Fletcher, Medieval 'representation' England-France
Fast track polity on a long slow road to real free representation..
The Source:
Christopher Fletcher, ‘Political Representation’, in Government and Political Life in England and France, c.1300–c.1500, edited by Christopher Fletcher, Jean-Philippe Genet and John Watts, Cambridge University Press 2015
[Introduction]
Any discussion of political representation in late medieval Europe must contend with the many different ways in which rulers interacted with a variety of overlapping social structures to exercise power on the ground level of politics. It would be wrong to focus exclusively on those institutions which present a reassuring formality when analysing the multiple dialogues in multiple spheres …
… Much of the rest of the present volume is made up of studies which consider modes of ruling and being ruled beyond those embodied in late medieval representative institutions which could nonetheless be thought of as modes of representation.
The process of petitioning, for example, both enabled the ruled to impress their desires on the centre and to mobilise its authority, just as it allowed the centre to inform itself and to ensure the more efficient exercise of that authority.
Everything from royal office-holding, to legal mechanisms, to the use of loyal language by communities in revolt, to the noble affinity are all, in their way, forms of political representation. They provided a zone in which common ground and common goods were negotiated between central authority and local power.
The present article will nonetheless focus on formal modes of representation current in England and France between the late thirteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, to ask what there was about these forms of interaction between ruler and ruled which distinguished them from other modes of governing and being governed. …
1. Historiography
[segments]
… [During the] development of the Commons’ role in public finance up to 1369 … under Edward I, II and III it was established that the knights and burgesses, had to be consulted for grants of exceptional taxation. In later years, the desire to diminish the significance of the Commons in parliament ran up against growing evidence of the importance of ‘county communities’ and the values of the locality in the government of the realm.
The gentry of the shires, from whose ranks the knights of the shire (and increasingly those of the boroughs) were taken, were also the foremost ‘representatives’ of the king in the localities, in their capacity as royal office-holders. As the king’s men in the counties, they stood to gain by seeing the royal will put into action with themselves as its agents. As landowners, they had an overriding interest in the good operation of royal justice. It has become difficult to believe that they [the landowners] were … irrelevant to politics at the centre …
Few would now see the knights and burgesses in the English parliament as fledgling democrats. Certainly, they had interests in common with the king, and certainly they had multiple relationships with the lords of mutual advantage and reciprocal influence. But was there perhaps still some value in seeing negotiations over taxation and legislation as a struggle between the Commons and the king? …
… The reasons why French representative institutions have proved so difficult to handle have [to do with] … their multiplicity of form and their concentration in certain limited periods. Perhaps most importantly, it remains clear that an exclusive focus on ‘Estates General’, that is to say estates bringing together the entire kingdom, would be misguided, since such gatherings were rare next to assemblies of … regions. A fuller story has to be told of multiple representative institutions with which the king and other princes consulted in order to raise tax, and to gain support for his policies. …
… I would like to focus on one central problem: namely the senses in which these institutions might be thought to be ‘representative’. To do so, it is important to work out precisely what it is that we are interested in, since ‘representation’ is one of those terms of multiple meanings whose relationship to one another is not always clear.
We might choose to define representation as something along the lines of: ‘the matter of speaking for and/or standing in for others within the political process’.
It can be seen that this definition of representation already contains two things at once. Speaking for somebody, like a modern advocate in court, is not necessarily the same as standing in for somebody, or doing what you would imagine they would do in similar circumstances …
… On the one hand … [there may be] a majoritarian form of representation, in which a represented group is taken as an organic body having a single will, which can then be passed on to a single individual. On the other… [there may be] a form of representation based on unanimity, in which the group represented is nothing but a collection of individuals, the consent of all of whom must still be considered, in accordance with the tag ‘What touches all must be approved by all’.
2. Development of what kind of representation?
In England, the reigns of the three Edwards [I, II, III: 1272-1377] saw the gradual victory of the majoritarian, ‘speaking for somebody’ relationship, as the recourse to ‘speaking as instructed’ was slowly undermined.
At first, this was done entirely to the advantage of the king, binding communities to accept what had been agreed, especially concerning taxation, by their appointed representatives.
It was in Edward I’s reign that it was established in parliamentary writs of summons that knights of the shire and burgesses ought to be sent with plena potestas (full power) to bind their community to any decision made in parliament [ref. to Gainer Post].
