons, as a part of the scheme of reform pressed upon the king in that year, demand that the council shall determine nothing cognizable at common law unless for reasonable cause and with the consent of the judges; that the council and officers of state shall be sworn to observe the common law and all statutes, specially The assem- those recently enacted.2 In the second place, while the law courts were upon the one hand drawing to themselves the control of the bulk of the judicial work which had originally control of belonged to the king in council, the assembly of estates was upon the other struggling to draw to itself the exclusive control of the legislative, taxative, and fiscal business of the kingdom. But before the national assembly was in a position to essay so great a task, a reorganization had first to be effected in its own constitution, a result which was brought about by the building up alongside of the older feudal council of a new and a popular body composed of representatives from the shires and towns. How these representative members were called up to confer with the king upon the business bly of es states draws to itself the the legislative, taxative, and fiscal busi ness of the kingdom. 1 "The guarantee of the supremacy of the law leads to a principle which, so far as I know, it has never been attempted to transplant from the soil inhabited by Anglican people, and which, nevertheless, has been, in our system of liberty, the natural production of a thorough government of law as contradistinguished to a government of functionaries."- Lieber, Civil Liberty and Self-Government, p. 91. 2 Rot. Parl., iii. pp. 585-589. A series of petitions begin as early as 1351 against the judicial usurpations of the council. See Rot. Parl., ii. pp. 228, 239, 295. In 1390 the commons petitioned that no one should be summoned before the chancellor or the council by the writ quibusdam de causis to answer in any case in which the common law gave a remedy. — Rot Parl., iii. p. 267. |