CHAPTER VI
THE BRITISH PARLIAMENT BETWEEN
KING AND PEOPLEThe power and jurisdiction of Parliament, says Sir Edward Coke, is so transcendant
and absolute, that it cannot be confined, either for causes or persons, within any
bounds.... It hath sovereign and uncontrollable authority.... It can change and
create afresh even the constitution of the kingdom and of parliaments them-
selves.... True it is, that what the parliament doth, no authority upon earth can
undo. So that it is a matter most essential to the liberties of this kingdom that such
members be delegated to this important trust as are most eminent for their probity,
their fortitude, and their knowledge; for it was a known apothegm of the great lord
treasurer Burleigh, “that England could never be ruined but by a parliament.”
—SIR WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, 1765
Of all those constituted bodies of Europe, largely aristocratic in composition,
which in some countries came into conflict with kings in the decade before 1775,
and which at Geneva had trouble with the citizens whom they governed, the most
famous and the most powerful was the Parliament of Great Britain, whose mis-
fortune it was to be challenged from both sides at once. Or, at least, the most ar-
dent devotees of the Houses of Parliament found Parliamentary independence
being undermined by the King, in the person of George III, while at the same
time a growing number of dissatisfied persons, in America, in Ireland, and in En-
gland itself, expressed increasing doubts on the independence of Parliament, in-
voking a higher authority which they called the People. The champions of Parlia-
ment relished neither rival. “It is our business to act constitutionally, and to
maintain the independency of Parliament,” said the young Charles Fox in the
Commons in 1771; “whether it is attacked by the people or by the crown is a mat-
ter of little consequence.”^1
1 Parliamentary History, XVII, 149.