Although in 1339, the Commons could still argue that they needed to consult again with their communities before consenting to the king’s demands, suggesting that they felt they had only a limited mandate to ‘speak for’ those they represented, this seems to have been the last gasp of such a ‘unanimatarian’ argument.
The development of a majoritarian form of representation established that the gentlemen and burgesses sitting in parliament could be taken by the king to speak for the whole kingdom without the tedious business of negotiating with each community individually.
It made the establishment of a common good centred on the king’s concerns all the easier, since it was this which was discussed in parliament, not whether or not such and such a policy was in the interests of Yorkshire, or Hertfordshire, or Devon.
The kings of France, by contrast, were rarely successful in getting representatives to acknowledge that they could act without reference back to their communities. This was not for want of trying. As early as 1302, Philip IV was asking for representatives to be sent with full powers to act for their communities. In 1321, Philip V even went so far as to send out royal agents to brief communities of his intentions in advance, in the hope that this would persuade them to grant power to their deputies to act without returning home to consult.
In the end, however, the most kings of France were successful in obtaining from large assemblies of estates was preliminary agreement that there was a pressing necessity which obliged his subjects to grant him aid. It seems that, in such assemblies, the right to give consent was considered to be less important to all concerned than the duty to give counsel, and the king’s duty to request it.
Counsel involved agreeing that an emergency existed and agreeing that something needed to be done.
Consent primarily concerned how the subsidy was to be collected, and it was granted locally if it was felt necessary at all.
Where large estates assemblies did make specific tax grants, as happened on a number of occasions in the 1340s and 1350s, these grants often proved impossible to collect, and the whole process had to be begun again on a local level. Charles VII’s early assemblies of the 1420s and 1430s, called in circumstances of acute military, political and financial crisis, were an exception to this general rule, and even then the actual details of how tax would be raised still had to be worked out with provincial assemblies, municipal councils and local lords.
In normal and even disturbed times, towns and provincial assemblies [in France] seem to have regarded larger gatherings with outright suspicion, as an occasion on which their liberties might be infringed by an individual representative subjected to bribery or intimidation or otherwise suborned. The relative fiscal fortunes of regions which continued to be consulted in provincial estates, as opposed to those which lost such rights or never had them in the first place, would appear (on an anecdotal level, at least) to confirm such fears. The results of a tax inquiry under Charles VIII [reign 1483–1498] recorded that the generalites of [a region] … where there were no provincial estates, paid the taille at between a third and a half of the per hearth rate current in [other regions] where provincial estates continued to give their consent.
From the late thirteenth century, communities in both England and France were subjected to pressure from their monarchs to return representatives with sufficient powers to bind these communities to what had been agreed – often a grant of taxation. It was clear that this exercise was supposed to work entirely in the king’s favour. French communities were aware of this, and resisted such initiatives, often with considerable success.
Writers who stress the legal aspects of these institutions thus tend to emphasise the extent to which the development of parliament as an institution in England was more of a victory for the king than for his subjects, more a means to impose his will upon them than a conduit by which they could present their grievances to the monarch.
Yet if this is conceded, it nonetheless remains clear that even at an early stage, the Commons’ acknowledged status as the representatives of their communities did lead them to attract a form of authority which had not formed part of the king’s intentions, and which had the potential to work against his interests. …
… [Some authors] overstepped the mark in minimising the importance of the Commons. [A] determination … to explain away anything that confirmed the authority of the Commons makes one wonder why anybody bothered with the Commons in the first place. We are left wondering why the exclusive right to give consent to public taxation came to inhere in a body that was nothing more than a clearing house for petitions not resolvable at common law; or why the author of Richard the Redeless [a 15th century poem] should exclaim upon the uselessness for their communities of members of parliament in 1397 who ‘like a zero in arithmetic occupy a place but contribute nothing’ unless it was expected that they would, indeed, contribute something.
It seems clear that there was more to the importance of parliament than its judicial status as described by the king’s lawyers.
Nonetheless [the above authors] did have an important point which goes beyond their stress on the judicial functions and the king-centred nature of parliament. Their work rightly notes a matter that can be easily passed over, namely that although, in the records of the English parliament, the representatives of the late medieval Commons spoke in the name of the people, and indeed were referred to as if they simply were the people, this representativeness did not … create an authority which might precede or overrule that of the king.
