The Parliaments of Early Modern Europe

1400 - 1700

M.A.R. Graves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317884323
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

A comparative survey of the emergence and development of Parliaments in Catholic Christendom from the thirteenth century, the chief focus of this work is the period between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries,when Europe was dramatically changed by the Renaissance, the  Reformation and the growth of composite monarchies which brought together diverse territories under their rule. European Parliaments experienced a variety of challenges, fortunes and fates: some survived, even flourished, but others succumbed to powerful monarchies. By investigating the powers and privileges and responsibilities of these institutions, Graves illuminates the whole business of government - the nature of executive power, the relations of ruler and ruled, the restraints of consent, and the realities of the tension between central authority and local custom.

PART ONE

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The Parliamentary Story

1

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The Origin and Growth of European Parliaments until the Fifteenth Century

REPRESENTATIVE ASSEMBLIES were not a dramatic innovation when they appeared on the European scene between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. They were regional or national expressions of representation, which had for a long time been practised in central, local and ecclesiastical government and corporate bodies. Such assemblies were also the product of (1) an established socio-political system, based on lordship and vassalage and existing in much of western Europe, and (2) the principles which it embodied, in particular the legacy of Roman jurisprudence and the evolving corpus of the catholic Church’s canon law. Just as important and perhaps even more so, because they were ongoing, relentless and often urgent, were the practical needs and priorities of the ruler and the ruled.

Lordship and vassalage

The development of a system of lordship and vassalage, resting on mutual loyalty and benefits, was essentially a Germanic phenomenon. It spread from the kingdom of the Franks into Germany, England and other, but not all, parts of Europe. In Spain and some of the countries of central, eastern and Scandinavian Europe feudalism evolved in a variety of ways or did not develop as fully, or even at all.¹ In its fullest form, especially in the Germanic territories, vassals had the obligation to support their lord with advice and aid, especially military assistance. This accorded with an older Germanic tradition whereby warriors had assembled en masse and provided the same services to their rulers.² The gatherings of kings and their vassals, however, do not bear any relationship to later representative institutions. They were meetings of great men. On the one hand there was the king who, as overlord, gave protection and rewards to his faithful vassals. On the other there were the vassals, who were the recipients of grants of land (fiefs) and other benefits from him or his royal predecessors. With their own vassals they rendered military assistance and, from the power-bases of their fiefs, they were in effective control of the administration of justice and the maintenance of law and order in the localities.

Although such assemblies were not representative of the community as a whole, but only meetings of great men, they had, in common with later representative institutions, the two functions and responsibilities of consilium (advice) and auxilium (aid). Furthermore, just as those who attended later parliaments thought in terms not only of obligations but also of rights – the right to be consulted, to question royal policies, to safeguard interests and even extend privileges – so, centuries before, vassals gradually extended their role and priorities at meetings with the king.³ This is a significant link between these early gatherings and representative assemblies, because many of the vassals’ descendants were to sit in the emerging parliaments as members of the privileged clerical and noble estates.

Roman and canon law

Nevertheless notions of representation had no place in such gatherings of great men. They derived from the two bodies of inherited Roman law and the developing canon law of the Church which, in time, were to pervade Europe. By the fourteenth century, when many of Europe’s parliaments took shape, two legal principles upheld by both Roman and canon law had become widely accepted by governors and governed. They were plena potestas (full power) and quod omnes tangit, ah omnibus approbetur (what touches all shall be approved by all). The first of these, derived from Roman law, concerned the authority given to a lawyer who was representing his client in court. This could be and was extended to corporate representation. So full power of attorney was given by the members of a corporate body to those who represented their interests in court. In the course of time this was further extended to national concerns which touched the entire community. The king would summon representatives of the community to assemble, bearing full powers to act in its name and to make decisions which were binding upon it. This did not occur until the emergence of parliaments in the thirteenth century. Long before then however, canon lawyers had adapted this principle of Roman law in order to serve the needs of the catholic Church, which abounded in corporate bodies. During the twelfth century it was employed not only in ecclesiastical courts, but also in assemblies of religious orders and, by the pope, in Church councils. The final step was its adoption and adaptation by secular rulers. It enabled them to consult and seek the assistance, not only of great men, but also of prosperous cities and towns (with a considerable tax potential), corporations and new, emerging social groups: knights in England, lesser nobles in Aragon and Poland, and even free peasantry.⁴

The second principle, quod omnes tangit, was also taken from Roman law and adapted, first into canon law and then, by thirteenth-century canon lawyers, to secular needs. It was originally a legal principle which ensured that the rights of individuals and corporate groups were protected in the courts. This was achieved by the requirement that the consent of all individuals or of the majority of a corporation to a legal decision was necessary. The adoption of a majority vote in a parliamentary election or in a parliamentary division was a secular application of this principle. The extension of it from ecclesiastical to secular institutions was an acknowledgement that rulers were bound by law, custom and the rights and privileges of subjects. Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries quod omnes tangit became a constitutional commonplace, cited, quoted, set forth in parliamentary summons, or used as a justification for the existence of representative assemblies.

