| Abstrakt: |
Throughout the seventeenth century Englishmen sought in history for the proofs as well as for the origins of political rights. Their historical theories of the Constitution – Coke's theory of the Immemorial Law and Parliament, the Gothic theory that traced all the limited monarchies of Europe to the Germans, and the Royalists’ theory that the English Constitution was established by William I – were all dominated by medieval evidence. Yet these historical theories were themselves the victims of history. The Revolution, the Act of Union with Scotland, and the Act of Settlement placed a definitive modern settlement or settlements between the historic past and the political present. Even those for whom the Revolution was a re-affirmation of old principles were placed in a different relationship to the past by that settlement's simple existence. But the Revolution was merely the most radical of a series of political events that after the hiatus of the Commonwealth devalued, in particular, the appeal of immemorialism. The feudal tenures were finally abolished in 1660, while the clergy's surrender of self-taxation in 1664, and their subsequent inclusion in Parliamentary grants, was followed by the disappearance, until 1700, of the sitting Convocation. It was a demonstration of how the Constitution and Parliament might silently change in response to mere taxative convenience. Contemporaries were perhaps slow to realise the significance of what had happened but the Revolution itself gave a measure of the decline of immemorialism with the omission from the 1689 Coronation Oath of the monarch's traditional promise to maintain the Confessor's laws on the ground that their historical standing was uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