In the often vigorously contested debates of this period, the Commons did not claim superior authority in their arguments with the king and his officials because they represented the people’s will. Indeed, there was often a certain ambiguity in their position, in which they both represented the Commons and excluded themselves from that body, sometimes petitioning that the ‘people’ were impoverished by labourers who asked for excessive wages, sometimes asking for reform lest the commons who had just risen in revolt (and who were clearly not the Commons in parliament) should rebel once again.
To this extent, their formal position in some ways resembles that of French estates bodies, who were more concerned with their duty to give counsel, and the king’s duty to demand it, than with a right to give consent.
3. The consequences of representation
Of course, one should not go too far. In the first half of the fourteenth century, the English parliament in general and the Commons in particular had become a far more firmly established part of political life than would ever be the case for provincial or general estates assemblies in France.
Regularity was the key. Forty-four assemblies, including both magnates and shire and borough representatives, took place in England between 1297 and 1337. Twenty-one of these assembled in the first decade of Edward III’s reign, amounting to two a year. The closest parallel to this in France occurred in the early years of Charles VII’s reign. Perhaps twenty-seven assemblies of the Estates of the Languedöil [northern-central France], or of the western or eastern Languedöil, or of the Estates General, met between May 1421 and April 1448. Yet in this last case, a maximum of six of these might be identified as full Estates General.
In England, far greater regularity at a far earlier stage enabled the Commons’ role to mutate from that of semi-passive approvers of the king’s actions, to active supporters of baronial calls for reform, to the primary voice calling for action themselves.
Whilst this mutation was occurring, estates assemblies in France retained their role as essentially convenient communications devices to be deployed when the king was ‘undertaking risky or unprecedented operations’. Philip IV used large assemblies to justify his dispute with [pope] Boniface VIII, or his suppression of the Templars, or to explain why he intended to go to war with Flanders. Local assemblies were used to gain acceptance of the peace treaty in Flanders in 1305 and to ratify the annexation of Lyon in 1307. A number of assemblies of nobles and, less often, of towns, were summoned between 1295 and 1304 to discuss taxation. Experiments continued under Philip IV’s sons. Yet after Philip V’s failed attempt to raise money in peacetime in 1321 by securing the assent of a large assembly for specific reforms, no large central assembly was asked to consider tax until 1343. It was only in the late 1340s and 1350s that crisis circumstances saw the renewed use of large estates assemblies in response to the English threat.
In the meantime, the Commons in parliament had been called to witness every major internal upheaval in England between the last years of Edward I, through the turbulent reign of his son, and on to the unsettled circumstances of Edward III’s early reign.
Parliament became the regular venue in which not only the king but also his opponents publicised and confirmed their actions in the most public venue possible, such that both the king and his enemies would (in theory at least) feel more bound by undertakings made in such solemn circumstances than at any other time. This role would flourish again during the renewed tensions over taxation, royal government and household expenditure which characterised the [later] reigns of Richard II and Henry IV.
In England, not only the king but also the king’s subjects had found a way to make use of a body which represented the whole community of the kingdom.
In France, by contrast, the king did not summon estates assemblies unless he felt the need of them, and when he did the good people of the bonnes villes became understandably concerned for the health of their purses. Both Charles V and Charles VII stopped summoning large assemblies once they no longer needed to do so, and their subjects do not seem to have been unduly put out by this development.
Given the very different point which the English parliament had reached by the mid fourteenth century from relatively similar origins to the French estates some fifty years before, it might seem rather beside the point to insist upon the similar nature of the theoretical justification for the Commons’ importance. Does it matter what the theoretical origins of the Commons’ powers were if the limits of their actions were not determined by these ideas? In the end, if they in practice derived power and authority from their representativeness of the people which could be used in opposition to the king, what difference does it make if they did not quite portray it like that?
Nonetheless, it is important to note that the failure to recognise how these ideas lent a certain form to contemporary political debate can still lead to some fundamental misreadings of the political discourse of late medieval England.
Take, for example, the controversies of one of the last parliaments of Edward III’s reign, which met in 1376 and earned its name – the Good Parliament – through its vigorous assault on the king’s ministers, royal financiers and certain prominent courtiers, including Edward’s mistress, Alice Perrers.
This [1376] assembly, above all others, might have been expected to promote the right of the Commons to intervene in central politics, witnessing as it did the emergence of their first Speaker, and the first occasion on which the Commons took the lead in demanding the reform of the kingdom.