Limited power and growing needs

Such legal principles, however, do not of themselves explain why, in practice, medieval rulers chose to reach out from meetings with the powerful and privileged in order to consult, deliberate and reach decisions wdth representatives of a wider community.⁵ It may be explained by the fact that the medieval prince ‘was a leader, not a master … [H]e relied on the conscious and willing collaboration of his subjects as the most effective and easiest instrument of success’. So, Marongiu argues, it was hard political facts about a prince’s limited power, his need and his dependence which promoted ‘the doctrine of collaboration and consent’.⁶ This may have been given further impetus by the pressing needs of princes in a Europe characterised by prolonged internal political rivalries, inter-state wars and conflict between the temporal power and the papacy: for example the Anglo-Scottish wars from the end of the thirteenth century, recurrent struggles between emperor and pope and the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Advice, the provision of justice and order, and especially military assistance and financial aid became frequent and often sustained royal needs. This would have encouraged princes to reach out beyond the gathering of vassals, in order to tap new and growing urban wealth and to enlist the active support of new emergent social groups.

The concept of community

However, Brian Tierney finds the ‘administrative convenience’ of representative assemblies, as a means of satisfying princely needs, an unsatisfactory explanation for their emergence. Koenigsberger offers a persuasive additional element ‘inherent in the very idea of representation: a feeling of community in the whole of a given political structure’. Such community consciousness extended beyond the narrow limits of feudal vassals to encompass cities and towns, professional interests (especially lawyers) and corporate bodies, particularly those engaged in trade. It was not something which, at that early stage, could be defined as national awareness. Nor, on the other hand, was it simply an expression of protective parochial or sectional interest at a national level. However, it did denote a shift, indeed a broadening from the older feudal focus to the wider horizons of the kingdom.⁷ Historians have and will continue to debate the relative importance of the part which, not only this ‘feeling of community’ but also feudal gatherings, the legacy of Roman law, the development of canon law in catholic Christendom and pressing royal needs all played in the emergence of European representative institutions. But it is probable that they were all of some, albeit varying, significance, as princes sought advice and consent within a framework of accepted custom and given law.

The political context of early modern parliaments

Two legacies from the ancient world of the Roman empire had an important part to play in the development of representative institutions. One was Roman law, which, as we have seen, included the principles of plena potestas and quod omnes tangit. These, however, figured only as maxims of private law. It was the achievement of canon lawyers of the medieval catholic Church to apply them also in the field of constitutional law.⁸ This brings us to the other legacy, which, in the first instance, can be traced back to the conversion of Emperor Constantine (306–37) to Christianity. Until then it had been an often unpopular minority religion and one subjected to intermittent persecution. It now became the official established Church of the empire. It was, however, a divided Church, which eventually would split into a western catholic Church, based on the see of Rome, and an eastern Greek Church centred on Constantinople (Byzantium), the city named after its founder, Emperor Constantine. The rise of an institutionalised Church in western Europe, which is the area of our particular concern, led to serious problems and conflicts over the respective roles and authority of Church and state. There was a positive side, however, to the Church’s assertion of independence from secular control from the tenth–eleventh centuries onwards. As, in Tierney’s words, it ‘began to reshape its own laws… [f]or centuries the leaders of the church … considered the problems of right order within a Christian society; and, in doing so, they created an array of ideas and procedures that were eventually assimilated into the theory and practice of Western constitutional government’.⁹ It was within this receptive climate of ideas and jurisprudence that the parliaments of western Europe emerged and developed from the late thirteenth century onwards.

The importance of the two legacies of law and Church in the origins of parliaments was considerable. Apart from that, however, the Roman world from which they derived had long since vanished by the time such assemblies began to appear. The long and complex process of economic decline, the barbarian invasions and (in the fourth and fifth centuries) the political break-up of the ancient Roman empire does not concern us here. Emperor Justinian (527–565) failed in his unrealistic attempt to revive the old empire by reconquering the west from his eastern capital, Byzantium.¹⁰ In the seventh and early eighth centuries Muslim conquerors from the east overwhelmed Arabia (including territories belonging to Byzantium), north Africa and Spain. Their expansion into western Europe was halted only by their defeat at the hands of Charles Martel, king of the Franks, in 732 when they invaded France. The Franks, one of the Germanic barbarian peoples who invaded and, in the fifth century, settled in the western part of the Roman empire, emerged as the major force there. At the end of the fifth century the Frankish king Clovis, and therefore the Franks, was received into the catholic Church. His Merovingian dynasty ruled the Franks until 751 when it was succeeded by the Carolingians. Under the Carolingian dynasty Church and state became mutually involved in both ecclesiastical and secular government and the system of feudal lordship and vassalage, as it spread to Germany and other parts of Christian Europe. In 800 the greatest of the Carolingians, Charlemagne, was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III. However one interprets the symbolism and significance of the occasion, it certainly appeared to regenerate the Christian Roman Empire. It also affirmed and reinforced the involvement of Carolingian rulers and popes in the affairs of each other’s domain. But, as the new emperor received his title and crown from the pope, it also symbolised the subordination of his kingdom to the Church.¹¹ Both feudal developments and what were to become the longlasting thorny issues of the authority of Church and state, and of the relationship between them, were to be important at various stages in the origins and history of parliaments.

Family conflicts amongst Charlemagne’s descendants over the Carolingian inheritance, successive partitions, and the raids and invasions by Vikings, Muslims, Arabs and Hungarians in the ninth and tenth centuries resulted in the disintegration of the western empire. But out of the chaos and collapse in western Europe there gradually emerged the successor states of France and the Germanic Empire.¹² Expansion eastwards in the following centuries extended the area of Germanic control to Austria, Styria and Bohemia and, at ti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Map: Europe in the early sixteenth century
• Introduction
• Part One The Parliamentary Story
• Part Two The Characteristics of Early Modern Parliaments
• Index