England Under the Stuarts Author:George Macaulay Trevelyan General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1922 Original Publisher: Putnam Subjects: Great Britain History / Europe / Great Britain Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get ... more »free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IV JAMES I. -- PARLIAMENTS AND COURTIKR8 " Le I !- . y s'avisera, the King will take thought of it: " really he should ! -- Histovical Sketches, Carlyle. Origins " I ""HE forms and functions of the English Parliament derived and de- ft, om mediaeval origins. The baron, able, when he chose, to velopment 1 1 1 , 1 , of the two let war loose over the land from his castle-yard, consented to spare Houses his country so long as he was compensated with an hereditary share in the counsels of State. The gentleman, the burgess and the yeoman, in days when the central power could do little to strengthen the hands of the tax-collector against the passive resistance of a scattered population, consented to fill the royal treasury, so long as they were consulted as to the amount and reassured as to the necessity of the royal demands. Such was the original meaning of the House of Lords and of the House of Commons. The Tudors retained the forms but altered the signif1cance of our Parliamentary institutions. By destroying the barons and their armies, the King removed the only political power that could presume to name his Ministers or dictate his policy. Having thus enslaved the Lords, he could safely make use of the Lower House. Urged and directed by the Tudor monarchs, the Commons entered into a career of legislative activity for which there had been no scope in the more conservative ages gone by. As the royal instrument of religious and social reconstruction, they gained prestige while they lost independence. At a tim...« less