The proceedings began, as was by then well established, with an address by the chancellor, John Knyvet. After requesting funds for the king’s wars, Knyvet went on, as was already the accepted form, to command the knights, burgesses ‘and all the commons of the counties’ to ask redress for any bad government taking place in the kingdom, and by their bon avyse and conseil, to ordain a remedy so that the kingdom might be more profitably governed ‘to the honour of the king and the profit of the kingdom’.
It is perhaps not surprising to hear this loyal form, in which the Commons faithfully advise the king on how to cure the kingdom’s ills, coming from the mouth of the king’s most senior official. What is rather more telling is the way in which the Commons maintained the same terms in their own debates. In their deliberations on the following day, the Commons swore an oath to keep counsel on what was discussed and decided
‘to faithfully treat and ordain for the profit of the kingdom without concealment’.
It was then declared that, ‘if any one of us knows to say anything which is for the profit of the king and the kingdom’ that it would be good to show what they knew, and that afterwards each one after the other could declare what lay at their heart.
This loyal terminology – the profit of the kingdom, or the honour of the king and the profit of the kingdom, or the profit of the king and kingdom – was continued by Peter de la Mare when he assumed the role of Speaker. In his initial address to the Lords, requesting an intercommuning committee, he talked of the charge placed upon the Commons by the king ‘to treat and ordain for the estate (lestate) of him and of the kingdom’, and to amend faults insofar as they could. He went on to assert that they had noted many faults which ‘it would be the profit of our lord the king and of the kingdom to be amended’, and requested ‘for the profit of the kingdom’ an intercommuning committee to reinforce the Commons’ limited knowledge.
Even in the Good Parliament, and in their discussions amongst themselves, the Commons did not present themselves as an independent power, the embodiment of a community whose interests might correspond with or diverge from those of the king.
Their role was to fulfil the charge placed upon them, that of determining how best money might be raised for the king’s wars, and to report on any unresolved grievances which had not been settled at common law.
Their charge was not, in formal terms, to give their opinion on what should be done, particularly not in the king’s wars, but only to provide information on how this might be achieved. As representatives of the commons, the people or the kingdom, they at least claimed not to give their advice on policy; they were simply there to give information which would assist the king in the realisation of the profit of the kingdom.
Their formal role, even in 1376, still seemed to be conceived of in a comparable fashion to that of the estates of France as discussed by Jean Gerson in his sermon Vivat rex (1405), in which it is clear that the nobles, clerks and burgesses were summoned for their concrete knowledge of the kingdom’s difficulties, a reinforcement of the king’s prudence in taking wide counsel, not because they had the right to refuse consent if they did not feel it would be in the interests of the communities they represented.
Although, by the end of Edward III’s reign, the Commons in parliament had a far better established, accepted and regular position in the process of government than would ever be the case for estates assemblies in France, the ideological basis of this role had not yet diverged from what it had been at the end of the thirteenth century, and what it had remained in France: they were still in theory the occasional counsellors of the king, called in voluntarily to help him to make his own decisions on how to deal with particular problems in justice, war or the church.
This is not to say that the interests of the localities which they represented were to be put to one side. But such interests entered into debate only in the second part of the chancellor’s charge to the Commons, in the form of petitions for grace. In 1376, the first knight to speak in the Commons’ debates began by mentioning the subsidies requested, before continuing that these would be ‘difficult to grant’, since
‘the commons are enfeebled and impoverished by many tallages and taxes which they have paid before now so that they will not be able to support such a charge or pay it this time’.
Such an argument on its own, although it might be entered as a plea for clemency, did not exempt the community of the realm from coming to the king’s aid. In the course of the wars of the late thirteenth and fourteenth century, it had been established that in case of necessity the king’s subjects were obliged to come to his aid. Arguments of impoverishment could not countermand this, but they could be lodged as appeals to grace. This was the form taken by petitions adopted by the Commons in the autumn of 1381 and in 1388 which asked for an end to war. The people were impoverished, so let it please the king and the lords to find some way of honourably bringing unnecessary conflicts to an end. But if the government was intransigent, the Commons could not use their representative role to force through their opinions on policy.
Although they had a right to refuse supply, they also had to have a legitimate reason to do so within the discursive system of the ‘honour and profit of the king and kingdom’.
