reported to them and convinced of the need to relieve his ‘high estate’,
petitioned for an Act of Resumption of royal grants of estates of land
and offices, whether in fee simple or in fee tail, for life or for years.^10
However, in the debate about Henry’s sickness and the land’s mis-
government in 1454, ‘the King’s welfare and his Royal estate’ is coupled
with ‘the common weal’ rather than the state of the kingdom, and in
1467 in Edward IV’s address to the Commons and in the preamble to
another Act of Resumption ‘the common weal, defence, surety and wel-
fare of this Realm’ is juxtaposed to ‘the honour, state and prosperity of
the King’, who proclaimed his intention to ‘live of his own’ and impose
taxes only ‘in grete and urgent causes’ concerning his subjects’ wele.^11
The displacement of ‘state of the realm’ by ‘commonwealth’ in the
rolls of parliament accompanies the increased importance given the
representatives of the shires and towns by the magnates’ use of them in
political struggles with the king, and the measure of initiative the
Commons gained for themselves in those matters ‘called common’, that
is the granting of taxes and the making of statutes which guarded
‘common right’, the ‘common law’, ‘the good of your said Commons’,
and ‘the state and integrity of your Crown [l’estat et droiture de vostre
Coroune]’. The polity appears as a relationship of king and estates in
treatises on the workings of English institutions written during the
‘Wars of the Roses’, the dynastic struggle between the families of
Lancaster and York, their author Sir John Fortescue, the chief justice of
England from 1442 until Edward IV’s seizure of the throne from
Henry VI in 1461 and chancellor to Henry in exile in Scotland and
France, but a member of King Edward’s council within a few months of
the Yorkists’ final victory in 1471. The English treatise ‘On the
Governance of England’ which Fortescue may have written originally
for Henry VI’s son, views the polity through ideals of good government
rather than commonwealth—of what was called in the parliament rolls
bonus regimen et gubernatio Regni, or the ‘politique and restful rule of
the said land’. The cause Fortescue alleged for England’s misgovern-
ment, the poverty of its kings in contrast to the great revenues of their
French counterparts, he explained in terms of a different relationship
between king and estates in the two countries: the ability of the French
king to increase ‘impositions on the commons without the assent of the
three estates’ stemmed from the emergency of the Anglo-French war,
when money had to be raised for defence but English incursions pre-
vented the estates-general from meeting.^12
Comparing and criticizing states of commonwealths 299(^10) RPv. 183–4.
(^11) Ibid. v. 241–2, 572.
(^12) Ibid. iii. 433, 612, iv. 34, 173, 197, v. 241; Sir John Fortescue, The Governance of
England, ed. C. Plummer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), 94–6.