from Aristotelian ideas of the ‘popular state’, rather from the ‘state of
the commonwealth’ defined by English Law: a law belonging to the
whole people, which William Lambarde was tracing back to Anglo-
Saxon antiquity, and which Chief Justice Coke, in the footsteps of
Christopher St. German, was blowing up into an ‘artificial reason’
declared by the courts. In the making of law English parliaments
generally worked in harmony with monarchs whose will they recog-
nized as necessary to give new laws their force. The conflict that arose
was about who should interpret the law, and whether it was a necessary
attribute of monarchy (as Aquinas had argued) to be able to dispense
with the law altogether in an emergency. In his Star Chamber speech,
James repeated that he had never meant to change English law, and
indeed ‘in matter of Policy and State’ innovation always changed things
maturely established for the worse. But he showed his resentment of the
‘foolish quirk’ of the judges who had advised that Scotland and England
could not be united by the name of Great Britain, for he had since
learnt that there was nothing an Act of Parliament could not do. And he
insisted that the Common Law must keep ‘within her own limits, not
derogating’ from the ‘Law of God and his Church’, and the ‘Law Civil
and Canon’. The judges must remember that they were only interpreters
of law they did not make, and they must not encroach on his preroga-
tive to define the boundaries of his courts and keep them ‘in musical
accord’: warnings directed specifically against Coke, whose campaign to
assert the supremacy of the Common Law courts over the the Court of
Chancery, Star Chamber, and the ecclesiastical courts, was about to
bring his dismissal from the office of Chief Justice.^79
Opportunity for constitutional conflict was increased when Coke,
who had been speaker of the Commons in an Elizabethan parliament,
returned to the House, helped to revive the process of impeachment of
the king’s ministers in ‘the high court of parliament’, and promoted a
Monopolies Act which ‘declared’ that patents of monopoly were
‘against the laws of the realm’. In 1628, as he completed in his late
seventies the second part of his famous Institutes of the Law of England
expounding the great succession of statutes from Magna Carta
onwards, he promoted in Charles I’s third parliament the momentous
Petition of Right, which declared that the liberties, not just of the
Commons but of all freemen, were indeed, ‘by the common law and
statutes’, inherited property rights. It followed that they were a matter
for the courts to determine, and that it was particularly for parliament
The English ‘commonwealth and free state’ 333(^79) King James VI and I: Political Writings, 207 ff.; C. C. Weston, ‘England: Ancient
Constitution and Common Law’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700,
374 ff.; A. Cromartie, ‘The Constitutionalist Revolution: the Transformation of Political
Culture in Early Stuart England’, Past and Present, 163 (1999), 76–120.