In France, such negotiations took place in similar terms, but the fact that they took place on a regional level, even where they had been preceded by a larger assembly, substantially changed their nature. Each community pursued its own interests, often with some success, attempting to have its contribution to a particular levy reduced or commuted either on the grounds of impoverishment, or of the need for the same funds on a local level, to restore defences or raise local levies. Even the twenty parishes which made up France-Alleu were able, on petition, to secure a reduction of their contribution to the taille of 1437 from 700 to 500 livres. Such negotiations could often take place in overt opposition to the interests, not only of distant provinces, but also of immediate neighbours. Thus in 1427 the town of Lyon, despite the extra weight which would have been derived by sending a single delegation from the Lyonnais as a whole to the Estates to be held at Poitiers, instead insisted on sending separate representatives. The majority in the city’s municipal government believed that they would have a better chance of securing special favours for themselves if they went to the king separately.
The English Commons played the same role of humble petitioner in their intervention in the legislation of parliament … The Commons petitions, like short-term arguments over requests for taxation, took the [non-political] form of an approach to the king’s grace. The Commons took advantage of parliament to draw the attention of the king to matters, not capable of resolution at common law, of which he might otherwise be ignorant.
Such approaches could always be, and often were, turned aside, often because it was considered that a remedy already existed at common law, that existing legislation should stand, or that individuals should sue for restitution of what seemed like too general or vague an issue.
In this way, complaints lodged in parliament could drag on for years, with regular repetition producing no resolution, to be intoned with particular fire at the moment of political crises, and even more at royal depositions. Once again the Commons’ role was only a supplicatory and informative one. It was whether or not ‘le Roi le voet’ which counted.
On the face of it, this state of affairs was not so very dissimilar from the situation in France, in which Estates meetings provided opportunities for the submission of cahiers de doléance to be submitted, accepted and, often, ignored by the king and his ministers. The practical reality of government in England and France was that, although kings might be obliged to accept the demands of the Commons or issue reform ordinances in times of crisis, it was easy simply to ignore these concessions once the crisis had passed.
Committees of reform could only continue to exert influence where abnormal conditions continued to pertain and necessitated the repeated summoning of representative assemblies, such as during the 1340s and 1350s or 1420s and 1430s in France, or in the 1380s or 1400s in England.
When the trouble was over, it was relatively easy for an Edward III or a Louis XI simply to ignore the concessions which he had made.
Again, it is possible to overplay similarities as well as differences when comparing the role of representation in legislation in England and France. The Parlement of Paris played a role in the registering of legislation, first established under Philip IV, which ultimately became binding on the king as well as his officials, a function which was fulfilled in England by parliament. English kings might use this role to their advantage, claiming to the pope, for example, that they could not repeal the statutes of Provisors or Praemunire without consulting with the estates of the realm assembled in parliament.
Even if they might in practice ignore what had been agreed in parliament, kings acknowledged on different occasions that they could not go back on a decision made in parliament except in another parliament, especially where, such as in the Statute of Treasons, this had been expressly asserted. French kings had neither this alibi nor this restraint. Again, the concentration of functions in the English parliament which were carried out by a multiplicity of institutions in France produced something fundamentally different, even where the point of departure had not been totally dissimilar.
Even the role of the Commons as humble petitioners came to be a right inhering in them as a body, established by custom, ranking with their right to determine the form that taxation would take.
In the parliament of 1407, the Commons objected to the king and Lords first deciding what taxation was appropriate, and then passing their decision to the Commons for approval, rather than the Lords and Commons first conferring and passing on their decision to the king through the Commons’ speaker. This was described in the petition as ‘to the great prejudice and derogation of their liberties’. In the reply granting this petition it was asserted that the king wished to do nothing ‘which could at all turn against the liberties of that estate, for which they have come to parliament, nor against the liberty of the aforesaid lords’.
The elaboration and close definition of their role as ‘petitioners and demanders’ is of undeniable significance in a period which also saw the growth of petitions to the Commons, asking them to present petitions to the king.
That said, even in circumstances of crisis, the practical and institutional weight of the Commons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries still appeared through, not despite, the king-centred form of the institution of parliament.
What established legitimacy for the Commons was as much their ability to argue in terms of a king-centred common profit as their right and obligation to speak in the name of the localities.
