English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords 1556-1832 (Routledge Revivals)

Corinne Comstock Weston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415578769
• eBook ISBN: 9781136972683
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

First published in 1965, this work studies the House of Lords and the various proposals for its reform, abolition or limitation of its powers which have been made in the light o f prevailing theories of the nature and characteristics of the English government.

The work also contains a history of the theory of mixed government that arose in Tudor England and lasted until well after the Reform Act of 1832. This history both illuminates the position of the House of Lords and also provides perspective for the study of Democracy in the movement for parliamentary reform. One of the book's most original features is an extensive account of Charles I's Answer to the Nineteen Propostions, out of which came the startling new theory of the constitution, known as "mixed monarchy".

INDEX

Acherley, Roger, 6, 122

amalgamation scheme, 55, 58, 60

Answer to the Nineteen Propositions. See Appendix I;

historical importance of the Answer, 5–6;

comparative neglect by modern historians, 6–7;

contents discussed, 5, 24–6;

prepared by constitutional Royalists, 26–8;

Sir John Colepeper’s debt to Polybius, 26;

receives wide publicity in the name of Charles I, 5, 32, 32 n⁴³, 33;

the two Houses seek to prevent publicity, 33;

‘errors’ in the Answer, 27–8, 28 n³⁴ 27 n³⁴, 31 n⁴¹, 41;

the two Houses allegedly abandon claim to control the royal councillors, 28–9, 28 n³⁶;

too late to prevent war, 29;

may have fostered war, 30–1, 30 n³⁹, 41;

encourages rise of the theory of mixed government, 23, 26;

source of the theory of mixed monarchy that appeared in 1642, 29–30, 31;

Charles I’s definition of the three estates, 30–1;

discussed in the House of Commons of the Long Parliament, 33;

a committee appointed to reply to the preamble, 33;

relatipnship to constitutional theory during the civil-war period, 34–43, 44–5, 51–3;

and the Political Catechism, 37–40, 41, 106, 112;

recalled during the Interregnum by Bulstrode White-locke, 63–4,

by Lord Saye and Sele, 65–6,

by Richard Baxter, 73–4,

by Sir Francis Nethersole, 32–3;

at the Restoration by Robert Sheringham, 82,

and by Sir Henry Vane, 83–5;

invoked by the Shaftesbury Whigs during the Danby impeachment and the Exclusion Crisis, 92–111;

and the Judgment and Decree of Oxford University, 111–13;

familiar to the authors of the Bill of Rights, 113–23;

current in the literature of the Glorious Revolution, 113–14, 115–16, 115 n⁵²;

commented on in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, 121–2;

indirectly a basis for the elaborate theories of mixed government in the eighteenth century, 123;

and the use of ...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• I BEGINNINGS OF THE ENGLISH THEORY OF MIXED GOVERNMENT
• II MIXED MONARCHY AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS DURING THE PURITAN REVOLUTION
• III THE TRIUMPH OF THE THEORY OF MIXED MONARCHY
• IV THE INFLUENCE OF THE THEORY OF MIXED GOVERNMENT
• V THE REAPPEARANCE OF ‘UNMIXED’ DEMOCRACY
• VI THE DEMOCRATIC ATTACK ON THE HOUSE OF LORDS RENEWED
• APPENDICES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX