PARLIAMENT IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

‘ The most high and absolute power of the realm of England is in the Parliament.’ This famous phrase of Sir Thomas Smith's summarizes a concept but falls well short of explicating it. Historians, following a tradition established by the whig victory of the seventeenth century and impressed by the fact that the meetings of representative assemblies inevitably bring together varied and often rival interests, have habitually concentrated on a political function; to them Parliament has been primarily the embodiment of that ‘politic’ principle which, as Fortescue explained in the fifteenth century, distinguished the otherwise ‘regal’ monarchy of England from the purely royal despotism that he, rather uncertainly, discerned in France. Thus its history has usually been written around the occasional clashes between the Crown and other politically influential elements, clashes which were exceptional rather than normal. It is not denied that meetings of the Parliament could offer an arena for political dispute, but the essence and permanent function of the institution did not lie in that fact. It is now nearly a hundred years since F. W. Maitland taught us an essential truth when he explained that from its beginnings the Parliament formed an aspect of the king's government, a meeting in which the monarch and his Council, calling to them the members of the realm, sat to resolve the problems of Crown and common weal. Even in the sixteenth century everyone agreed that Parliament formed the apex of the king's courts: here the errors of the other courts could be amended and its own errors were remediable by itself alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]