From the thirteenth century, across Europe, rulers made use of representative assemblies to exert a new kind of power over the communities under their authority.
In England, the accumulation of competences in the institution of parliament gave it a significance which it never acquired in France. Nonetheless, it would be reading history backwards to imagine that parliament was already a fully established counter-power by the mid-fifteenth century, whereas the French estates, general or provincial, were mere stooges to the king’s ever-expanding claims to authority.
Seen in the later Middle Ages, the English parliament appears as an unusually vigorous, well-established version of a kind of mechanism which could be found across Europe.
It was still less by reference to the representation of the people than to the representation of the king that political legitimacy was established in late medieval England.
Even when the language of the ‘three estates’ was deployed, the diversity of the significance attached to this language suggests the need for considerable care. In 1410, for example, when the Commons petitioned for the newly appointed continual councillors to be charged by the king ‘in the presence of all the estates of parliament’ to do justice and right without delay, it is difficult to see how this differs from similar requests, lacking this terminology, which were issued during the childhood of Richard II [reigned 1377–99].
It is the ultimately public nature of parliament which is at issue, ensuring good governance. It is also hard to see how the references to the prorogation of ‘the three estates of the realm in this present parliament assembled’ fundamentally change the nature of the body in question.
It is too much to deduce from the description of parliament as ‘all the estates of the kingdom’, when consenting to the deposition of Richard II in 1399, that because of this ‘the proceedings might have the justification of representing the people of England’. If this were so it would have been made explicit in proceedings which otherwise mobilised every other possible justification for Richard’s deposition and Henry IV’s accession.
Deposing Edward II and Richard II in parliament made these acts more binding, and more likely to be accepted throughout the kingdom, but they did not confer legitimacy on the grounds that the people thereby added its authority to the removal of the king.
The language of estates seems rather to be a way of confirming what Chief Justice Thorpe had uncontroversially asserted in 1365, that everybody in the kingdom is held to be aware of what happens in parliament, ‘since parliament represents the body of all the kingdom’.
This role of parliament as a public space, an assembly whose deliberations could be held to have taken place in the full knowledge and view of those communities who were summoned to it, was shared with French Estates assemblies and similar bodies both local, regional and general. It was this which first recommended such assemblies to Philip IV and his sons, to secure confirmation for their more controversial actions, or to attempt to secure financial support for specific financial exactions.
For similar reasons, later baronial reformers from John the Fearless to Louis XI’s opponents in the war of the Public Good invoked an assembly of Estates as the most powerful forum in which the problems of the kingdom might be thrashed out.
It was this, too, which inspired kings to make use of such bodies in the course of diplomacy, to confirm an alienation [transfer of rights] of sovereignty or an annexation to the Crown, or to secure approval for a particularly controversial treaty or change of policy. It was this which led the English and the Burgundians to secure consent to the Treaty of Troyes by a body of representatives summoned from throughout that part of France which was under their control in the autumn of 1420. In such circumstances it was all the more imperative for Charles VII to consult the Estates in the first, insecure decades of his rule.
Since the Estates summoned to Paris had seen fit to disinherit him, it was all the more important for Charles to assemble still larger assemblies which, simply by turning up, confirmed his title to rule.
In England, for similar reasons, parliament came to be the most important sphere for the resolution of political crises.
That parliament was useful for such purposes was an outgrowth of its ultimately ‘representative’ role, which had been established with other aims in mind.
With the acceptance of plena potestas [full power], everything in parliament could arguably be held to be binding on the whole kingdom, since every community had been ‘represented’ in it.
Removed from a legal or fiscal context, the presence of advocates for the whole kingdom made possible the use of parliament as the ultimate public location, a place where the common good could be negotiated and determined such that no one in the kingdom could claim not to have been party to it.
Nonetheless, put in this way, it is by no means clear whether things done in parliament gained authority because they were done in the view of (as it were) the representatives of the body of all the kingdom, or by those representatives.
This ambiguity remains even in the later use made of parliament to authorise claims to the throne which are still, at least in theory, made in terms of the right line of hereditary succession. When in 1484 Richard III [reigned 1483–5] made a declaration in the first and only parliament of his brief reign as a usurper, he noted:
“…how that the court of parliament is of such authority, and the people of this land of such nature and disposition, as experience teaches, that manifestation of any truth or right made by the three estates of this realm assembled in parliament, and by authority of the same, makes, before all other things, most faith and certainty, and quieting men’s minds, removes the occasion of all doubts and seditious talk.”
In one way, it was still parliament’s role as the ultimate form of publicity which was held to be significant in this declaration. Parliament represented the whole body of the kingdom, therefore no one could claim to be ignorant of what took place during its proceedings. Richard III only suggested that any truth or right was less likely to be contested if it was propagated with parliament’s authority, not that parliament determined what was true or right through its own authority. His was not a ‘parliamentary’ title.
But at the same time the (to say the least) dubious nature of Richard III’s title to rule made it clear that parliament’s role lay as much in agreeing to accept his coup as in simply publicising the truth and righteousness of his claim to legitimate succession.
Even in these straitened circumstances, no clear statement was made that the Commons, as representatives of the kingdom, the people, or as one of the estates, derived a right to do more than observe, approve and publicise judgments and actions originating (often somewhat obscurely) elsewhere, even as it was clear that their role was rather more significant than that in practice.
The Commons gained no sovereignty, no power in opposition to that of the king by being ‘representative’ of the people’s will. What they did gain, however, was a right of advocacy.
It was a limited advocacy, in theory at least, in matters of policy, not concerning what was to be done, but how it was to be made possible. In practice, however, this, tied to their role of petitioners, gave them considerable room for self-assertion. It gave them the space to marshal arguments about the king’s and the kingdom’s honour and profit whilst still not claiming to be the kingdom, nor to embody its will. As expressed in the nineteenth article of the ‘record and process’ of the deposition of Richard II [reigned 1377–99], every county ought to be free to elect and appoint knights of the shire to attend parliament, there to put forward their grievances and request remedies as seems expedient to them.
Richard [II] was alleged to have interfered in the process of selection, ordering the sheriffs to send men he himself had nominated, whom he bribed and threatened ‘to agree to things prejudicial to the kingdom and burdensome to the people’, notably onerous grants of taxation [ref.]. His crime was not to have denied the will of the people, but to have refused redress, and to have imposed taxation without proper consent.
As elsewhere, his [Richard II] fault was not that he asserted that the king’s will was the last word, that he was the ultimate arbiter of law, justice and custom – this was not in doubt – but that his will was arbitrary; that he would not even listen to the advocates of his subjects.
This was where the significance of parliament came from. It was judicial in form, but political in impact. Every community had a right to an advocate in parliament. This was fitting, as the very function of a parliament was that anything done in it was to be held to be binding on the whole kingdom, because every community had been ‘represented’ in it, in this legal sense.
In France, although the idea of the assemblies of Estates, general and provincial, never went away, they never assumed the centrality nor the regularity that parliament did in England.
[In France] They were instead one aspect of a multifaceted discourse of reform and not, moreover, one which was very popular with the towns, regional assemblies or local lords who were summoned to the various bodies it occasionally gave rise to. Kings or noble rebels might invoke such assemblies as the ideal forum in which to deal with the greatest affairs of the kingdom, but local elites saw in such mechanisms simply another occasion to undermine their customary rights.
Recent work has emphasised the variety of means available to local communities [in France] who wished to represent their interests to the king, and for the king to represent his wishes to these same communities, even as it has ascribed greater importance to estates assemblies than an earlier generation of writers had done.
It would clearly be overstepping the mark to see the seventeenth-century constitutions of England and France prefigured in the fifteenth century, or even in the early sixteenth century. But it is clear that the English parliament had already become something rather different from any identifiable means of interaction between the French king and his subjects, simply by the way that so many functions had become concentrated in one institution.
By the end of the fifteenth century, with the Treaty of Etaples (1492), and in further Anglo-French treaties in 1510 and 1514, it was the English parliament which was used to ratify such major diplomatic agreements, whilst in France it was not the Estates General, as first envisaged, but a variety of regional assemblies who gave their assent to what was done.
The fact that Henry VIII [1509–1547] was simply repeating late medieval commonplace when he stated that he was never so high in his estate as in parliament makes the sentiments he voiced on that occasion all the more important [ref. Koenigsberger]. The power of the King of England was expressed most effectively in parliament, when his actions were witnessed by the community of the realm, binding them and him to respect what had been agreed in that assembly. The King of France could not have assigned such a central role to any single institution, except to himself, the king.
[END of chapter]
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